Human rights are the inviolability of thought, criticism and human dignity. The true freedom of a society is not measured by how loud people speak, but by whether they have to pay any price for speaking out. If the price for speaking out is imprisonment, exile, loss of job or discredit, there is only fear, not freedom.
I understood this much more deeply when I read Jose Marti's story in my university years. In 1869, as a 16-year-old student, he wrote only one sentence in his notebook: ’Cuba must be independent.“
This sentence, dropped in a child's notebook, so disturbed the colonial administration that Marti was arrested. Chains were put on her feet and she was sentenced to hard labor. Those chains cut his flesh, crippled his body, left a scar he would carry for the rest of his life. But they could not touch his thought.
This is where human rights begin. Marti's story is much more instructive than long declarations and thick law books on human rights. Because no matter which period of the world we look at, we see that the governments always make the same mistake:
They think that by silencing young people, journalists and academics they can also silence thought.
Yet history has proven time and again that the body can be punished, the voice can be silenced, the pen can be broken...
But the idea cannot be killed. Repression does not destroy the idea; on the contrary, it makes it more resilient, sharper, more permanent.
Today is December 10th, Human Rights Day.
But this is not a day of celebration. This is a day of remembrance. For every young man in chains...
A day to remember every academic who has been silenced...every journalist who has been targeted, put on trial, fired. And every time we see the same truth again and again: Human dignity, no matter how much pressure is applied, does not stop having the last word.