Preamble: a cry of alarm
Alerted by the grave dangers threatening the balance of the world and the future of humanity, the members of the Collegium International — Ethics, Politics and Science — identify four main reasons behind these dangers.
The first is the absence of ethical reference points, vision or practice in the exercise of political, economic, media and technological power. Neither States, nor multinational corporations, nor other holders of effective power seem to carry this vision. The United Nations has defined the objectives to be reached to meet the great challenges of the new century, but its normative function is weakened by the fragmentation of competences between international organisations and by the absence of an integrated mechanism — or even a world human-rights jurisdiction — that would guarantee the effective and indivisible application of all fundamental rights, civil and political as well as economic, ecological, cultural and social.
The second reason is the growing impact on humans and ecosystems of the physical, biological and atmospheric degradation of our planet, whose consequences appear sporadically through droughts (and the resulting desertification), floods, cyclones, climate change and threats of irreversible pollution.
The third reason for alarm is the widening gap between rich and poor: more than a third of our contemporaries are deprived of their basic fundamental human rights — civil, political, social and cultural.
The fourth reason lies in the growing risks of war and terrorism, and in the absence of brakes on the rise of violence and barbarity.
To respond, the construction of a world civility requires the creation of a Collegium International — ethical, political and scientific — entrusted with a fourfold function: watch and alert on the main risks; discernment, particularly ethical; deliberation on the major conflicts; and advice to governments and international institutions (foremost among them the UN).
I — Principles: interdependence as a project. The members of the Collegium recall their attachment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and to the Declarations of Rio (1992) and Johannesburg (2002). They observe that the globalisation of flows is both an opportunity and a risk, and declare that the community of life and destiny calls for the proclamation of the principle of planetary intersolidarity.
II — Priorities: a programme of action. Five worksites are identified: 1) inventing democracy on a global scale; 2) identifying and protecting global public goods (drinking water, access to knowledge, food resources, pharmaceuticals, energy resources, public transport); 3) building the conditions and indicators of sustainable development; 4) building a universalism of values through inter-civilisational dialogue; 5) guaranteeing economic and social rights.
Bled, Slovenia — 5/6 October 2002. For the Collegium International: Oscar Arias Sánchez, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ruth Dreifuss, Malcolm Fraser, Jürgen Habermas, Alpha Oumar Konaré, Milan Kučan, Edgar Morin, Sadako Ogata, Mary Robinson, Michel Rocard, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Hassan Bin Talal, Richard von Weizsäcker, Henri Atlan, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Stéphane Hessel, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, Wolfgang Sachs, William vanden Heuvel, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, Helmut Schmidt, Robert J. Lifton.