–Only when people –and peoples– understand their rights and responsibilities and the obligations of their governing authorities can they confidently articulate and actually demand legislation, policies and practices that are in harmony with binding international human rights law.
1. What this means is that it is essential for law makers and decision makers to get to know the substance of internationally protected rights and the extent to which respect of these rights is mandatory in order to ensure that laws, policies and practices are in compliance with international human rights obligations. Unfortunately, most of them do not. Human rights learning for duty bearers is one of the key answers for this shortcoming.
2. Otherwise, a broad knowledge of international human rights law within a society has the potential to protect citizens/claim holders* from abuses of power or neglect of duties by lawmakers, police, military personnel, elected officials, bureaucrats** or the judiciary –all as unambiguous holders of duty bearers’ obligations. (Lawyers Rights Watch Canada)
*: A good sample of claim holders includes public interest CSOs, NGOs and trade unions, business associations, farmers groups, religious and academic institutions, community, youth and women’s groups, professional associations, political parties, students’ organizations, ethnic lobbies….
**: Not being facetious, is a bureaucrat the person that makes a problem out of a solution…? (Albino Gomez)
Universal and effective human rights protection can only be achieved through an informed and continued demand for human rights protection by the people
3. Only through knowing the rights of all and the means to ensure the respect of HR can claim holders then defend them and ultimately have them respected, protected and fulfilled. (Mary Robinson) Human rights learning campaigns and methods to get there must thus be highly participatory. (See Freire below)
4. Under this optic, good human rights learning (HRL) facilitators are expected to show their students that much of society is characterized by structures of dominance. Together with participants, they must explore major social and economic problems such as employment, health, housing, education, international trade… and show how some people systematically and regularly obtain a disproportionately small share of the benefits. These educators are to provoke their students into taking a stand and working to overcome this systematic oppression. But perhaps the students may not be persuaded; is it because, in fact, …most of them are not oppressed? What then is the facilitator to do with these students?
5. As Paulo Freire remarked, oppression is not only found in the Global South; it is not linked to geography. We can find the victims of oppression all around us the world over –if only we look carefully. Also everywhere, individuals are marked by pre-existing values, most of them a product of a false consciousness and a silo mentality. In the end though, individuals will have to make their own new decisions –therein the niche for HRL.
6. Moreover, what of those of our fellow development colleagues who are oppressors or potential oppressors, because they stand to benefit from (or are oblivious about) the existing structure of dominance? A preoccupation with attributing blame to others as individuals, masks the fact that oppression is largely due to unfair social structures rather than to the actions of evil individuals. This concern with blaming them, falsely suggests that they all can be made right by the purging of these evil individuals to achieve an end of particular evil practices. Not the case here. (If this individualized blame is deemed true, pigs can fly…).
7. Instead, emphasis in HRL must be placed on explaining the roots of the problems to, then, collectively find realistic and feasible corrective actions. The overarching questions to be discussed with participants are: If the system is bad, what ought to be done about it? What should you and I do? Challenging students and HR educators to together examine the situation in which they live –and to challenge a whole new lax vocabulary, e.g., partnership, transparency, good governance, stakeholders, evidence-based…– means examining the realities critically, asking not only how things are, but also how things ought to be.
8. In short, students must be invited to take up social problems even though they are not directly connected to their immediate personal concerns. But ponder: The core difficulty in the pedagogy of the middle class is in reaching an understanding that human interests must be based on sharing, that we all must participate-in and improve each other’s fate.
9. Students must ultimately understand that there are severe limits to dialogue in a business-as-usual mode between antagonists, i.e., between those whose interests are in polar, silo mentality opposition. Reconciliation cannot be achieved through communication alone, with no significant changes in the existing structure of skewed, non-level-field social relations. There are simply persons who hold extreme convictions with whom we should not lose our time any more. (R. Ampuero) Let us face it: For some, reality has reasons that honest reason cannot comprehend. (Luis Weinstein) So, educators must overcome the fear about what liberation from oppression will entail if they are not to infect their students with that fear. They simply must accept some risk. (much of the above from George Kent)
Neoliberalism does not suit the human rights learning core mandate
-The cutting edge of conventional thinking in neoliberalism is: obey, fall-in with.
10. What this fait accompli puts us-on is that one cannot do popular education without having a new ‘clothesline’ to hang the clothes… This clothesline is fundamental to visualize the past, as well as the ongoing social and local and global political process. But today, many people find it difficult to have such a line to hang their life projects onto; therein yet another challenge of HRL.
11. Why do young people living under neoliberalism reach the age of 20 without the slightest idea of what they want to be or do with their lives? For many of them, everything is here and now. Therefore, if we want to rescue Paulo Freire’s legacy, the way to go is to return to grassroots work with the popular classes, adopting his method to arrive at a coherent historical perspective that opens truly democratic HR-centered horizons. Without this, there is no salvation. And if we believe that democracy must be, in fact, the government of the people for the people and with the people, there is no alternative but to adopt the Paulo Freirean educational process in HRL, a process that places the oppressed as political and historical protagonists. (Frei Betto)
12. Bottom line: Human rights learning paints a picture of ‘tragic optimism’ searching for meaning about and actions to reverse the evitable tragedies of human existence –most of them linked to HR. Such a position is better for HRL to take than avoiding darkness and trying to paint an unrealistic positive picture.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-Sheep are no great thinkers, but their instincts, bred in them from the cradle, are sound; their feet bring them home, even when their minds have wandered. (Joanne Harris, Chocolat)
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