An important anniversary

Here is information about an event commemorating the 500th (!!) anniversary of Antonio de Montesinos, the Dominican who famously denounced the enslavement and oppression of indigenous people in the New World and whose preaching influenced Bartolome de las Casas.  Here's a bit from the conference web site:

While concerned with the history of human rights, the conference will have as its primary focus assessing current institutional and legal approaches to move forward in protection of human right.   The 500th anniversary is the ‘rationale’ for the conference. Given many contemporary experiences with problems in the global human rights regime, a review of universal definitions and protections of human rights would be justified even without the 500th anniversary.

While we have created in the last century many formal human rights statements and enforcement institutions, from the ILO to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various courts built on the Nuremberg model, egregious violations of defined standards continue. For example, despite great progress in defining indigenous rights, there are many cases where specific native communities are being displaced or forced to adapt to norms imposed by outside dominant societies. The movement of millions of migrants as a companion to economic globalization has spawned numerous failures to protect labor and other human rights. Imbedded in this migration is the smaller but more appalling abuses arising from involuntary human trafficking. While many religious institutions and traditions provide models for justifying and defending human rights, of which Montesinos is a stellar example, movements linked to many religious traditions have been tempted to approve suppression of rights in the name of conformity.