United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned this Friday in Lisbon of the decline in human rights and the “dead end” the world is approaching, with the increase in conflict, dictatorships, oppression and inequality.
The UN leader spoke late Friday at the Expresso 50 Years Conference “Leaving the Better World,” which marks the anniversary of the weekly’s founding.
To the president of the republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the former head of state Ramalho Eanes and the newspaper’s founder and former prime minister, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Guterres compared Expresso’s role in Portugal’s departure from the “alley” in which it was before April 25 and the relevance of press freedom, which she says is under threat this Friday.
The former Portuguese prime minister took the opportunity to reflect on another event, the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a list of declines in vast areas.
“Looking at what human rights are today in a broader perspective of our times, it is clear that the denial and withdrawal of these rights are largely the alley the world has pushed itself into”he declared.
Referring to freedom of the press, Guterres stressed that it is essential, pushing for the idea of a “dead end”, in which “Many political leaders think the way to find a way out of the alley is to dig it and the more they dig, the deeper they go, and the deeper they go, the more they dig”.
For this reason, he argues that the present day demands “transformations as radical as those of April 25, so that the world can get out of the alley”.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations also said that he was not in favor of revising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, believing that “we’d end up with a much worse text than we have today”.
Source: DN
