Artur Sakunts, “Human rights are now violated with greater cynicism”
07:02, December 16, 2013 | News, Other newsChairman of HCA Vanadzor, human rights activist Artur Sakunts evaluates the level of human rights protection in the RA as significantly below all possible criteria.
On International Day of human rights in a talk with Aravot.am he mentions that currently the violations of human rights have taken a more organized direction.
“Human rights are now violated with greater cynicism. The violations in our country are of systematized character, selective justice functions; a policy to patronize insiders with all possible means and to punish outsiders is operating.”
According to him, we have a situation where even persons with high legal awareness are faced with violations of human rights and problems reinstating them. “The problem in us is that adepts are either obliterated, imprisoned or persecuted, or else discredited”.
Although he does not undermine the role of raising legal awareness among people, nonetheless, he states that knowledge without action does not have any value.
“We should struggle consistently and principally, adhering to human dignity as a mentality in understanding, accepting, maintaining, and applying it as the highest value. Knowledge without actions has no values, without realizing it, without moves it merely remains an idea failing to become a lifestyle, losing its essence and becoming meaningless. When no measures are undertaken to achieve changes and present demands, the existing knowledge loses it sense”.
According to the human rights activist, there are things the understanding of which does not require high level of legal awareness.
“Do you think it needs knowledge to understand that one should not degrade, beat a person in the Police, will anyone state it is allowed and natural, does it require knowledge to pose a demand for fair trial, does it require knowledge to understand that a person cannot be deprived of his/her shelter by justifying it with state interests and etc. Humanity has developed the aforementioned knowledge and valued it through history; those are achievements of civilization, which are formulated by the legal norms. But if they failed to be formulated or are neglected as useless, this is itself the unnatural, is against civilization the understanding of which does not require additional knowledge. In Spartak era, the slaved did not have knowledge, when they rebelled against human dignity degraders”, concludes Artur Sakunts.
Source: http://www.aravot.am/2012/12/10/313571/