Rizalyn L.

Formentera Jurisprudence
BSSW II

“TAO PO”

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened”
John F. Kennedy

I believe in human rights. I believe in fundamental rights and freedom, core values that
bind the entire human family together and which form the only truly universal language on earth
except, sadly, perhaps and too often except for war. These are rights and freedoms were hard one
all over the world and in many parts of the world they are yet to be realized. Including parts of
the worlds these rights are currently and constantly under attack. What are rights and freedom
that we should hold in? What are the human rights that protect your family, friends, neighbor and
everybody else on earth that should protect every newly arrived asylum seeker anywhere just
because they’re human and just because they’re alive, not because they’re bad person that should
protect every single one of us? What are these rights? The right to life is the right to positive
protection of life because every life matters. It’s the right to proper investigation into any
untimely death. It’s the right to not to be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment or torture.
It’s the right to be enslaved or subject to arbitrate attention without law not to experience the
knock on the door in the middle of the night and disappearance that too many people still face
today. It’s the right to a fair trial including the presumption of innocence if accused of a criminal
charge and the crucial right to advise and representation before you have to face serious
consequences whether it’s the loss of your child, home or a job, or right to be in a country or
your liberty. It’s the right to respect for your private life and your family life, home and your
correspondence. And this is increasingly that the new frontier of human rights discourse in an
internet world, the appropriate balance between proportionate and lawful surveillance on the one
hand and personal privacy in the other is increasingly important for this generation more even
than our parents time.

We have to equal treatment under the law called normal discrimination translated into
human. Its empathy treating other people as you’d like to be treated yourself walking around in
someone else’s shoes. You find the germ of this idea that in every great civilization and tradition
on earth why it is the most important, why is equal treatment more important? That is because if
we practiced empathy there would be no torture or killings without charge or trial or undue
interferences with speech and conscience. Which of these rights and freedoms would you give
up? Which of these is trivial unnecessary superfluous? There may be some who would choose to
live on a planet where these rights are not protected but I am not of their number. We ought to
live and the right to have justice is needed to protect the voiceless people in society. Killing is
not a choice, rather it’s a problem that must and to be addressed properly.