You also can be a part of it!
International Human Rights Day is celebrated on December 10 to mark the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris on that day back in 1948. Countries, organizations and civil society use this occasion to carry out activities celebrating human rights.
The embassies of the Czech Republic, for instance, organize breakfasts with human rights representatives in their missions abroad. In Buenos Aires, the Czech Embassy brings together Argentine human rights activists and defenders with people exiled from Cuba and Venezuela to exchange concerns and initiatives.
These Czech breakfasts on International Human Rights Day stem from the memory of the official visit of the French President Francois Mitterrand on December 9, 1988, in times of the communist regime in the then Czechoslovakia, during which he made it a condition to meet with dissidents and political opponents.
Then, the history-making breakfast was arranged, as Radio Prague International recalls: "I will meet with various representatives of your society, including representatives of public life and including members of the opposition. I will express myself freely and with the respect due to the state and the people,” the then French president told the leaders of the communist dictatorship.
Among the democratic leaders who participated in the remembered breakfast at the French Embassy in Prague were Václav Havel, Jiří Dienstbier, Karel Srp, Miloš Hájek, Václav Malý, Petr Uhl, Ladislav Lis and Rudolf Battěk.
According to the chronicle of Radio Prague International, Mitterrand began the breakfast with the prophetic words that he was “happy to be meeting with the country’s future leaders.” A year later the transition to democracy had already begun, following the Velvet Revolution of November 17, 1989, and on December 29 Václav Havel would assume the country’s presidency.
Unlike the Czech Republic - whose memory of the solidarity received during the Nazi occupation and later the communist dictatorship provides one of the foundations for the implementation of an active foreign policy in the international defense of human rights - the countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America have not adopted global leadership positions, i.e. not limited to some of the situations of regional autocracies. This is despite the fact that Argentina, Chile and Uruguay received important expressions of solidarity during their military dictatorships, including from the embassies of democratic countries.
In the case of Argentina, the visits of Pat Derian, the State Department’s official in charge of human rights during the Carter administration, are well remembered and highly valued. These invitations to embassy receptions of democratic countries in Buenos Aires provided some protection to human rights referents and freed them from the state of “non-existence” in which the military dictatorship wanted to keep them.
Inspired by the Czech Republic’s example and by their own memory of the international democratic solidarity received during the military dictatorships, the countries of the Southern Cone can adopt a similar initiative through their embassies, especially in places where helping the current victims of authoritarianism is a moral obligation.
