All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. This U.N. stipulation is interesting in both its ex pression of universality and of hope. As universal value, it could be articulated and acted upon in quite a variety of ways and at various levels: individual, community, or national. At the individual level, we have already been witnessing well-known cases like Benigno Aquino in the Philippines, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov in the former Soviet Union, to name just a few. At the national level, we have just gone through modern of power starting, again, with the Philippines, and most recently across the whole Eastern Europe and then right within the citadel of power of the former Soviet Union itself. At the community and grass- root level, we have read a good deal about protest move- ments and even armed rebellions among minority or local groups in their efforts to exert their customary rights of livelihood. The last category is, as I see it, to assume increasing importance and scope, particularly among the Third World peoples in the face of the on- slaught of industrialism. In the post-Cold War, there still indeed remain pertinent issues of human rights and freedom, and thus democracy, as to be presently looked