This week is particularly special to me, as I spent the summer of 2012 working for a human rights focused NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. My practicum, built on this experience, focused on social media's role in local NGOs. I designed a blog and Facebook page for Africa Unite, the particular organization I worked with. I'm quite pleased they are still in active use today!
(https://africauniteblog.wordpress.com/) (https://www.facebook.com/UmojaWaAfrica)
As our discussion centers around the broad concept of human rights, I've taken a look back at many of the materials I worked with and helped to create during my summer in South Africa. Aside from recalling many memories, I've posted a couple of my reflections and quotes from my experience as a means of inspiration for discussion this week. They might seem scattered, but I hope they might be of interest to someone. I'd love to hear opinions on any/all of them.
1. "Human rights is distinctly difficult because it deals with our shared humanity as opposed to our secondary identities." - Dr. Amii Omara-Otunnum (UNESCO Chair of Comparative Human Rights)
2. Africa as a nation needing to take responsibility for many of its own actions as opposed to using imperialism as a scapegoat. - Idea discussed at a human rights conference that I found particularly interesting as it deals with the complex issues of victimization and blame.
3. Should schools include a curricular component on the values of human rights?
4. The African Charter of Human and People's Rights oversees human rights violations, but has no legislative power. Is this a problem? Everyone at the conference was unanimous that it was.
5. What is the ideal organizational structure for addressing large scale human rights violations?
Hopefully these spark some discussion, as I am sure we will touch on some of the concepts in class tomorrow.
Wow it seems like you had an amazing experience in South Africa, which I am very jealous of! The ideas you posted are very intriguing and I especially like number 3. It seems crazy to me that schools do not already include a curricular component on the values of human rights. I think that if human rights content was included in an elementary level classroom it would promote not only acceptance among children, but it would teach students at an early age to treat others respectfully and fairly, since we are all human after all.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post Bradley, it sounds like an amazing practicum.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to comment about your third question. I believe that Alex, our Latvian (?) guest from class had a few key insights about how education impacts revolution. He told us that by instituting an education program, it makes the public's brain more malleable 20-30 years down the road. I think that this would be amazing to do with human rights. Human rights seems to be an ongoing revolution that often stagnates, and I think that keeping a component of this would reignite what is needed for positive change in the sector of human rights.
I have also been struggling with your fourth question. Balancing goals with enforcement and guaranteed results is a large problem to handle. Without enforcement, what is the point of having human rights goals? Positive education helps, but I suppose that there will always be 'bad' people out there. I have also been to a couple countries in southern Africa for a few months and one of the major problems that I noticed was corruption. There are large amounts of resources pouring into Africa, and without enforcement of human rights this money can create large problems. So yes, I would agree that a lack of enforcement is a major problem to overcome.