Defending Human Rights
We face injustice every single day of our lives. It doesn’t have to be an injustice against us, as a human rights defender; if I see something unfair I definitely take it personally and take an action about that. I really have no other option but to stand for Human Rights against injustice and unfairness. What drives people like me most is, our determination to make a change in the world. I am fortunate to see the excitement and the change that’s possible through our defense and activism. If you think that you have to be famous or powerful to support human rights, you have a rethink.
Human rights defenders are the everyday people from anywhere who choose to peacefully act for secure accountability for respect human rights legal standards. This is a chain it can either starts individually or with a group of people with the same thought. Protecting one person individually is actually protecting everyone in the world who suffers from the same thing. Generally, we are working together and take action as a group. By working together that you can actually achieve something even the most powerful fear.
Since Human Rights notions were seen as being derived from the Enlightenment tradition, this seemed to imply that Human rights are Western or Eurocentric. Cultural differences across the globe are regarded as threatening because many have assumed that subscribing to the cultural relation would preclude possibly embracing international human rights standards. Even the most chaotic region of the world, the Middle East had an era of Arab Spring in which people were starving for freedom and justice. Eduardo Galeano, a famous author once said; “Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.” Some countries are not complying with human rights such as Saudi Arabia but since there is a change in the world for having rights as individuals they let women drive cars nowadays. It was just one woman at the first who drove the car around and busted from cops and had been catcalled by both women and men of the country. It starts individually to get in the action but it spreads around until it hits the governments and its power.
As Foucault says, we all have one thing in common — we are subject to power, so we should stand up for people who fall victim to abuses of power. That common factor makes us all international citizens. So it is not important how late that a culture got used to human rights it starts from individual characters and this is a chain. When it started there is no power to stop it.
Actually, human rights had evolutionary procedures during centuries. It’s important to mention that human rights defenders were around long before the term came into existence. Countless people and communities have stood up against injustice throughout history, from the anti-slavery movement to the movement that gave women the right to vote. Both of those campaigns came about before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which happened after World War II and the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Something that we would not even talk or think about these days were big issues of the past, let’s think about the era when colored people had excluded by the community for long years. Now we even had seen a black president of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. was believing in his dreams during his powerful speech as we all know or hears about it ‘I Have A Dream’. Change always starts like that, it takes time to spread but it does in the end. We know that things won’t be fixed overnight, you have to defend the human right since this is what we believe the right thing to do.
Even though countries deny human rights they feel its pressure on their shoulders because we live in the 21st century you can not run away from facing unfairness. Those countries who have the power to give speeches to the world in great hall rooms or conferences have to obey the rules of human rights that’s how they can ensure their presence. There are some problems and issues that had not been solved yet in every country but it doesn’t make it a general statement that human rights can not defend against domination. They generally achieve their goals, it takes time it takes risks and also needs too many volunteers but in the end, we win.
In this century we can not say that human rights can not able to end domination and repression because people who had suffered from discrimination likewise the LGBT community had gained their rights almost in every developed country. They had despised by too many generations. In the end, they now can get married, have their status of rights, people had accepted their individualities. They can celebrate the Pride even in the most undeveloped countries but most importantly now they know that they are not alone anymore. Since Human rights make each person to not feel lonely or desperate since they have the European Court of Human Rights which support and give courage to human right defenders all around the world so they can act and support their rights. Courage is contagious.
Human Rights are not excluding anyone for their differences, race, ethnicity, or background. Everyone has rights and there are defenders of it who are increasing day by day. Of course, globalization is a multi-Iayered thing and can be both enabling and disabling to the advancement of human rights. There is no doubt that a child who was born in Copenhagen faces different kinds of issues than a child from a refugee camp.
As a defender, we must act and this is why I am volunteering in different organizations for the people who needs to be able to use their rights. Such as kids, refugees, disabled people, etc. At the end of the day, there is an element of faith in human rights practice and theory: faith that documenting and exposing life and what has been experienced, chronicling the distances between our diverse lives and our particular hopes, can make a positive difference. One of the hardest questions for human rights is whether, in existing theories and practices, academics and advocates are vindicating that faith. Despite the apparent failures of the UN and its organs to effectively regulate human rights around the world, we find ourselves only at the beginning of the ‘age of rights’. There is still much for activists, academics, governments to do in the infant field of human rights.
I also want to say some words about how I ended up writing about human rights. During this pandemic, we had to learn many new things. We started baking bread, learning from online, changing our daily routines and we even started traveling the world online. Some of us just found out that there are platforms like Coursera, EdX, Udemy, and too many other options for learning new things. Luckily I was prepared to learn online since I have been taking online classes for a year now. I had classes in languages, artificial intelligence, data science, and legal/law classes of course since it is my major for college.
I was curious about refugee and migrant rights because this is where I want to work in the future, but I realized I have to learn human rights in general before practicing a specialized area of it. We all think that we know what are human rights and we think we practice human rights in our daily lives. That is why I want to learn real information about it and improve my skills for defending human rights that is how I found the course, AmnestyInternationalX: Rights3x-Human Rights Defenders on EdX online course platform. I recommend it to everyone!!
