As Mary Robinson said, “human rights are inscribed in the heart of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their proclamation.”
The Daughters of Charity have been defending and supporting human rights since our founding in 1633, long before anyone had ever heard the term. St. Vincent de Paul, our founder, captured the principle when he wrote that helping convicts was “doing an act of justice and not of mercy” (CCD VII, 115). In other words, charity is not charity if not accompanied by justice.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. In it, the protection of fundamental human rights is laid out and is recognized as “having inspired and paced the way for the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels.”