A New Paradigm For Human Rights

[Robert]

We can all agree that cities are well placed to advance human rights,
but if citizens do not know their human rights, they are no more
impactful than the sound of a tree that falls in the woods when no one
is around to hear it. By definition, human rights are inalienable,
they are not given to us by government and they should not be taken
away...they are ours by virtue of our being born human beings.

When the majority of people think of human rights, or human rights
organizations, they first think of Amnesty International or Human
Rights Watch. These are monitoring organizations, the police force of
the human rights community. Then there are organizations like mine,
PDHRE, doing advocacy work, but for cities to be most effective, they
must recognize that human rights work is done by those addressing
human rights. Educators, nurses, doctors, farmers, people providing
affordable housing, clean water, clothing; these are human rights
workers as they answer our human rights to education, health, a roof
over our head, healthy food, access to clean water and the shirt on
our back. Each of us, when treating our fellow person with dignity
and without judging them becomes part of the human rights workforce,
living human rights every day, making it part of our daily life.

It is an imperative that we move away from thinking of human rights as
pointing out violations or calling government to task. Certainly
those are important, but they are not human rights...human rights is
what we do everyday, how we interact, negotiate our relationships with
others and learn the ways to improve and enhance our collective
quality of life by implementing the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights as part of our everyday existence.

Cities are made to ensure that every woman, man and child know, own
and are able to act upon their human rights, every city has the
potential to be a human rights city, where laws of government,
operations of business and actions of civil society act in concert
based on the Universal Declaration as the foundation from which
everything comes.

We at PDHRE hope to work with you all and share our experience as you
bring the concepts stated above to your city, in your way by learning
human rights as a way of life.

Robert Kesten
PDHRE
New York, USA
917-520-6382 (USA)
rtk....@igc.org
www.pdhre.org