Günter Nooke, the Federal Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Aid at the Federal Foreign Office, issued the following statement today (20 May) in honour of World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development on 21 May:

“Cultural diversity enriches our world and makes living together more interesting. However, I am very concerned that the concept of cultural diversity is being instrumentalized in the international human rights discourse to diminish the absolute nature of universal human rights.

To prevent this, we must resist declaring everything that Germans or Europeans deem desirable to be a human right. We should therefore limit ourselves to minimum standards and basic human rights. They allow plenty of room for many different ways of life. Only something that can and should be universally valid is truly a human right.”