Human rights’ heart: human dignity

September 21, 2020
Tovere’s electoral seat
(Amalfi)

In Italy there is one certainty among many endemic uncertainties: the right to injustice. Every day the Articles of our Constitution are widely betrayed, evaded, circumvented, deceived, transgressed by a guilty distracted and quietly defaulting political class. Article 2 of the Constitution is certainly the one most ignored: The Republic recognizes and guarantees the inviolable rights of man, both as an individual and in the social formations where his personality takes place, and requires the fulfillment of the mandatory duties of political solidarity , economic and social.

People with disabilities and their families are increasingly invisible only because politics, all of them, has decided that it is not convenient to see their reality. Complaints run online 24 hours a day in the testimonies and voices of those who experience discomfort, and who continue desperately tirelessly, with the hope of being heard, to report difficulties, emergencies after emergencies.

Ciro, Rosa’s husband suffering from a serious disability, unequivocally recounts the abandonment of institutions, isolation, the violation of the (inalienable) right to vote.

When it comes to human rights, we should ask ourselves a fundamental question: what is the person?

When we talk about the dignity of the person as a supreme and universal value and consider what happens in our contemporary society, the famous opening words of Rousseau’s Social Contract “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains” comes to mind and we are tempted to adapt it to the news we read and listen to every day:
Human dignity is, by nature, inviolable and inalienable, but it is trampled on everywhere. Disability in Italy, when people are in serious conditions, unfortunately becomes exclusively a family affair.

In recent years, science has made great strides. Thanks to the extraordinary skills and expertise of the researchers, the new technologies have been able to create excellent products, capable of radically changing the quality of our lives for the better.

Believe me, these improvements are not only an advantage for people with disabilities, but actually constitute a very considerable advantage, also in economic terms, for the whole of society. This is why it would be very important for our country to make them accessible so as to guarantee people with disabilities those evident benefits derived from the progress of scientific research.

And it would be equally important to strive to ensure that in Italy inclusion and social cohesion represented the principles underlying political and corporate decision-making processes at all levels, applying the universal design approach: the human being is not “standard ”And universal planning is the social approach that affirms the human right of all to inclusion and defines the criteria for achieving it.

By improving our world we will improve ourselves.

Salvatore Cimmino