"Human rights are characterized by their universality -every human being is a holder of those rights by the fact of being human- and their absolute character -their resistance to any violation-. These features cannot be based on moral relativism; they implicitly entail the formulation of a claim to moral objectivity". This was stated by Juan Cianciardo, researcher of the committee National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET), who has (CONICET), who has coordinated the congress 'Reason internship, autonomy and fundamental rights', organized by the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra.        

It is a fact that the protection and protection of fundamental rights in the world varies enormously from one country to another. agreement One of the keys to the progress of rights, according to Professor Cianciardo, can be found in the coordination of a "policy of rights" between different States: "There are good examples of legal systems that have been reformed and have evolved from situations of injustice to others of greater justice thanks to the action of other States".

Among them, he mentioned the case of Alberto Fujimori, president of Peru between 1990 and 2000: "he renounced the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and that meant a very strong international isolation, which left him very weakened".

In line with the latter, the CONICET's researcher pointed out that an "interesting bet" consists in strengthening regional systems of recognition, protection and promotion of fundamental rights, such as the European or Inter-American systems. "We are witnessing the emergence of 'neo-conventionalism', a phenomenon characterized by the internationalization of the sources of rights and of the courts in charge of interpreting them. This endows them with greater strength and allows a higher quality technical-legal treatment, less linked to politics with a lower case, party politics or ideological distortion".

Philosophical foundation of human rights

Juan Cianciardo's intervention at congress was entitled 'The doctrine of double effect and the foundation of human rights'. In it he exposed how the principle of proportionality - which requires the legislator that the law he issues regulates fundamental rights in a "proportionate" way - has points of contact with the classic doctrine of double effect. "The raison d'être of the principle of proportionality coincides with the raison d'être of double effect: the legal-moral requirement in the first case and the moral requirement in the second to recognize the absolute character of, respectively, human rights and moral absolutes. As a consequence of this, the meaning of the principle as a whole is at stake in the possibility of escaping or transcending a mere balance of costs and benefits".

For the Argentine specialist, the Philosophy plays a fundamental role in sustaining the theory and the speech of human rights. "Only the Philosophy is capable of providing solid instructions to the concepts of dignity and human nature. Without a solid foundation, rights are reduced to flags of political struggle, to instruments permeable to strategic reason, to ideology".

In this sense, he appealed to enrich them with the vision of the classical doctrine of natural law: "Faced with problems of coordination, the only human alternative is the juridical one, which treats the other and the subject himself as an end, not merely as a means, and allows the person to make his claim a good that provides him with an increase in his being".

Juan Cianciardo is one of the twenty experts participating during March 12 and 13 in the congress 'Reason internship, autonomy and fundamental rights', organized by the project 'Natural Law and Reason internship' of the ICS. Among them are professors from the Austral University (Argentina), the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of Seville, the School of Law of the University of Navarra and the Institute for Culture and Society.

"Reason internship, autonomy and fundamental rights have been gaining importance in legal debates, especially as a consequence of the growing prominence of the constitution of legal systems," said Professor Cianciardo. The two cross-cutting themes of the various papers are autonomy, in relation to the theory of action and the legal act, and the relationship between moral principles, legal principles and legal rules.

Some of the topics addressed are 'Power, truth, law, judges: have judicial processes become a blind machine?', 'On the distinction between "killing" and "being manager of homicide": something more than a linguistic question' and 'Self-determination, dignity and fundamental rights', 'The cognitive challenges of concrete interpretation. Between the intelligibility of language and the intelligibility of action'.