Human Rights Education: The 4th R
Get Up, Stand Up! Celebrating 50 years
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
vol. 8, No. 2, Fall 1997.

by Patrick Manson

Here it is, educators! Finally, a campaign whose educational import is as momentous as the historical event it commemorates: the campaign to honor the 50th Anniversary of the December 10, 1948 signing of the United Nations� Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Amnesty International is embarking upon a unique project to recall the reasons behind the penning of this document, to connect its existence with the birth of AI, to relate its words to modern contexts of rights violations, and to celebrate not only the sublime, unified message underlying its articles but also the very human fact that people and governments do, on a daily basis � though woefully too seldom � gloriously uphold and exercise all of these rights.

This campaign is different from most others in that it will emphasize education over our more traditional work of advocating through letter-writing, demonstrations, and other "direct" action, though it certainly maintains that kind of energy. It is also unique in that it is a one-year campaign; AI campaigns are typically six months long.

Our main goals are threefold. One is massive internal and external education. This means teaching ourselves more about the UDHR, more about the rights not explicitly covered in the action aspect of the AI mandate (like economic, environmental, and cultural rights), and more about the documents that have followed the UDHR, like the conventions on Women�s Rights, Torture, Children�s Rights, Genocide, and others. We hope that by integrating all of these rights, we will continue to discover and rediscover the interdependency and indivisibility of these rights that we tend to categorize and see as separate. It also means continuing to train ourselves as outreach speakers, as activists who seek out audiences in order to grow the body of advocates.

Flowing out of this outreach component is another goal: to extend the kind of coalition work that unites us with others doing separate but complementary rights advocacy. What we intend is that social change organizations who may not see their work as human rights work or as related to the UDHR, begin to use the vocabulary of the human rights framework as an organizing principle, and that we continue to infuse into our work the insights and advice developed by others.

Beyond educating ourselves, educating others, and building teams with other organizations, we should better enable the rights community to continue to do what AI does best: lobby those with life-power in their hands to act according to international standards of human decency. This means advancing the human rights framework by insisting that governments and other controlling bodies take heed of these rights . . . the direct action that AI has always done so well.

Patrick Manson is the Chair of Amnesty International USA's UDHR 50 Task Force and the Co-Chair of the Human Rights Educators' Network Steering Committee.

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