The International Conference on the Human Right to Peace , held in Santiago on 9 and 10 December 2010, concluded with remarkable success after the unanimous approval of the Declaration of Santiago on the Human Right to Peace and the establishment of the International Observatory on the Right Human to Peace. [continues reading to download the statement]

The Congress was held under the World Social Forum on Education for Peace, which developed in Santiago in December 2010, and was the culmination of the Global Campaign AEDIDH in favor of codification of international human right to peace.

The Campaign AEDIDH began on October 30, 2006 with the approval of the Luarca Declaration on the Human Right to Peace and had their milestones should particularly be highlighted in the Bilbao Declaration on the Human Right to Peace (February 24, 2010), which reviews the Declaration of Luarca in light of regional contributions coming from different cultural sensibilities of the world. In turn, the Bilbao Declaration was reviewed by an International Editorial Committee, which approved June 2, 2010 the Barcelona Declaration on the Human Right to Peace. The latter text is the immediate antecedent of the Declaration adopted in Santiago.

The four statements share a holistic conception of peace, which means absence of all kinds of violence, whether gun violence, structural or cultural. The gun violence has been aided by an arms race that in 2009 represented an expense of 1,535 worldwide billions of dollars. The structural violence is produced by social and economic inequalities that divide the world between a rich North and poor South is where most of the 1,400 million human beings in situations of extreme poverty and social exclusion, in addition to over 1,000 million of human beings suffering from hunger every day, mostly women, children in developing countries. This situation of structural violence is incompatible with peace. Peace also requires the absence of cultural violence, the product of domestic violence, intrafamiliar, school and work, as well as racial discrimination, xenophobia and religious intolerance.

The world suffers from a culture of violence fueled by all these sources of violence. But the culture of violence has to be replaced by a culture of peace in the realization of human rights without discrimination of any kind can be a reality. Will from that moment when we can say we enjoy the human right to peace.

The Santiago Declaration illustrates the reader about the contents necessary for peace as a human right, such as the right to education on peace and human rights, the right to human security, the right to the environment, the right to disarmament, the right to development, the right to emigrate, the right to shelter, the rights of victims of violations of human rights or the rights of persons belonging to groups in situations of vulnerability.