Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.
Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.
The U.S. government engages with many countries around the world in official dialogues on human rights.
I am passionate about human rights.
Moreover, only a strong and united scientific opinion imposing the intrinsic value of scientific progress on society at large can elicit the support of scientific inquiry by the general public.
Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.
The effects of human rights education can be dramatic in awakening people to the value and power of their own lives, as shown in the following stories.
The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
Those who have been outspoken in advocating human rights during these last forty years, have themselves grabbed the most fundamental of human rights from the people of the Third-World countries.