Law is framed in the language of rights: life, liberty, property, religious freedom, and the right to live without fear. While these systems traditionally served the elites, they are now meant to empower and defend the marginalized—or so we were promised. But at a time when human rights violations are at an all-time high, how do we keep faith in human rights work and education when we see its devaluation on TV through starvation, displacement and indiscriminate killing? So I asked my supervisor at Equitas. He answered realistically that while it often feels like dropping a pebble in the sea, a pebble in a sea can create a ripple effect. These are the paradigm shifts Equitas strives to promote through its human rights education work, like its annual International Human Rights Training Program (IHRTP), for which I had the pleasure of helping develop its curriculum.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), promising a vision of a world where every person enjoys freedom, equality, justice and dignity. Seventy-seven years later, the state of human rights in the world is disillusioning.
In the heart of Montreal’s downtown, I spent my summer internship at Equitas, a human rights education organization co-founded by John Humphrey, a co-drafter of the UDHR. Steeped in the international human rights movement, Equitas presented me with the opportunity to grapple with the cynicism that has clouded my law school journey. The bulk of this journey had run parallel to an ongoing genocide that has made a caricature of any claim to a rules-based world order or universal human rights. Few humanitarian crises have matched the scale of the ongoing war in Gaza. Yet arguably, there has never been a time since the UDHR was adopted that the world has been free of crises. So, what was the UDHR worth?
From time to time, humanity makes progress in its struggle for fairness and equality. The issue with subjugation is that it is not sustainable. There comes a time when the ruling elites overplay their hands and unintentionally give the masses a point of entry. Our response as human rights defenders should not be defeatism, no matter how tempting it is to fall into the abyss of cynicism. From the UDHR to conventions on the rights of women, children, people with disabilities, as well as on political and civil rights of people, these aspirational documents ended up inspiring change in one place or another at the right time. From the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the UDHR and the international human rights movement inspired real change that has improved people’s lives and rights directly and tangibly. Much as revolutions have inspired other liberation movements, there’s a place for documents like the UDHR to inspire the full realization of equitable human rights in all nations.
Indeed, the horrors unfolding in the world with complete complicity from the hegemonic powers ought to demoralize the most optimistic of us. Yet such times are when human rights work is needed most. For over forty years, Equitas’s IHRTP has empowered generations of human rights defenders from every part of the world to seize moments when the oppression has boiled over. And as difficult as it was to work on human rights education curriculum by day while watching a genocide unfold by night, the butterfly effect gave me a glimpse of hope. It is not an abstract, self-soothing concept either. At different junctures, history has displayed this dynamic, from the Great War and the Wilsonian dream, to the Second World War and the decolonization era. The events that catalyzed these movements alone could not have led to them without decades of earlier theorization, education, aspiration and idealization. I learned that in the field of human rights work, despair is the enemy of progress.
Another lesson I learned at Equitas is that all human rights work has value. Each has a role to play: the activists raising awareness on social media, the students leading protests, the advocates and scholars speaking in debates, and the human rights education intern assisting in curriculum design. The value of my work was not evident from the beginning. At a time when so many children are starving, Human Rights Education (HRE) seemed too remote and without effect. But is the work of a lawyer helping a Gazan resettle in Canada also without effect? And the World Central Kitchen aid worker cooking a pot of stew to a group of famished people? The answer cannot be in the positive.
I began my internship at Equitas with a great deal of skepticism about both the value and efficacy of human rights education, perhaps owing to my legal perspective which prefers to see rights disputes settled with a quicker turnaround. But by the end of the internship, I came to appreciate the place of everyone in the struggle for universal human rights, from legal advocates to human rights activists. With the butterfly effect in the back of one’s mind, all work can have enormous value that will reverberate for generations. In every tragedy, there’s desperation, but there is also resilience. Human rights work dies when we see the desperation and fail to be inspired by the resilience.