Your freedom stops here!

This article talks about the need to respect each other and accept the other, which is the role that UNESCO is entrusted with through the formulation of school curricula in order to avoid the negative effects of hate speech. This is something that UNESCO has not been able to achieve until today, which is what it must take care of in order to be able to achieve the general goals of the United Nations.

Thousands of years ago, people fought criminality around the world and intellectual intolerance that causes hate. We can say this is the most essential element for crime and not accepting each other. Maybe before 100 years, the world was separate of each other and many news and opinions were not known between societies. This is not the case today after the Internet and social media. Borders between states broke down and today we all know each other. Social media gave us the chance to discover so many cultures.

And the challenge today is how we adapt different minds to be able to accept each other. This is the big challenge which faces the United Nations today, to check treaties are effective and force different states to follow international instruments such as the instruments of UNESCO. Because some states follow these instruments and others don’t, and this is not acceptable. With education, we can reach acceptance by reading and practicing how we should accept differences in societies.

These goals were the most important goals of UNESCO, but today after hate speech and different crimes which happened around the world, we can tell UNESCO has failed in reaching its main goal, because hate speech and crimes haven’t been eliminated, and this will cause a crisis in different domains. First we will fail to save the souls from different criminals, and on the other hand, many sectors will be affected negatively, such as the business sector, because it will be the first sector to be negatively affected from these crises which have been seen from time to time.

And the business sector in our opinion is the most important sector that we should support, because today the world’s main language is the economy. If we will not maintain these sectors, they will be affected negatively, and this is not acceptable. On the other hand, some other sectors will also be affected negatively, such as tourism, because if security is not tight, this will affect tourism around the world.

This responsibility should make us support the role of the United Nations today more than before. We want the United Nations to take steps and ensure different states respect the treaties which they have been signed. We should all bear this responsibility together without throwing it between each other. The first step is to have good knowledge about freedom and how we should stop our freedom in the area of others without causing any offense to the beliefs of others. This is the most important culture UNESCO should focus on when it starts to set educational subjects around the world.

• Al-Ghamdi is in her last semester of law at Kuwait International Law School.