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Benedict XVI at the UN

Benedict XVI at the UN. In Speech, Pope Urges Promotion of Human Rights. By WARREN HOGE and IAN FISHER April 18, 2008 UNITED NATIONS —

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Benedict XVI at the UN

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  1. Benedict XVI at the UN

  2. In Speech, Pope Urges Promotion of Human Rights • By WARREN HOGE and IAN FISHER April 18, 2008UNITED NATIONS — • Pope Benedict XVI, who was a young German prisoner in the war that forged the United Nations, addressed that body Friday as pope, insisting that human rights — more than force or pragmatic politics — must be the basis for ending war and poverty.

  3. Benedict XVI at the UN • “The promotion of human rights remains the most effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and social groups, and for increasing security,” Benedict told the General Assembly at United Nations headquarters.

  4. Benedict XVI at the UN • “Indeed, the victims of hardship and despair, whose human dignity is violated with impunity, become easy prey to the call to violence, and they can then become violators of peace,” the 81-year-old pope said.

  5. Benedict XVI at the UN • And in a passage that will have particular resonance for the current United Nations leadership, which is trying to establish the right of the outside world to intervene in situations where nations fail to shield their own citizens from atrocities, the pope said that “every state has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights.”

  6. Benedict XVI at the UN • “If states are unable to guarantee such protection,” the pope said, “the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations charter and in other international instruments.” In an apparent allusion to countries that claim such international actions constitute intervention in their national affairs, he said instead they “should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty.” • He added, “On the contrary, it is indifference or failure to intervene that do the real damage.”

  7. Benedict XVI at the UN • At base, the pope presented the idea that there are universal values that transcend the diversity — cultural, ethnic or ideological — embodied in an institution like the United Nations, founded to help prevent the ruin of another world war. Those values are at the base of human rights, he said, as they are for religion. Thus religion, he said, cannot be shut out of a body like the United Nations, which he said aims at “a social order respectful of the dignity and rights of the person.”

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