“Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free”, writes the Dalai Lama.

We can start from this sentence to explain the reason for our March focus on human rights. Because human rights are at the heart of civil coexistence and peace. Of unity and universal fraternity between people and peoples. They are the foundations of humanity.

Yet, human rights are not secured right now. The world, human beings themselves, even institutions, are denying them, trample them underfoot, killing them. It has happened in the past and it is still happening today.

We started with a film, “I am still here”, by Walter Salles, fresh winner of the Academy Award for Best International Film, to recall this wound in the world. It recounts the denial of the main human right: life. In this case for ideas of freedom, for dissent against an authoritarian regime.

It is a story from the past, the one told in this powerful work that comes to us from Brazil. It is a true story, which begins in the 1970s, but tragically has the flavour of the present and the universal. A story that is memory and eternal lesson.

Then, the story of Ruth Milgram: a 94-year-old Jewish woman who survived Nazi persecution. True, powerful in its profound drama, certainly an instrument of necessary remembrance and at the same time a representation of one of the historical moments in which humans destroyed the human rights of their fellow human beings, in the most aberrant way.

Her journey from the hell of Hitler’s Germany to his rebirth in the United States is reconstructed by the exceptional pen of Maddalena Maltese, with an interview piece borrowed from AgenSir News Agency.

In order to strengthen our reflection, however, we always try to meet people who can help us understand and better understand the issues we deal with. People who are competent in the subject we go through. People capable of adding useful details and valuable reflections to our in-depth study.

Therefore, we had the pleasure of talking to Riccardo Noury, spokesperson for Amnesty International Italy since 2003, on our journey into the subject of human rights. He spoke to us about dignity and justice and reminded us how the gesture of each person is important for the defence of the human rights of all.

Another interesting testimony was that of Alessandra Morelli, for almost thirty years Delegate for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in many countries around the world. Her words, in the interview she gave us, were also full of intelligence, experience and wisdom.