Issue 36 March 2007 - Introduction from the Editor
“Is it not better to light candles than curse the darkness?”
In this issue of the Scottish Human Rights Journal, we continue to reflect on contemporary human rights developments both at home and abroad.
Climate change is increasingly dominating public debate and is fast becoming a matter of public concern. In this respect, we are pleased to be able to share a very stimulating speech recently presented by Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her speech makes significant links between this topic of urgent concern and human rights.
Additionally, the situation of older persons in our country is also receiving much public attention. Kavita Chetty offers a human rights perspective and insight into some current concerns and issues. Furthermore, it would not be surprising if the Scottish Commission for Human Rights, about which we have been reporting, will identify the rights of older persons as one of its priorities. In this regard we are pleased to include a further update from Rosemarie McIlwham on the progress in establishing the GB Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
We continue to keep you abreast of significant case law developments through the legal eagle eyes of Scott Blair.
Last month I had the privilege of working with West Bank members of the Palestinian Bar Association as pan of an international human rights and humanitarian law training programme organised by the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association. Their experiences, as lawyers and as individuals, of daily humiliation and frustration are tangible.
On the first day of the programme, a Palestinian lawyer who had been imprisoned and reportedly tortured in an Israeli prison for five years and who was now seemingly reflecting the sentiments of many of his colleagues, directly challenged our team of international trainers as representing an international community for which human rights was no more than a rhetoric and which had abandoned the Palestinians. Mindful of his experience and opinion, we responded that we were representatives not of our governments but of the international legal and human rights community and that not only did we share his frustration but also a common cause in the realisation of human rights for Palestinians as the basis of a lasting solution which should include respect by all in the region for "the other". There was an uneasy silence which was then broken by a young female Palestinian lawyer who appealed to her colleagues,"Is it not better to light candles than curse the darkness?"
The training programme proceeded, experiences were exchanged, bonds strengthened and the value of linking lawyers with human rights activists within Isreal was ultimately recognised by all. Subsequently, plans were laid for a second training programme for Bar members from Gaza.
As is so often the case, the real insights were gained during the coffee breaks or over dinner in the evenings. For example, a lawyer from Ramallah recounted how one afternoon while at work, he received a telephone call from his five year old - daughter asking him to be careful coming home that night and to leave through his office back door as she was watching tanks on the street outside his office.
My lasting impression? Ordinary lawyers, fallible like us all, but demonstrating extraordinary resilience and dignity in extraordinarily challenging circumstances; not so much lighters of candles but carriers of the torch of the human spirit.
In this regard it is interesting to source a possible origin of the quotation from the young female Palestinian lawyer. A version of this saying was used and possibly coined by Adlai Stevenson (1900-65) in his praise of Eleanor Roosevelt. When addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1962, he said, "She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world."
As illustrated in our last Issue, it was Eleanor Roosevelt who was a driving force behind the drafting and endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The values of the Declaration, human dignity and inalienable rights for all individuals by dint of humanity, are more valid than ever but still need to be realised. The world needs the United States, just as it did Eleanor Roosevelt, to once again discharge that responsibility.