Human Duties and Rights in an Intercultural Perspective

This paper reflects on the possibility of opening new ways of revaluing the role of human responsibilities and duties by establishing a relationship with rights that goes further than a simple correspondence between correlative terms. Approaching the interdependence between the language of rights and the language of duties from an intercultural perspective helps achieve an increasingly broader, but necessarily more complex, consensus. This analysis goes back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which left duties in the background but showed the incipient presence of an intercultural purpose thanks to the work of UNESCO. The final part of the paper is devoted to those international declarations which delve deeper into this purpose and focus on duties. The aim of these initiatives, which originated with dialogue, is to strengthen those bonds of solidarity that involve assuming responsibilities when faced by the requirements of others that cannot be expressed in terms of enforceable powers.