Human Rights Day shows freedoms are still elusive
Human rights — an issue that has bubbled through some of the most contentious battlegrounds in 2017 — took center stage Sunday to salute individual freedoms across the globe.
In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). A year later, Dec. 10 was declared Human Rights Day. The declaration formed in a post-World War II era that shed both Nazism and colonialism sought to cement basic rights for people worldwide.
Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, one of the most vibrant defenders of human rights, invoked the name of an earlier anti-Nazi pioneer Sunday. “The words Anne Frank wrote ... still remind us to cherish and defend human rights,” she tweeted.
“Today, I am thinking of Palestinian and Rohingya children — and all around the world still struggling to achieve Anne’s dream of freedom,” said Malala, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 as a Pakistani teen crusading for the rights of girls to receive a quality education.
Against a backdrop of police-involved shootings, sexual harassment cases, immigrant arrests, threats to LGBT gains and a surge in hate crimes since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a heated debate rages over individual rights in the United States.
“The United States, while offering a series of human rights protections, still has a lot of work to do in order to remedy all abuses in the country and abroad,” says Fait Muedini, an associate professor of International Studies at Butler University.
“Many in the U.S. still fail to view economic and social based rights — that includes health — as secondary to civil and political rights,” says Muedini, who studies human rights, international affairs and global justice.
Another critical concern: Racial discrimination manifested in ways such as prison incarceration rates for minorities and limitations on voter access, he said.
Slavery, ethnic cleansing and a lack of education still prevail in many cultures worldwide, Muedini notes.
“The UDHR has served as the cornerstone for so many subsequent documents in the international human rights corpus,” Muedini said. “However, there is still so much that we need to work for.”