Lima, Peru, May 6, 2008 / 13:32 pm
During his weekly radio program, the Archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, said human rights are recognized, not “invented” by international organizations, as they respond to natural law and not to the arbitrariness of U.N. conventions.
“Human rights are based on natural law, a law that is inscribed in the heart of man, in the different cultures and civilizations,” the cardinal said. “Every man receives them by nature, by the fact of being a person, because they are part of our very identity. They are not bestowed by the U.N. or by any law or organization,” he stressed.
The cardinal warned against efforts to create new “rights” for alleged minorities, which run the risk of making the expression “human rights” subjective.
Cardinal Cipriani also cautioned that some organizations manipulate the concept of rights and “limit their action exclusively to political rights of a specific ‘color’ or ideology.