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Indeed, when governments develop nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens - and this is true in most cases - they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation…
Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?
The United States developed its atom bomb during World War II, without giving much thought to the long-term effects and consequences - and the rest of the world has followed it to this day…
Only peace between states can promise real security to each state and to every citizen. No force in the world can provide security or ensure survival…
It was not force which spread the word of Jesus through the world…Children are brought into this world to live in it, not to fight. It is not true that war is an inevitable state of affairs - on the contrary, what is essential is peace.
It is a question of listening to your conscience, to the voice of Jesus telling you, yes, this is what you must do--sacrifice yourself, your personal freedom: in the nuclear era, and with the nuclear threat hanging over us, the answer to this challenge is obvious, one may not evade such a responsibility, one must accept the mission in order to warn against the danger.
At that point in Vanunu's 1987 statement words were crossed out by the Israeli censors.
Vanunu was writing the speech in response to being awarded The Right Livelihood Award, better known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.
Instead, Vanunu sat in silence in a windowless tomb sized jail cell while his brother Meir read the above statement at the ceremony for the Right Livelihood Award. The award was established in 1980 to honor personal courage that inspires social transformation and supports those "offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today."
One of last year's recipients was journalist Amy Goodman, whose infamous interview with Vanunu in 2004 was used as major testimony against him in his ongoing freedom of speech trial that began in January 2006.
Not until after the July 2007 sentence of six more months in jail, did Amy Goodman phone Vanunu for a follow up interview, but he wouldn't talk to her. When I saw Vanunu in Jerusalem a few weeks later, he told me he refused to speak to Amy because "the media has never helped me."
Amy Goodman was awarded the Alternative Nobel for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media."
In reply, Goodman affirmed, "I strongly believe that media can be a force for peace. It is the responsibility of journalists to give voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken and beaten down by the powerful. It is the best reason I know to carry our pens, cameras and microphones out into the world. The media should be a sanctuary for dissent. It is our job to go to where the silence is." [4]
The silence of the media regarding Vanunu’s trial and conviction for speaking to them and the silence regarding the undemocratic restrictions that forbid him the RIGHT to speak to foreigners and the RIGHT to leave the state should end by April 21, 2009. That is when the 5th year of restrictions that deny Vanunu his inalienable human right of speech and movement expire. Silence in response to wrong is complicity with it.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. -Article 19 UN Universal Declaration Human Rights
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.-13:2
