[hr-education] Re: Human rights/children's rights values

Dear all, 

Thank you for raising such a controversial issue. I'm a teacher- trainer
in Morocco and a coordinator of the Citizenship Education club in the
training school I work in. Believe me, this is the kind of problems that I
face with trainees sometimes. For them the best values exist in the
Moroccan culture and Islam, and they often try to refute universal
references/documents because they think the values they include are
imported and were made up by USA to control the world, and that's enough
good reason for them to reject them.  American foreign policy and its
intervention in Afganistan, Irak, and in other parts of the world, has
made people lose faith in the concept of "democracy" and "justice". They
tend to confuse the rights as universal values that we have to fight for
with the politicians' acts and deeds all over the world which are
committed in the name of protecting Human Rights, the "War against evil",
for instance.

I've been following the discussion about the values to teach and their
relation to culture for some time, and I honestly second Dan's opinion
that cultures are not constant; and that they are continuously changing. I
believe that the UDHR was based on the needs of people wherever they are,
and so think that the needs/rights and values that it includes are
indisputably Universal. Any country, what ever its culture(s)is, which
doesn't nurture respect, dignity, equity, justice, tolerance, etc. is
violating the rights of its people. How come that some people think that
these values belong to the American culture(s)? These values were
discussed by Plato and the Greek philosophy, inspired the French
Revolution, and were the basis of almost all religions. It is these
questions and others that I encourage my trainees to raise to help them
promote critical thinking.

Nezha Belkachla 
Teacher-trainer 
Coordinator of the Citizenship and Values Club 
Centre Pédagogique Régional Marrakech-Morocco 





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