Write a blog for Human Rights Day – 10th December 2008
It’ll be the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the 10th December. It’s a milestone year for such an important declaration.
We are inviting you to write a blog for that day, and we will post them up here on the 10th of December in a day of intensive blogging. To keep it focused, we ask that you choose one of the articles in the Declaration of Human Rights Declaration, and write about that article and its relation to Zimbabwe. We hope to have a selection of personal blogs covering a wide range of articles in the Declaration.
For example:
Article 20
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
You may want to choose this article and right about how, in Zimbabwe, people are refused the right to attend political rallies, or they are forced to attend Zanu PF rallies against their will.
Article 15
1. Everyone has the right to a nationality.
You may decide to write about how you were refused the right to be ‘Zimbabwean’ and how that felt and how it impacted on your life.
We’ve set up a side-blog here where you can choose the article you want to write about by ‘voting’ on a poll (this is not a proper poll, but the votes will tell you how many blogs we’ll get on that topic and hopefully persuade you to choose one of the other articles instead). Please ‘vote’ and then complete this form here to register your interest – that way we can keep track of how many offers we get and we can also remind you to write as the day draws closer. (If you don’t fill in the form we don’ t know if votes on the poll are ‘real’ offers, or just accidental voting clicks… people can’t resist clicking!)
We’ve also put up a post here containing the full Declaration of Human Rights.
Why not also visit Every Human Has Rights and sign the Pledge.
November 29th, 2008 03:03
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a document of compromise, expanding from traditional political and civil rights into new economic and social ‘rights,’ in order to get socialist nations to approve the Declaration. Sixty years later, every socialist nation in the world is still among the most impoverished nations, and they are all also among the group of nations with the worst records on human rights.
Since the signing of the Declaration, a number of non-socialist nations have vaulted into the group of wealthiest nations, notably South Korea, Japan, and Germany, three countries devastated by total war and economic collapse. With entirely different cultures, religions, and languages, all three deliberately chose the path to prosperity set by several other countries around the world: adopt freedom, prosperity follows.
For all of the 170 major nations of the world–excluding just OPEC and the super-rich mini-states–their level of national prosperity exactly equals their actual commitment to the Declaration. Zimbabwe, of course, is the world’s foremost example of the correlation that is world-wide: If any country is among the worst in human rights, it will be populated by one of the most impoverished people.
The great freedom philosophers of the 20C were written by several economists who earned the Economics Nobel Prize. Every Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded for the science of how nations can avoid poverty, or how nations can build prosperity. Clearly the freedom philosophies by the Nobel Prize winners in Economics have no reading audience in Zimbabwe; so long as the Declaration is held in such wide-spread disregard by the ZANU-PF government, the people of Zimbabwe will continue to be impoverished.
All of the top twenty nations in human rights in the world are also the top twenty nations in national prosperity. They did not get wealthy first, and then “buy” their freedom. There won their freedom first, and then grew their prosperity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights points to the path of national prosperity for Zimbabwe: Freedom.
November 29th, 2008 14:51
It’s worth remembering that this declaration came in the aftermath of the Second World War, the desecration of the rights of millions. And alongside the Nuremberg trials, which were a credible and necessary commitment to justice. How can people enforce respect for their rights in a culture of impunity?