Santiago Castellà, director of the Tarragona Smart Mediterranean City Chair of the Rovira i Virgili University and full academician and member of the Governing Board of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), inaugurated on 10 December the tribute of this university to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the occasion of its 70th anniversary. The academician intervened with the presentation “Visión global de la Declaración de los Derechos Humanos” (Global vision of the Declaration of Human Rights), where he traced from the genesis of the document to the consequences that led its adoption by the member countries of the United Nations and other international organizations.
Promoter of the Centre for Social Conflict Studies at the Rovira i Virgili University, co-organizer of the event, Castellà believes that the globalization of International Law and the work of the International Criminal Court represent a new guarantee for the protection of this Universal Declaration so that its breach doesn’t go unpunished. For the academician, International Law, which was previously based on the territory and on the principle of sovereignty, has a new frontier: the dignity of people. States that don’t respect Human Rights must now answer before the International Criminal Court.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The session was also attended by Carme Colomina, from the Centre for International Information and Documentation in Barcelona (CIDOB), with the conference “Derechos Humanos y Unión Europea” (Human Rights and the European Union); Bartosz Kaczorowski, from the University of Lodz, who via Skype intervened with the work “Política exterior y la cuestión de los Derechos Humanos en Polonia” (Foreign policy and the question of Human Rights in Poland), and Fouad Nohra, from the Centre for Diplomatic and Strategic Studies in Paris, who also via Skype delivered the talk “Les droits économiques et sociaux dans la Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme” (Economic and social rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The event was chaired by an emblematic quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, the driving force behind the Declaration: “We are on the threshold of a great event, this Universal Declaration of Human Rights may well become the Magna Carta of Humanity”.
