Accountability

categorically: The effective enjoyment and implementation of human rights and
fundamental freedoms is inextricably linked to the assumption of the duties and
responsibilities implicit in those rights.
After fifty years of the adoption of the UDHR and following human rights instruments,
the point of departure of the DHDR Preamble is the shared concern regarding the lack
of political will for enforcing globally human rights. Moreover, the DHDR takes into
account the new challenges of the global scenario for translating semantically rights into
duties and responsibilities. “Recognising the changes that new technologies, scientific
development and the process of Mondialisation have brought about, and aware of the
need to address their impact upon and potential consequences for human rights and
fundamental freedoms“, states in its Preamble.
Its 12 chapters and 41 articles can be compared with the human rights such as
formulated in the UDHR and recent initiatives that reflect a similar preoccupation for the
formulation of duties and responsibilities, such as the United Nations Millennium
Declaration, the Statute of Rome, the Global Compact, The Earth Charter, the Kyoto
Protocol, and UNESCO declarations and conventions.
History
The drafting of the declaration has been the result of the committed and disinterested
work of a group of experts integrated by Nobel laureates - Joseph Rotblat, Wole
Soyinka and Dario Fo -, scientists, artists and philosophers representing all the regions
of the world –among them, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, Richard Falk, Ruud
Lubbers, Lord Frank Judd, Sergey Kapitsa, Jakob von Uexküll, Fernando Savater-, and
the judicious chairmanship of Richard Goldstone from South Africa and among its
members. This process was inspired by the need –in words of Justice Goldstone- of the
transition from a “formal equality” to a “substantial equality, with a shared concern of the
situation of millions of ignored and marginalised people in our globalised world: “the
recognition of human rights is insufficient, … if such so rights are to be realized it is
necessary that they are enforceable...
There must be a duty on all relevant authorities and individuals to enforce those rights.”
With a convergent perspective, Norberto Bobbio has entirely supported the initiative and
the text of the DHDR, in particular taking into account the main concern for humanity of
reinforcing the international systems. In that context he has established an interesting
comparison between the transition from “moral rights” to “legal rights” and the need to
transform “moral duties” into “legal duties” (See: Norberto Bobbio, Declaration of Human
Duties and Responsibilities, page 98).
This Declaration proposes comprehensively the implicit system of duties and
responsibilities contained in our human rights systems, in particular that enshrined in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and in subsequent international
human rights instruments and establishes consequently their bearers.
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