President Smt Droupadi Murmu said that developing sensitivity and sympathy is the key to promoting human rights. It is essentially an exercise of the faculty of imagination. If we can imagine ourselves in the place of those who are treated as less than human, it would open our eyes and compel us to do the needful.
Addressing the Human Rights Day celebration, organised by the National Human Rights Commission, she said that there is a so-called ‘golden rule’, which says “Treat others as you would like them to treat you”. That sums up the human rights discourse beautifully.
She noted that today is the beginning of the worldwide, year-long celebrations of the 75 years of the UDHR. And the United Nations has chosen ‘Dignity, Freedom and Justice for All’ as the theme of the year 2022. She said that over the past few years, the world has suffered from a high number of natural disasters caused by unusual weather patterns.
Climate change is knocking on the doors. People in the poorer nations are going to pay a heavier price for the degradation of our environment. We must consider the environmental dimension of justice now.
The President said that the challenge of climate change is so enormous that it forces us to redefine ‘rights’. Five years ago, the High Court of Uttarakhand held that the Ganga and Yamuna rivers have the same legal rights as human beings. India is a land of sacred geography, with countless holy lakes, rivers and mountains.
To these landscapes, the flora and fauna add rich biodiversity. In old times, our sages and seers saw them all as part of a universal whole, along with us. So, just as the concept of human rights exhorts us to consider every human being as no different from us, we should treat the whole living world and its habitat with respect.
