I believe that the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so quickly after the Holocaust, proves that we have begun to learn those lessons. For if human rights are to have any meaning at all, none of us can remain indifferent when anyone's rights are violated anywhere. In recent years, peacekeeping operations in El Salvador and Mozambique have helped the people of those countries turn their backs on civil strife, and their energies towards the work of democracy and development. Genocide has become a work of our time, too. So we move both forward and back.
Peace spreads in one region as hatred rages in another.
Unprecedented wealth coexists with terrible deprivation. Globalization knits us closer together while intolerance keeps up apart. But while much of our progress is fragile, some achievements endure. One such achievement is the Genocide Convention, which was born out of the experience that a person stood a better chance of being tried and judged for killing one human being than for killing 100,000. Another is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.