Former South African government minister and Trinity College Dublin law lecturer Kader Asmal was awarded a prestigious French honour, the legion of honour, at a ceremony in the French embassy in Cape Town yesterday.
Mr Asmal was awarded the order in recognition of his struggle against apartheid, his defence of human rights, and his role in the adoption of the Unesco Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.
This convention, adopted after two years of negotiations, was adopted last year under his chairmanship. It states cultural diversity is "a common heritage of humanity" and defending it must be "an ethical imperative inseparable from respect for human dignity".
In his letter to Mr Asmal, French president Jacques Chirac described him as "an immense figure in the struggle against apartheid" and praised his role in bringing the convention to fruition, as "services that you have rendered to France ".
In his acceptance speech, Mr Asmal invoked both the French revolutionary heritage of liberty, equality and fraternity and the Irish 1916 Proclamation promise to "cherish all the children of the nation equally".
He ended his speech by quoting Séamus Heaney: "History says, Don't hope/On this side of the grave,/But then, once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme."
"How to honour and respect cultural diversity is one of the great challenges of our time," Mr Asmal said. "Does the enhancement of cultural diversity militate against the recognition of national identity?"
Human rights and national identity are not in tension - there are universal standards of rights, which must include action to accommodate cultural diversity, he said.
No civilisation has a monopoly for greater or lesser respect for rights. The central issues remain tolerance, pluralism and the concept of cultural rights, within states as well as between states. This has practical dimensions in the challenge of balancing the "customary rights" of groups with wider law, as well as equal rights of social groups to a full share in economic and social life, he said.
The question of identities has been given dramatic new force by dynamic trends at play today, he said. There are nearly 200 independent states in the world, and over 5,000 ethnic groups. Balancing the rights of different groups with those of the state and institutions of power remains a source of unresolved tension. The pressures of globalisation have left many groups and individuals feeling marginalised.
In this era the challenge of balancing human rights and national identity also means paying special attention to the rights of the poor, indigenous peoples and the rights of migrants, he said.
Mr Asmal has been an MP in South Africa since 1994 and was a government minister from 1994 until 2004.