Introduction

Is it possible to layout the principles of human rights thinking in the absence of historicity and without theoretical spiritualism? However, the basic components of the problem remain in, questioning subjectivity and the surroundings, continuous search for creeds, roots and becoming, the reading of thoughts, situations, institutions and characters with a critique eye and following closely the development and failure, progress and rotation.

The establishment of any foundation has to include progression, accumulation, ideas and procedures lead off the construction.  Moreover, it is necessary to have vision and imaginative abilities to foresee the human situation from different angels in order to open to diversity.  Thus, any related question to human being, politics, philosophy, history, society and others will always search for introductions either by rejecting positivism or by assuring dialectics.  There will always be a continues query, whither the enriching of the incomplete foundation with international ethics and values originated from human experiences, inventions, and cultures will consider the human facts trivial and partial.

Behind this collective effort, was a premonition of critical thinking and affirmed diversity of the world’s vision.  That was the condition for human rights to remain far from ideology and excluded from dogmatism.  The desire was to combine the accumulation of knowledge with the dealing with knowledge criticism, at last having the chance to live a difficult and deprived period of history in a society with a controversial project. However, the best is to ruminate yesterday’s image of merely absent project and the fantasy of belief in a historic role.

KARL MARX in his evaluation of the past and the present human rights thinking said “the so called human rights are the rights of the egoistic human, who was separated, from other human beings and groups”.  During the twenties, the Surrealism movement dedicated the first issue of its magazine to call for new declaration of human rights.  The idea of indulging human rights thinking with economical and social rights was defended by the critical socialist schools in the twentieth century; it was also necessary to enrich the socialism thinking by introducing new culture of democracy and diversity.  As well, most of liberalism tendencies had a great share of enriching the culture of separated authorities, which defeated the principles of  infinite and arbitrary authority.  Despite, the critical interest in adopting or following the previous work from Du Mapli to Jurgen Habermass there were not even one coherent coexistence of the thinking and culture of human rights deserve the honorable title.  In view of the facts, the pioneers probably considered these rights part of political, cultural, or religious extended agenda for the project with its own interpretation to these rights.          

It is naïve to imagine that human rights could easily disposes the political crown -politics as power, supremacy and subjugated compliance.  As they say, end justifies the means-. Thus, political noble means participation in public affairs. It is a huge involvement in bearing responsibilities and carrying out duties.  However, that expresses the great need for more and more mechanism of protection for human rights and more ethics code. Any way, politicians rejected these principles. In fact, these principles were necessary for human existence to restrain the barbaric undermining which penetrated each and every cell of the physical and moral principles.

The introduction of human rights culture into not only the elite’s libraries and Lawyers' archives but also every home was the only escape from the political blockage, which dominated our time.  This blockage bears the fruits of political assassination, ideological demolition and violent killing of the dream.  Many forms of fundamentalism and isolated chauvinism have infiltrated and appeared with the ugly face of Globalization.  Capitalism turned into absolute authority exploiting countries and societies.  These new forms of dominant imperialism ostracized the feeble by dividing the World into unequal divisions, spread of air pollution, weapons of mass destruction, drugs and other food poison goods.

The deep roots of the problems face those who work for human rights, remain in the obscene wealth and the infidel poverty; the poor people’ wars are fought by the rich people’ weapons and the illness, render victorious defeat over the development battles in the south.  Defending the basic principles of human rights require minimum understanding. In fact, the limited co-operation between the human groups and the defenders of human dignity made the increase of  international human rights front form the most important mean for establishing counter-power capable of balancing the new global forces.  It is impossible for this front to become an effective force without the support of almost all interested sections of the society in human rights thinking and culture.  Our knowledge of the existing dialectics and the relation between the thinking and the acting made us vigilant; not optimistic about our theoretical efforts.  In the main time, these efforts urge us to be always armed with ambition of the humanization of tomorrow. 

As POSHKINI said ((marvelous that man who carries the letters- who so called the postman- as for my role is to write these letters))

This, ambitious and creative work was the premonition of every pen participated in this encyclopaedia.  Therefore, at this moment of glory, I stand before each and every one and pay my respect to any participant shared the work and the editing of these international and collective effort.

Thereafter, the human relationships represent a pillar of the thinking production; it is impossible to end this introduction without paying tributes to two persons played vital roles:

The first to my partner forever Violette DAGUERRE, who was the first to believe in this work and stood by me in  every step we have taken.  She devoted sleepless nights to fulfil my needs.

 The second is my friend Fateh AZZAM who gave the best of his efforts to make this dream come true before the beginning of the new Millennium.  Hoping that the new century will be prosperous and bring better times than the darkness of the past century.             

It is inevitable, to thank all my friends at the Arab Commission for Human Rights for their help, in particular, Mohamed Hafiz YAKOUB and Moncef  MARZOUKI.

It is obligatory to state my responsibility for any insufficiency in this work and welcome the views and criticism.

Lastly, I wish to dedicate my humble effort to my mother NAJAH and my father YOUSEF as a mark of gratitude.

      HAYTHAM MANNA  

SHORT UNIVERSAL ENCYCLOPEADIA OF HUMAN RIGHTS

HAYTHAM MANNA

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