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SG/SM/6734

LET DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS BE YOUR GUIDE, YOUR SOURCE OF STRENGTH, YOUR CREDO, SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS AT SWEDISH EXHIBIT IN NEW YORK

6 October 1998


Press Release
SG/SM/6734
HR/4383


LET DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS BE YOUR GUIDE, YOUR SOURCE OF STRENGTH, YOUR CREDO, SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS AT SWEDISH EXHIBIT IN NEW YORK

19981006 Following is the text of the statement by Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the Swedish exhibit on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in New York today:

Thank you, Ambassador Hans Dahlgren, for that introduction, for this gift, and above all for this wonderful initiative. I also want to send my warmest regards to State Secretary Jan Eliasson and the people of Sweden, who I understand will be seeing this event on television Wednesday morning.

This exhibit gives us a taste of the many reasons the United Nations has to be grateful to the people and Government of Sweden. As of tomorrow, there will be about 13 million new reasons -- when every telephone book in Sweden will include a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As you know, the Declaration turns 50 this year. What better way to celebrate that birthday than to get the Declaration out to every home and office in the land? And what better way to make the Declaration truly universal?

And so it strikes me that this is the kind of thing that could be done in every nation.

Print it on the back of train schedules; enclose it with voter registration forms and ballot papers; insert it into school textbooks; place copies in hotel room stationery folders and the seat pockets of airplanes. It matters not how you do it; what matters is getting the Declaration out there to every man, woman and child in the world -- to the people to whom it rightly belongs.

In the half century of its life, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has had universal impact. It has inspired the constitutions of many newly independent States and many new democracies.

It has become a yardstick by which we measure respect for what we know, or should know, as right and wrong.

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And yet: it is often those who most need their human rights protected, who also need to be informed that the Declaration exists -- and that it exists for them.

And so, with this event, let us dream of the day when every schoolchild can recite, along with the words to his or her national anthem, the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And I quote: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

Let us dream of the day when all of us live up to the responsibility which that spirit of brotherhood implies; the day when every one of us is ready to speak up not only for our own rights, but the rights of our fellow human beings, whenever we see them threatened, wherever we know them to be violated.

In acting on that spirit of brotherhood, let the Declaration be your guide, your source of strength and your credo.

"Mina kära bröder och systrar, tack för att jag kan lita på Ert stöd." [My dear brothers and sisters, I am grateful that I can count on your support.]

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For information media. Not an official record.