Human rights
David Ransom
Even if it ends as routine, the abuse of human rights usually begins in disguise, as an intricate dilemma, a delicate balance, an exceptional circumstance. But there is nothing exceptional at all about the sight of people with too much power cultivating yet more of it, since they can think of little else. Their weakness is that they don’t know just how transparent they have become. Seeing through them is easy, but acting accordingly can be dangerous. For that we tend to rely, perhaps too heavily, on inspiration from the kind of people who crowd the magazine pages that follow. All of them–and many, many more–would, in another world, be revered above any number of athletes manufactured at great expense for the Beijing Olympics. Another world is made not just more necessary but more possible because the stories told here contain, like human rights themselves, the very stuff of life.
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David Ransom for the New Internationalist Co-operative
davidr@newint.org
COPYRIGHT 2008 New Internationalist Magazine
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
