Lessons Learned from ... Kyrgyzstan:
Encouraging Gender Inclusive Human Rights Education and Advocacy

From 1996-1997 I had the privilege to serve as a United Nations (UN) Human Rights Specialist in Central Asia’s Kyrgyzstan, under the auspices of the UN Volunteer program. During this time I developed and taught the first in-depth UN sponsored human rights course in Central Asia—Human Rights and International Law Summer Course (hereafter HRIL Summer Course). This course was a month long program, funded by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), that targeted first year university students in the region and hoped to encourage a life long interest in human rights education and advocacy.

The HRIL Summer Course, as well as other human rights education and advocacy that I conducted over an eighteen month period in Kyrgyzstan, provided valuable lessons for me as an educator. The most important lessons related to issues of how an educator can encourage the transformation of human rights from the international legal stratosphere to concepts meaningful to people’s daily lives. Overall, this time in Kyrgyzstan served to reinforce my belief that, more than any other human rights tool, human rights education and/or advocacy improves lives, including women’s lives, by changing attitudes and thus influencing behaviors. However, human rights education/advocacy is only effective if (a) the strategy is comprehensive, (b) relevant to local conditions, and (c) places the students in real life situations. These vital components of human rights education/advocacy comprise the subject of this article with particular consideration provided to women’s human rights education/advocacy.

Gender Inclusive Human Rights Education/Advocacy

First, one of the most frequent errors committed by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is the promotion of women’s rights education/advocacy as a subject/project separate from all other human rights education/advocacy.

Human rights NGOs often neglect women’s human rights and instead provide human rights education/advocacy lacking in women’s issues to the more powerful members of society. Women’s focused NGOs are then left to work with the underprivileged women, nearly exclusively, on "women’s" issues. Thus, largely male decision-makers, when trained at all about human rights education/advocacy, learn that women’s human rights are the responsibility of women and women’s NGOs while "real" human rights education/advocacy are their domain. Conversely, women learn that women’s issues are not as important as, and not necessarily part of, other human rights concerns. Training women about women’s human rights education/advocacy is only half of the battle. Men must also understand and believe in the value of women’s human rights education/advocacy in order for authentic protection and promotion to occur. Moreover, women’s human rights education/advocacy must be an integral component of all human rights education/advocacy in order to avoid a, perhaps unintentional, duplication of a Western gender discrimination and a distasteful emphasis on Western style feminism, which too often separates women from the concerns of her family and community.

Second, while the subject of human rights education/advocacy must be relevant to local conditions this does not mean accepting "cultural" norms.

A session in human rights education/advocacy must address the cultural versus universal human rights debate and the subsequent failure of the "cultural" argument in human rights history and practice. "Culture" and "tradition" are far too often used to conceal and prolong human rights violations by dictators or patriarchal governments. The use of tradition/culture in promoting human rights violations must be confronted, in a sensitive manner, in effective human rights education/advocacy.

Third, the value of injecting "reality" into human rights education/advocacy cannot be understated.

Role-play/simulation is the catalyst to attitudinal/behavioral change because role-play allows for the vital link between universal human rights education/advocacy theory and (a) personal life, attitudes, behavior, (b) family relations, (c) community problems, and (d) the nation and the world. In order to encourage critical thinking about how personal attitudes influence human rights practice I developed and tested an action pedagogy that builds on three basic techniques. Women’s human rights education/advocacy comprise an integral component of each section. Section length may be changed according to programmatic needs and restrictions.

Conclusion

Many of the students that I taught during my time in Kyrgyzstan, the majority being women, have gone on to work as human rights professionals. As they advance their careers and education they often contact me and relate two things. First, the human rights summer course changed their lives because it changed the way they thought about human rights their own ability to influence their family, community, country, and the world. Second, it was not until the simulation and role-plays that they began to really understand the concepts, value, and practice of human rights. It was often during the simulation when they decided to impart human rights practice and promotion in their daily lives. This, for me, is a true mark of success because as Eleanor Roosevelt has said, unless concepts of human rights have meaning in the small places of the world, the home, school, community, human rights have little meaning anywhere.

L.M. Handrahan is director of The Finvola Group (www.finvola.com) a human rights and gender consulting group. She is completing a Ph.D. on U.S. democracy assistance and gendered ethnicity in Kyrgyzstan at The Gender Institute of The London School of Economics and Political Science. She can be reached at: L.M.Handrahan@lse.ac.uk for questions or comments. The training exercises mentioned in this article can be found at: http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/women/handra00.html