Two quotations that inspired this story:

Helena Kennedy describes human rights as

‘a beautifully hybrid thing, legal, political, philosophical  which draw their authority from and in turn make manifest certain threads found across vast distances in space and time..It’s the deeper sense of the human that these rights are striving for ’

 Theodore Zeldin wrote:

‘Our imaginations are inhabited by ghosts, familiar ghosts which reassure, the lazy ones which make us obstinate and, above all, the frightening ones which discourage.  The past haunts us.’