A/HRC/21/45
awake Indian consciousness to the necessity of his social agenda. He condemned
discrimination and immorality, inequality and exploitation. He struggled not merely for
independence from England but for social justice within India: ―Unless poverty and
unemployment are wiped out from India… I would not agree that we have attained
freedom‖.8 In the same vein, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King expressed his hope
that there can indeed be social progress: ―I have a dream that one day this nation will rise
up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‗We hold these truths to be self-evident that
all men are created equal‘.‖ Similarly, Nelson Mandela, upon receiving the Nobel Peace
Prize on 10 December 1993, stated: ―We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of
war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and
repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want ... countless
human beings, both inside and outside our country, had the nobility of spirit to stand in the
path of tyranny and injustice, without seeking selfish gain. They recognised that an injury
to one is an injury to all and therefore acted together in defence of justice and a common
human decency.‖
25.
As to freedom from fear, Aung San Suu Kyi expressed it well: ―Within a system
which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear
of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or
means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form
of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as
foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to
preserve man‘s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people
conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves
from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery
courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.‖ 9
26.
In his book Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage), Stéphane Hessel similarly calls for
taking responsibility in our hands and demanding change. Such courage is being expressed
in many countries by civil society, indignant at the failures and abuses by government. For
centuries it has been the role of poets and novelists to use literature to promote a more
ethical order, from Aristophanes to Ibn Rushd, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Friedrich von Schiller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wilfred Owen, Lu Xun, Anna
Akhmatova, Gabriel García Márquez, Vaclav Havel, Arundhati Roy and Wole Soyinka.
III. Complementarity and coordination with other mechanisms
27.
The Independent Expert will endeavour to liaise with charter-based and treaty-based
mechanisms and build on United Nations initiatives such as the Global Compact.10
28.
The United Nations treaty bodies are seized of situations and individual cases on
matters relating to the present mandate and have adopted many pertinent decisions in this
respect. Their jurisprudence in the form of case law,11 concluding observations and general
8
9
10
11
India, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting), vol. 87,
p. 452, as cited in Norman G. Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says (2012), p. 62.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, acceptance message for the 1990 Sakharov Prize for
Freedom of Thought, 1991.
See www.unglobalcompact.org/issues/human_rights/Human_Rights_Working_Group.html.
See, for example, Jakob Th. Möller and Alfred de Zayas, United Nations Human Rights Committee
Case Law 1977-2008: A Handbook (Kehl am Rhein, Engel, 2009); Manfred Nowak, U.N. Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights, 2nd revised ed. (Kehl am Rhein, Engel, 2005).
11
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