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Following is the full text of a written statement by the Chief Executive, Mr Tung Chee Hwa, on the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights tomorrow (December 10, 1998). The statement is included in a special publication to mark the occasion, to be distributed by the Home Affairs Bureau to the public tomorrow.

"Hong Kong has a long tradition of respecting and safeguarding human rights. The rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration have been given legal substance through the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, both of which have applied to Hong Kong for more than 20 years and - as applied to Hong Kong - are entrenched in our constitutional document, the Basic Law.

Together, the Universal Declaration and the two Covenants comprise the International Bill of Rights. The Declaration was born into a world that had barely emerged from the Second World War - a war in which there had been more fatalities than in any human conflict before or since, a war that had spawned new depths of inhumanity. In 1948, the world desperately needed an affirmation of right values and a reassurance that simple human decency still prevailed: a covenant among the nations proclaiming their common goal to do better by the peoples of the earth. We salute the noble and laudable aims of those who formulated the Universal Declaration.

We, in Hong Kong, are indeed fortunate to live in a society where human rights - founded on the bedrock of the rule of law - are woven into the very fabric of our lives. So much so, indeed, that many of us too readily take them for granted. Many seem to regard human rights solely in terms of the guarantees they afford us as individuals: underwriting, as it were, the moral and cultural solipsism of the "me generation". This was not the vision of those who drew up the Universal Declaration who did not for a moment forget that every right entails, as its natural concomitant, a corresponding duty.

Here in Hong Kong, the community affords us the respect to which we are entitled as human beings and protects the rights to which our humanity entitles us. We remain a robust and lively community where people have no hesitation in speaking their minds. We will do everything to protect and preserve these rights. But we should also be mindful of the vision of those who drafted the Universal Declaration, that we also owe a duty to the community which nurtures and forms us, and without which our lives would be without substance."

End/Wednesday, December 9, 1998

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