Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Final vindication for the Sunday Times came from the Court of Human Rights last week. The 11-to-9 decision stopped short of saying that Britain's law of contempt itself violates the broadly worded guarantee of free expression in the charter, which also recognizes the need to protect the "authority of the judiciary." But banning the final Thalidomide article simply was not "necessary," said the Strasbourg judges. In this case, they added, the public's right to know was more important...
...Strasbourg has always felt that it must go cautiously for fear that national governments will pull the rug out from under it," says Cedric Thornberry, an international lawyer who has brought more than 100 cases to Strasbourg. Indeed, the human rights commission refuses to hear most cases and tries to settle the rest amicably. Only when that fails, or a really significant test like the Sunday Times case comes along, does the full court pass judgment on one of its member nations...
Britain, in fact, is the commission's best client. In the past three years Strasbourg has received 398 complaints against the British government, more than against any other country. Unlike many other European countries, England does not recognize the European human rights convention as national law. Its own constitution is largely unwritten; there is no bill of rights set above the power of Parliament. That makes it more difficult to persuade a British court that the government has trespassed on individual rights. And it helps explain why so many Britons turn to Strasbourg for redress...
...demonstrate their affection. Swedish Film Maker Jan Troell, who has made terse, beautiful movies (The Emigrants, The New Land), here seems merely distant and befuddled, as does his usually superb cameraman, Sven Nykvist. The poorly shot concluding hurricane is supposed to be a sort of heavenly analogy to human passions we have been witnessing at play. In the circumstances a light breeze would have done...
...Latin America's largest class, the desperately poor, the uneducated, the politically unorganized. In fetid Netzahualcdyotl, a slum of 2.6 million people that grows like a tumor on the outskirts of Mexico City, several comunidades have cooperated to help protest rising bus fares and appalling health conditions. Human feces lie in the streets. Contaminated water adds to the filth and contributes to a death rate of more than 50% among children less than four years of age. Before Pope John Paul II's visit to Mexico in January, hundreds of comunidad members from Netzahualcoyotl and elsewhere in Mexico...