The issue of human rights has been much on my mind recently especially with the continuing conflict in the region of Israel. The people of Gaza are daily being subject to horrors that make me sad and enraged and of course there are those from Israel who are also suffering with the loss of life of loved ones. There is no benefit to anyone that can be claimed on either side or by the world in general through the devastation that is happening but it is especially adversely affecting the young people and children who have had no part in creating the conflict in the first place. They are the innocents who are suffering.
As these events have been on my mind as well as a general desire to learn about the law regarding land and my subsequent reading of a textbook on the subject, I delved last night into a copy of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This small volume has been on my shelf for a while after I picked it up at the Bodleian Library. It was published by the Bodleian and has a foreword by Amal Clooney. There is also a short introduction with some background information and then the text itself which is presented very simply in the book.
There are a number of things that came to mind as I was reading through the articles. Primarily there was the references to slavery which although abolished in the West many years before the drafting of the declaration still must have been in current consciousness enough to ensure its inclusion. Having just finished reading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage and My Freedom”, this was still in the forefront of my thoughts.
However I was also looking through the articles to discover anything that would relate to land and the one that stuck out for me was Article 25. You can read the whole Declaration on the United Nations website so I won’t reproduce the text here but it is worth looking at this one in particular as I feel many of noted points of standards of living are increasingly being eroded even in this country as the cost of living spirals increasingly upwards.
Another interesting feature to note about the Declaration is that there are 30 articles, most of which are simple statements and none have more than four parts to them. This number has been the basis for my continuing exploration of the Gaelic Psalms and relates to the traditional Jewish calendar with 30 day months that align with the lunar cycles. I am thinking that I will begin to interweave both of these together in my daily explorations and hence the reason why I am posting this blog is to make the links available for myself as well as for the general reader. More may transpire of this in the future.
