The Russian Orthodox Church presented on Thursday 6 April – at the end of the 10th World Russian People’s Congress (Moscow, 4-6 April) – a “declaration on the rights and dignity of man”, denouncing the excesses of absolute individualism that pervades the international regime of human rights and expressing the concern that it occupies a terrain largely left to organizations of Western inspiration. In presenting the declaration, Metropolitan Kirill, head of the Department of Foreign Relations of the Patriarchate of Moscow, denounced tendencies that are creating ambiguities in the way believers understand human rights: on the one hand, human rights are at the service of man; on the other, in the name of an absolute individual liberty, they risk generating “ideas that are in contradiction to the moral representation of the human being”, by permitting and “imposing foreign practices contrary to the foundations of the Orthodox faith”, such as euthanasia, abortion and homosexual unions.
