[hre-asiapacific] A convention on human rights education

Dear colleagues,

As you know, the United States are in opposition to the initiative to
develop the Convention on Human Rights Education. I think, it's just time
for us to draft an outline of such Convention as an argument to be used in
Geneva.

First of all, the Convention, I think, should state the right of the
individual to know and act upon his rights as specified in the Helsinki
Final Act of 1975. One of the possible definitions of this right was
published by Ms. Evgeniya Pavlenko in 2003: "The right of individual to
know his rights is possibility of individual set in international legal
acts and guaranteed by the state to acquire knowledge, values, views,
practical skills and abilities by studying, review, discussing issues of
theory and practice of human rights and freedoms, receiving and imparting
relevant information, and requiring from the state and international
organizations to create proper conditions for implementation of this
right, as well as to claim its protection."

Then, the Convention should include the recognition of the remarkable dual
character of this right: as a particular case of the right to freedom "to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas" (UDHR's Article 18), it is
the civil, "negative" right, in the same time, as a particular case of the
right to education (UDHR's Article 26), it is a social, "positive" right.
Therefore, the obligations of the state in this field should not be only
in protecting human rights education efforts of civil society, but in
direct state policy in this field.

Then, referring to UDHR's Article 26 p.2, the Convention should set that
"the states are obliged to take measures to ensure that education at their
territories shall be directed to the strengthening of respect for human
rights and fundamental freedoms and shall promote understanding, tolerance
and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups." Maybe this
statement should be revised taking into account the definition of human
rights education from the UN Plan of Action which is following:

"...Human rights education shall be defined as training, dissemination and
information efforts aimed at the building of a universal culture of human
rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the moulding of
attitudes and directed to:

(a) The strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental
freedoms;

(b) The full development of the human personality and the sense of its
dignity;

(c) The promotion of understanding, tolerance, gender equality and
friendship among all nations, indigenous peoples and racial, national,
ethnic, religious and linguistic groups;

(d) The enabling of all persons to participate effectively in a free
society;

(e) The furtherance of the activities of the United Nations for the
maintenance of peace."

Concretely, it should be set that the member states should encourage
including human rights issues into curricula at all levels of education,
set such requirements in the state educational standards abd guidelines,
should establish human rights expertise of curricula, manuals and
textbooks for every teaching subject, support extracurricular and NGOs
activities in informal human rights education, etc.

It is very important to include to the Convention the statement that the
member states recognize the diversity of approaches to human rights and
their development in time, otherwise we have a risk to receive very
dogmatic system of education similar to the Soviet one, when even the
conditions of tasks in mathematics schoolbooks were designed in order to
provide "ideological bringing up" without changes during decades. ;-)))

I think that the Convention should establish the Human Rights Education
Committee, the eighth UN's "treaty body", in order to consider state
reports on human rights education every four years.

What is your opinion?

Sincerely yours,

Roman Sinelnikov


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