On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and called upon all member countries to publicise the text of the declaration widely. Today, 32 years later, there are countries where trade unions are banned outright.
Open your newspapers any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable able to his or her government.
25,000 people “disappear” in one country and 15,000 in another; in a third, a trade unionist is detained by police for the 24th time in two years; in a fourth, released prisoners tell of the torture of a 14-month old baby girl held with her mother in a clandestine military camp for the “disappeared.”
Dr Cairns has been accused of obscurantism because his writings are supposed to be infected with distorting ideological conceptions;1 facts are the Ark of the Covenant, and Cairns evades the empirical evidence likely to contradict his views. It is the purpose of this paper to: