A ‘Declaration of Human Responsibilities’?

Another initiative came from the InterAction Council, based in Tokyo, and drawn from many retired senior politicians. "A Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities" was proposed in September 1997.

Its 19 articles (written in the form of a standard UN declaration) covered such matters as: every person having a responsibility to treat all people in a humane way; it said "what you do not wish to be done to yourself, do not do to others"; everyone should respect the life of others; each person should behave with integrity, honesty and fairness; and people should speak and act truthfully. The draft declaration received some sympathetic media coverage at the time.

To sum up so far, there has been no lack on ideas of what such a declaration of human responsibilities/ human duties could contain. The issue is more one of discussing why so little has been achieved.

One explanation is that talk of "responsibility" runs against the current spirit of the times, which has the selfish, self-absorbed emphasis of "what is in it for me", "I know my rights" and "I want to look after number one".

By contrast, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was rapidly created in about 18 months because it had caught the spirit of the then times: revulsion at the suffering in World War II, anger at the international community's failure to stand up to the dictators in the 1930s, and a determination to do better.

There is not a similar determination to take action on human responsibilities. The current dominant paradigm of new right economic rationalism encourages a narrow, selfish short-horizon approach to living. Politicians now rarely talk of vision and nation-building.

To sum up, what seemed a simple idea to complement human rights with human responsibilities has become more complicated than was first thought. Doubtless individuals and non-governmental organizations will continue to advocate for some form of declaration of human responsibilities.

It will be a protracted struggle – but, then, so were the long campaigns for human rights prior to 1948, such as the movement against slavery and the campaign to end racism. Major changes in dominant paradigms do not occur overnight (if they did, then they could be eradicated equally quickly).