AKEL on World Human Rights Day
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 10th December 2016, Nicosia
World Human Rights Day, established as the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recalls that the safeguarding of human rights on an international, European and national level is a gain of modern societies and their peoples. It represents a step forward in the course of human civilization. However there remains a great struggle to be waged by all for the protection and development of these rights. AKEL will be at the forefront of this struggle. On the occasion of World Human Rights Day, AKEL congratulates the Office of the Commissioner for Administration and Human Rights (Ombudsman) that is the National Independent Authority for Human Rights, for its work and interventions to protect people’s rights and freedoms.
This Day finds the world, but also Cyprus experiencing profound, structural and multifaceted violations of human rights. Even in Europe, which likes to portray itself as the international model for human rights, a whole series of human rights violations are being recorded, such as the phenomena of human trafficking, violence against women, police brutality, the racist treatment of refugees, the situation experienced on a day-to-day basis by people with disabilities, the violation of the rights of LGBT people, the curbing of democratic rights through the legalized filing of people, but also the stifling of free expression by institutional anticommunism in EU countries.
In addition, today one must recall something which is “forgotten”, even in the most advanced bourgeois democracies. Human rights are indivisible and that means that civil and political rights have the same status and value as social, economic and cultural rights, namely the right to work, education, housing, health care and participation in culture. States must be held accountable for the fact that unemployment, poverty, economic inequalities and social exclusion constitute a blatant failure to guarantee their citizen’s socio-economic rights, while simultaneously eroding the practical implementation of civil and political rights. In other words, the system’s inequality and injustice undermines the very implementation of human rights. AKEL stresses that the effective safeguarding of human rights as universal, indivisible, interdependent and complementary rights are linked to the struggle for a qualitatively more advanced society based on equality, solidarity and true freedom.
At the same time, AKEL stresses that the varied human rights violations suffered by the people of Cyprus, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, due to the continuing occupation and division of our country can be ended through a just and agreed solution of the Cyprus problem that will restore human rights and basic freedoms in our homeland.
