Human Rights: The Ethical Underpinning of Globalisation?

The Hawke Centre is now offering a 'Focus on Rights' series within its extensive public program of lectures and seminars. The inaugural Series event presents the highly respected CEO of World Vision, Tim Costello.

In the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami we have witnessed both the almost unimaginable suffering of thousands of people across Asia and a corresponding outpouring of sympathy. Both the Australian Government and the Australian people responded with unprecedented generosity. Across the world this generosity and compassion was replicated, as people reached out to one another without regard to the barriers of ethnicity or religion.

Tim will ask whether it is possible to interpret the response to the Tsunami as an expression of the ethical dimensions of globalisation; the creation of a community where the concept of what it means to be human is no longer reducible to membership of the nation state.

Over the last twenty years it has become increasingly commonplace to hear discussion about the transnational dimensions of capital. But the disintegration of the boundaries that have divided nations for centuries goes well beyond the limits of commerce. Improvements in global communications make us increasingly aware that natural disasters do not recognise national boundaries. As people around the globe saw images of the devastation wreaked by this arbitrary act of nature, it became apparent that the vulnerability of others is the vulnerability of all humanity. The response that was generated by the images of suffering suggests an increasing recognition that our common humanity (a concept that finds expression in human rights) can provide the ethical underpinning for an increasingly globalised world.