For more than 20 years, the Baptist World Alliance has encouraged Baptist congregations around the world to observe Human Rights Sunday. The date suggested this year is Dec. 10, which coincides with the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed Dec. 10, 1948. Fifty-two years later, countless men and women are still held in prison for their beliefs. They are as prisoners of conscience, held throughout the world in crowded jails, in labor camps or in remote prisons.
Thousands are held under administrative orders by military regimes that deny the prisoners possibility of trial or appeal. Other victims are confined to hospitals for the insane or removed to secret detention camps. Many are forced to endure relentless, systematic torture. Ordinary citizens are abducted, disappear or are killed. Many flee and become refugees. Treatment of children and youth — forced in many countries to serve as child soldiers, bonded servants or prostitutes — is especially horrific. These acts degrade the image and likeness of God in which every person is created and are an affront to God and to human society.
There has been progress. People around the world accept The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights documents as individual and collective commitments. In the 1960s when Amnesty International and other advocacy groups became prominent, many violations of human rights took place in countries that are now models of democracy and respect for human dignity.
This progress is of vital importance. The setting of international human rights standards and the creation of possibilities for the protection of those rights reinforce the vision of the Beloved Community, God’s Realm, which animated Baptists such as James Henry Rushbrooke, an early leader of the Baptist World Alliance. In 1918 he wrote “A Creed for Believers in a Warless World.”
It reads in part:
We believe in a sweeping reduction of armaments.
We believe in international law, courts of justice and board of arbitration.
We believe in equality in race treatment.
We believe that Christian patriotism demands the practice of good will between peoples.
We believe that nations, no less than individuals, are subject to God’s immutable moral laws.
We believe that peoples achieve true welfare, greatness and honor through just dealing and unselfish service.
We believe that the spirit of Christ … can conquer every barrier of trade, color, creed and race.
We believe in a warless world and dedicate ourselves to its achievement.
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