Human rights education at the UN DPI NGO conference in Paris

Dear friends and colleagues,  

In many countries, 60 is the age at which people are deemed to have served their purpose and required to retire. Clearly the Universal Declaration at 60 faces no risk of having outlived its purpose. One of the key reasons this is so, as Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has pointed out in his remarks, is the lack of awareness of its contents especially among those who most need their protection. Perhaps it is also a casualty of the tyranny of low expectations – from the governments who signed it with no realistic intention of turning it into reality, to us in civil society who have failed to take a solidly human-rights-centric approach to our work.  

We know that an individual’s or community’s awareness of their rights can multiply the effectiveness and the efficiency of development work and policies. In my work in India , I have personally witnessed the transformation that rights awareness can achieve. My favourite story comes from a small village deep in the desert of Rajasthan in North West India. The teacher at the State school in that village had been repeatedly absenting herself from classes. Her students, being fully aware of their fundamental right to education, thanks to a local NGO, first sent a delegation to the local village council to formally lodge their protest. As is usual when children speak, the council laughed them off saying they had more important business to attend to. The children called a meeting and developed their own strategy. They collected as much money as they could and bought a lock. When the truant teacher finally turned up to collect her salary she found she could not enter the school building. The kids then sat her down and told her their terms and conditions if she was to continue as their teacher. In one move they had demonstrated the empowering effect of rights awareness and its impact on making development policies work effectively by ensuring that the clients of those policies can demand accountability and governance. Far more effective, and a lot cheaper, in fact, than some sophisticated monitoring and evaluation frameworks.  

If this fact is so well known, why isn’t greater money, time and emphasis accorded to human rights education? Is it short-sightedness on the part of governments and civil society? Or is it expediency, for instance, the availability of funding? Or is it politeness and political correctness that refuses to challenge prevailing power structures? Or, even worse, is it fear of actually liberating people from dependency?  

60 years on from the adoption of the Declaration, humanity faces a great confluence of crises – food, energy, climate. CIVICUS has repeatedly pointed out instances of the so-called war on terror having been used as an excuse by self-proclaimed democracies and unashamedly authoritarian regimes alike to justify infringements of rights. Civil society’s freedom to express, engage, even to exist has been seriously curtailed under the guise of national security concerns. CIVICUS’ Civil Society Watch programme has monitored legislations in 87 countries in 2007 alone that aim to restrict the activities of civil society. From Burma and China to the UK and USA we are witnessing the closing of spaces for democratic dissent.  

The new crises promise worse. In the name of urgency, quick-fix, undemocratic solutions that suit certain interests are being advocated and pushed through with the excuse that there is no alternative. As global decision-making and governance break down in matters of trade, climate justice and development assistance, as economic growth falters and as global power relations shift their centre of gravity, we are at great risk of losing even the modest gains of the last 60 years.     

The framers of this document have been described as visionaries. They were clearly not constrained by short-sightedness or expediency or fear. Thanks to their unbounded ambition we have a declaration that we know would be impossible to achieve in today’s geo-political context. If we are to do justice to their vision, if we are to achieve the MDGs, if we are to make any significant progress in achieving justice – economic, social, environmental, cultural or political – building awareness of this document is, in my view, a critical step.  

How many of us can put our hands on our hearts and claim we have done everything in our power to promote awareness and understanding of the contents of the declaration? What would it take to make this document the most widely read text in the world? To ensure it is included in school curricula everywhere? To make its values the core of all civil society and UN work? To make its articles the criteria by which we evaluate the success or failure of all our programmes, policies and practices? To support the Elders campaign to get it signed by billions of people everywhere? To be able to look at the faces on these panels without feeling shame or making excuses. If there is one thing you do today I urge you to find a way to integrate human rights education into your programming, your advocacy and your own practice. You could start by signing the Elders pledge at www.everyhumanhasrights.org. If each of us simply did that and urged our partners, constituents and networks to do so as well it would go a long way to achieving the vision of the framers and achieving a more just world for all.

With gratitude, faith and solidarity,

Ingrid Srinath,

CIVICUS Secretary General 

To send your comments, suggestions or contributions of articles to e-CIVICUS, e-mail editor@civicus.org.

For previous articles from the Secretary General, see details below: 

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