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Documents Fides et Libertas The
Journal of the International Religious Liberty Association Salute to the UDHR John Graz Secretary General International Religious Liberty Association Silver Spring, Maryland, United States of America Fifty years! We like celebrating a fiftieth anniversary. Fifty is the age of maturity. For a person, it is a time to re-evaluate. What about one of humanity’s most important documents--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? At fifty, it is obviously older. Is it also tired? No. Less appealing? No. Bereft of its nascent admirers? No. Having reached a half-century maturity, is it still full of promise? Emphatically, yes! I find the UDHR story totally amazing. How was it possible for people, leaders, and nations to dream of a world in which human beings would be respected--a world of human rights, freedom, and dignity for all? They could have thought revenge, control, oppression. But no, they dared to dream the best for humankind. They had endured a paroxysm of hatred and racism and survived. Now they just decided to build another world. A new world. A better world. Fifty years later the world is better. And worse. Consider the status of religious freedom. It is threatened in many countries, nonexistent in some. Clothed with new words and new obsessions, intolerance stalks the land. Fanatics, religious and secular, dictate nightmare visions of the next millennium. The present fin de siecle must be revived by the message of tolerance from those who wrote and voted the Universal Declaration. This first issue of Fides et Libertas is dedicated to those who, surrounded by darkness, saw the light. It is the IRLA’s way of celebrating, globally, the UDHR’s great fiftieth anniversary. The purpose of Fides et Libertas is to defend, promote, and protect religious freedom according to Article 18 of the Universal Declaration as well as other international instruments. Find herein trenchant arguments for religious liberty compellingly expressed by leaders of thought and leaders of people around the world. Our authors live in different countries, espouse different cultures, confess different faiths. But they are one in the defense of religious freedom. On this principle they stand together: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. . . . |
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