AKEL on World Human Rights Day

AKEL C.C. Press Office, 10 December 2018, Nicosia

This year marks 70 years since the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is one of the most important achievements of modern societies and their peoples. This anniversary has been celebrated for 70 years on 10th December, World Human Rights Day, which reminds the whole of humanity about the importance of safeguarding human rights on an international, European and national level.

Steps forward have unquestionably been made. Unfortunately, however, the struggle for the right of every person to enjoy the same equal rights as everybody remains a necessity. Human rights – political freedoms and socio-economic rights – even in the more developed democracies, are in our days continuously being curbed on all sorts of pretexts and schemings.

AKEL underlines that the safeguarding of human rights, as universal, indivisible, mutually supplementary and interdependent rights, but moreover, their constant defense and protection are linked with the struggle for a qualitatively more advanced society of equality, solidarity and real freedom.

For that reason, we shall continue to wage this struggle from every podium and forum. In the European Parliament. We will continue to criticize those policies that undermine or do not address the violation of human rights, such as the fiscal policies being pursued that institutionalize foreclosures, human trafficking, violence against women, police violence, racist treatment of refugees, the situation people with disabilities are suffering every day, the violation of the rights of LGBTI people, the filing and violation of every notion of privacy, as well as the silencing of free expression through institutionalized anti-communism across EU countries.

We shall continue to wage the very same struggles from the podium of the House of Representatives, recalling that a state based on the rule of law must protect the right to work, education, shelter and public health care.

At the same time, another struggle, perhaps the most important one for the restoration of human rights in Cyprus, is the one that we are waging for an overall solution of the Cyprus problem based on bi-communal, bi-zonal federation. This is so because, as we will continue to stress, it is the only solution that can lead to the liberation and reunification of our homeland, so that we can at long last, together, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, look forward to a substantive, sustainable and multifaceted protection of our fundamental freedoms and rights.