(…) The network of fundamental rights gives everyone the dignity of a person, leaves no one shipwrecked in their own destiny, keeps alive the hope of peace, freedom, equality. Human rights are therefore a limit both to the authority of States and to the unconditional freedom of individuals; they represent the paradigm and the litmus test of the very juridicality of the legal systems. There is no law, no right, no justice without the full recognition of rights and the effective possibility of realizing them. (…) When the protection of human rights breaks the logic of borders to affirm a public order of justice for people, one must have the courage to consider the centrality of man as a link between the various constitutional traditions, different sources of law, and even the different jurisprudences, national and international, which require, indeed impose to accept the virtuous and reciprocal contamination of juridical knowledge as a lever and anchor of a firmly communal and supportive perspective. The perspective of rights breaks down all ideological barriers. The distinctions between internal and external law, between common law and civil law, between public and private, blur. (…)
Pietro Grasso President of the Senate of the Republic
What are the properties that make someone a certain individual and distinguish from everything else that exists in the world? Are they purely physical properties or are they also mental characteristics? What is the nature of human persons? What causes a given person to exist at different times, surviving a drastic series of changes, but always remaining the same entity? And what changes could it not survive? (…) From this first list of questions two main themes emerge: the problem of the nature of people and that of the criteria of their identity over time.
Michele Di Francesco – Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani – VII Appendice (2007)
