Justice & Law Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

Tabucchi’s line lands with the quiet force of someone refusing to treat the obvious as negotiable. The sentence is built like a debate-stopper: not a lyrical defense of “human rights,” but a flat insistence that they are not a matter of taste, culture-war mood, or philosophical fashion. The repetition of doubt - “any doubts,” “the slightest doubt” - reads like impatience with an era that keeps demanding procedural apologies for moral basics.

The sly move is the concession in the middle: “Perhaps some more should be added to the list.” It’s a writer’s pivot, acknowledging that rights aren’t a museum piece but a living document that must keep up with new vulnerabilities (migration, surveillance, gendered violence, precarious labor). Yet the concession doesn’t soften the claim; it sharpens it. The list can evolve, but the premise cannot: humans have rights by virtue of being human, not because a state grants them citizenship, productivity, or ideological purity.

Tabucchi’s context matters. An Italian novelist deeply engaged with Portugal and Europe’s 20th-century dictatorships, he writes in the shadow of regimes that perfected the art of making cruelty sound administrative. The Universal Declaration, drafted after fascism and war, is his anti-relativist anchor: a deliberately blunt instrument against the rhetorical tricks that normalize abuses (“exceptional times,” “security needs,” “different values”). The intent is less to persuade the unconvinced than to shame the pose of skepticism itself. When basics become debatable, power wins by default.