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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. (Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
No doubt you clocked that today, 10 December, has been Human Rights Day. Were you able to do anything special to mark the day?
Happily I was able to spend the afternoon at an excellent conference on the theme of Human Rights Based Approaches to Campaigning.
The conference was a joint enterprise between the British Institute of Human Rights(BIHR), a wonderful NGO dedicated to human rights research, education and consultancy, and Campaigning Effectiveness, a programme of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, and was hosted at UK Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre.
This was one of the best delivered training events I have been to for several years. Most of the programme was interactive. The presentations were short, clearly focused and, in one case, moving.
The key message of the conference was encapsulated in BIHR’s five principles for human-rights-based campaigning.
Five principles
- Look at the issue through a human rights lens.
- Identify who is accountable for respecting, promoting, fulfilling human rights.
- Empower people to know what their rights are and how they can claim them.
- Facilitate the participation of those affected in an active, meaningful, accessible and inclusive way.
- Aim to tackle inequalities and prioritise the most marginalised.
As the BIHR say on their website:
The underpinning rationale for this work is that for domestic and international human rights to have meaning for or benefit everyone they need to be animated, understood, applied and claimed outside of the courtroom and by a much wider range of people and organisations.
As a Baha’i, I find myself very much in tune with the human rights approach. The Baha’i community is committed to universal human rights as a matter of principle. For us, human rights can provide a space and a framework for human flourishing and are the responsibility not only of governments but of all of us:
The realization of human rights does not involve only action by the government or freedom from unjust government interference or oppression; rather it requires the construction of a progressive social order from the ground level upwards. It demands a new awareness of the reality of human unity and the development among all peoples of an all inclusive notion of community that extends from the family, to villages, towns, cities and localities, to nations, and, most importantly, to the boundaries of the planet itself. Moreover, given that rights cannot exist without corresponding responsibilities, each member of a community has a responsibility to uphold the rights of the other members based on a recognition of their unity and interdependence.(Baha’i International Community statement to the 49th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 18 January 1993)
Did you do anything special for Human Rights Day?
Technorati Tags: human rights, Baha’i, Bahai
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- Human rights at the UN General Assembly: country-specific or not?
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