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

Dear Nezha, 

I am a human rights activist and trainer in Nepal; especially I trained
people on human rights, social justice and humanitarian law. When I start
to discuss international human rights covenants, most of the trainees
express as you have faced. So, Nezha my experience and your seems exact
alike. Therefore I do agree on your statement. Thank you.

Devika Timilsina 
Chairperson 
Hamro Abhiyan (An organisation for Human Rights, Social Justice and
Development) 
Anamnagar, Kathmandu, Nepal 
Tel / Fax : 977-01-4265320 




On 29 January 2007, Nezha Belkachla wrote: 

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. 





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