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Address by the Hon. Dr Louis Galea, Minister of Education, at the 31st session of the UNESCO General Conference – Paris
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18/10/2001
18/10/2001
| There are two kinds of look, which a Minister from Malta gets when | he leaves for Paris for a UNESCO Conference. |
| The first kind of look can be interpreted as saying: | "There he goes taking time off from the urgent responsibilities of the moment to regale himself for a few days with the exotic topics beloved of highbrow bureaucrats and international eggheads." |
| The other look bespeaks the belief that the Minister | is going to the field where the most crucial battle of the hour is being fought. The hour moreover is midnight; because as in the night-battle that Newman famously spoke about, it is by no means altogether clear to the participants themselves what is really happening. Some of the warriors labour under the illusion that they are fighting for one civilisation against another; but the reality is, as usual, more complex. The issue at stake is between the promoters of cross-cultural communication on the one hand, and the defenders of inter-cultural barriers on the other. |
| Caught between the two looks the Minister cannot help | asking himself what degree of true understanding there might be in each of them. |
| The answer depends on what we actually manage to do | here, on the extent to which we succeed in identifying ourselves with the twofold picture of humanity which peers at us from all the documents which the Director General has challenged us with. |
| Throughout the documents there is the persistent | surfacing of humanity in two shapes: the individual human being and the human species in its totality. The first shape is familiar, but changing historical contexts imply a permanent need to recall the dignity of each and every individual human being. |
| The second shape is perhaps less familiar. It has not | been the habit in the West over the past few centuries to consider the human species as such, and not just individual human beings, as the subject of human rights; and it is only recently that we have started to spell out the implications of the concept, now well established in International Law, of the Common Heritage of Humanity. |
| The first of the two great cross-cutting themes which | have been proposed to us – the fight against poverty, especially extreme – can be easily derived from the principle of the equal dignity of every human individual. The second theme – bringing about a global knowledge society – is clearly and closely related to the second shape of humanity. A necessary condition for the coming about of a worldwide knowledge society is undoubtedly the realization of the species – being of man. |
| This concept is most prominently to the fore in the | Bioethics programme and especially in the promotion of the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. The most basic principle in this area is that humanity as a species has a right to the preservation of its integrity just as much as an individual human being has a right to the preservation of the integrity of his life. |
| However, at present there is an even more immediate | danger than that of direct assault upon the natural integrity of the species. It is the threat of, the misappropriation of knowledge about it. There is here a strong parallel with the structure of individual human rights. If one admits a hierarchy among human rights, the most basic of them is surely the right to life, which is the foundation stone of all human dignity. |
| But the immediate corollary of the right to life is | the right to some property, that is to the ownership or appropriation or making one’s own of just those kinds of goods as may be reasonably regarded as extensions of one’s body. |
| Likewise the collective right to existence of | humanity as a species which underlies the Declaration on the Human Genome has a corollary. Only humanity as a species is entitled to manage those resources which cannot be rationally managed by individuals, groups or states, but can only be efficiently managed on behalf of mankind as a whole. These resources have acquired the name of Common Heritage in International Law. The resource, which perhaps most evidently belongs to the Common Heritage, is precisely the Knowledge of the Human Genome and indeed all analogous Knowledge. That such knowledge cannot rationally be appropriated by any individual, group or state in any permanent or absolute fashion is the converse of the right acknowledge to every individual of privately owning clothes tools and housing facilities. It is on this ground – securing the future integrity of the human species in a human environment – that the various initiatives proposed within the Bioethics Programme deserve the fullest support. |
| Another less all-important but extremely interesting | development of the concept of the Common Heritage appears in the proposals put forward for the "Protection of the Cultural Heritage". Here the notion of "A crime against the Common Heritage of Humanity" is introduced in order to characterize the nature of certain acts. The enlargement of the notion of "Crimes Against Humanity" to that of "Crimes against the Common Heritage of Humanity" is logically comprehensible on the basis of the analogy with considering certain "properties" as extensions of the human body. It is a clear case of the almost spontaneous emergence at the collective or species level of the required complement to the juridical conceptual Structures which were previously developed in terms of individual human rights. |
| It is hardly surprising that the concept of the | species – being of humanity and its corollary, that of the Common Heritage are assuming great importance in manifold areas of global concern. Nor is it surprising that the intangible dimension of the heritage is coming to loom perhaps larger than the spatially determined. Although the concept and the implied system were first put forward by the Government of Malta with reference to the Seabed, the model was conceived from the start as apt for pioneering application in Ocean Space but transposable elsewhere. |
| The section relating to the oceans in the programme | that has been submitted for consideration illustrated very well the rule that it is generally to be expected that systems which are first made to work in the oceans, will subsequently prove imitable on land and elsewhere. I am referring in particular to Integrated Coastal Management as providing some sort of model for Integrated Resource Management in general. |
| I am confident that this General Assembly of UNESCO | will commit wholeheartedly to the implementation of the twin cross-cutting themes of the fight against poverty and the construction of a knowledge society. Such a commitment will bring about a movement at least in the educational and scientific areas, towards the recognition of the complementary but hitherto largely missing facet of individual Human Rights. This facet consists essentially of the recognition of the implications of the unity of the human species, such as the Common Heritage in its various manifestations. If this happens, then the second group of onlookers to whom I referred at the beginning will have had their facial expression proven to have been more appropriate than the first. |
| For the time being, I will only express gratitude and | congratulations to the Director-General and all those who have contributed with him to the hopeful prospects opened up for us in these days of greater-than-usual anxiety. |
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