The Global Movement for Human Rights Education

An overview of the global movement for human rights education (HRE), its impetus, challenges, and contrasting developments in different regions of the world, focusing especially on Latin America, the Philippines, South Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Seeks to put HRE in the USA into an international perspective, as well as to show the variety of goals that inspire HRE and how methodologies have evolved to meet specific regional and political cultures and needs.

he 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) exhorts "every individual and every organ of society" to "strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms."Despite this clear mandate, human rights education (HRE) got off to a glacially slow start everywhere in the world.The Cold War brought about a long delay: the Soviet Union and its allies regarded the civil and political rights proclaimed in the UDHR as a threat to their oneparty governments, while many western countries regarded its social and economic rights as "leftist" or "communistic."It was, in fact, radical teachers in the Global South who showed the world the power of HRE to further both civil-political and social-economic rights.

HRE in Latin America
During the 1970s, opponents of the oppressive dictatorships that dominated Latin America found in HRE a tool for nonviolent social change.Especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, activist educators used both popular education and the existing formal education system to reach the working class and the urban and rural poor with grassroots programs that emphatically condemned the violation of human rights and called for a restoration of democracy, along with the recognition of popular and political organizations.HRE became an essential component of popular resistance.Describing these early efforts, Peruvian activist educator Rosa María Mujica Barreda recalls: We felt that violence and human rights violations worsened every day . . .We needed to work against violence, to develop opportunities for peace, and to accept that education was an important element in this purpose. . .[W]e decided to work mainly with teachers, for they can be found all over the country, have a key role in their communities, and are in charge of developing consciousness and awareness.Also the teaching profession had become one of the places where those who defended a violent solution to the problems of Peru confronted those who stood for human rights. 1 Deeply influenced by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his concept of critical pedagogy, human rights educators across Latin America understood HRE as much more than a conceptual or curricular content like math or history.For them, HRE was a task of political and cultural awakening that required personal transformation, as Argentine educator Mónica Fernández describes: The skills necessary for the promotion of human rights education are more cultural than curricular.There is a clear epistemological difference between teaching human rights and promoting human rights education.The former is linked to theoretical transfer.The latter tries to develop cultural habits.The strategies of cultural transformation need an ethical and political commitment with constant criticism and reflection. 2 As more democratic governments began to replace these dictatorships in the 80s, many of these courageous students and teachers went on to became leaders for educational reform in their respective countries, working to integrate HRE concepts and methodologies developed through political struggle into national curriculums and teacher-training institutions.They built important national and international networks that continue to train teachers and social justice advocates. 3This on-going movement for HRE has received strong support from the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights, an autonomous international academic institution dedicated to the teaching, research and promotion of human rights among the countries party to the American Convention on Human Rights (1969).
As the cycle of political persecution came to an end, the fight for human rights in Latin America has shifted to become a struggle for economic, social, cultural, indigenous, and environmental rights.Here too Latin American educators continue to lead the rest of the world in theory, policy, and methodology.

HRE in the Philippines
HRE in Latin America provided both inspiration and models for young activists in the Philippines opposed to the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos.In the early 1980s, teams of students went out into slums and rural areas to teach human rights to fisherfolk, farmers, and the urban poor.Their efforts directly contributed to the socalled People Power Revolution, the sustained campaign of popular, nonviolent resistance that culminated in 1986 with the overthrow of Marcos. 4e new Philippine government immediately passed legislation requiring HRE in schools, for the civil service, and for all "arresting and investigating personnel." The new Constitution of 1987 introduced many new human rights provisions including the establishment of the Commission on Human Rights, an independent office with responsibility to "establish a continuing program of research, education, and information to enhance respect for the primacy of human rights." 5Such a constitutional mandate for HRE was a global landmark, but it has also served to illustrate a global conflict between topdown and bottom-up efforts: sustained HRE requires both that grassroots movements be institutionalized and that legislative mandates be implemented.Everywhere in the world, HRE requires time to be fully realized.

HRE in Asia
The imperative of substantial time for effective HRE is nowhere better demonstrated than in some abortive efforts of the UN to use HRE in post-conflict situations, of which Cambodia is a prime example.In early 1992, HRE was specifically mandated in the peace accords that ended decades of civil war and established UNTAC, the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia.The time frame was ridiculously short-eighteen months-and the circumstances dire: most educated people who might have served as teachers or interpreters had been murdered or forced to flee.Furthermore, HRE on such a scale had never been attempted.As Stephen Marks, who headed UNTAC's Human Rights Component, observed, there was neither sufficient time for laying long-term foundations nor sufficient "experience by which to judge the effectiveness of such campaigns." 6e fact that a peace treaty would explicitly call for HRE was another milestone.At the same time, it illustrates a kind of optimistic naïveté that continues to bedevil HRE: programs are often designed and goals set without a realistic understanding of what it takes to do effective HRE.
Another example of HRE-in-a hurry were efforts in Thailand to educate about the new Constitution of 1997, which conferred new powers to the Thai people, explicitly acknowledging many human rights for the first time and establishing the National Human Rights Commission.Several NGOs, such as the Canadian Human Rights Foundation and Amnesty International, collaborated with the Thai Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice to design programs to educate the general population about these new rights.However, although the intentions were genuine, the investment in time and resources was insufficient to do more than provide information.Building a culture of human rights requires decades, not years.
Both the Thai and Philippine experience illustrate the importance of national human rights institutions in furthering HRE, especially in Asia.Unlike most parts of the world, Asia lacks a regional human rights treaty with a transnational body to monitor that governments respect, protect, and fulfill human rights.Perhaps more than in any other part of the world, cultural differences among individual countries and attitudes toward human rights as "western values" create a prevailing resistance to HRE in formal education.
As a Chinese presenter at a 2001 national HRE conference in Beijing declared, "Why do we need the Universal Declaration?The constitution of the People's Republic and our Confucian tradition provide us with all the human rights education we need!" 7

HRE in Africa
Changes in law and/or regime are often the impetus for HRE programs.For example, the Ethiopian Constitution of 1995, which expressly provides for a set of basic human rights to be interpreted according to the Universal Declaration, initiated a nationwide effort to teach about the new constitution and the UDHR.However, as in Thailand and other HRE initiatives that focus on legalities, these were informational and short-lived rather than inspirational and sustained.
In dramatic contrast to short-term, legalistic HRE is the example of South Africa.Although HRE was a relatively new concept within post-apartheid educational discourse, it had roots in the long struggle for a non-racial and democratic education system, especially the People's Education (PE) movement, which shared with HRE the Freirian principles that education is political and should be personally empowering and transformative.
Even before 1994 and the first universal adult suffrage election that brought in the Mandela government, NGOs like Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), the Street Law Project, and Amnesty International were already working to prepare South Africans for participatory citizenship and to lay the foundations for building a culture of human rights.With the establishment of a new regime, HRE, especially in the formal sector, became a major strategy for nation building: Transforming the education sector and the curriculum has been a central and complex priority within the broader scheme of things since 1994 because educational sites represent the most peopled social space in the country. . .In South Africa the notions and ideals of nation building, reconciliation, social solidarity, social cohesion, inclusivity and anti-discrimination seem to provide the basis for the rationale, purpose and structure of HRE in the curriculum, and are linked to the PE movement and the broader antiapartheid struggle. 8dre Keet and Nazir Carrim trace the complex development of HRE as a national priority in South Africa, concluding with valuable lessons learned, especially their appreciation that HRE must be a long-term institutional commitment and their recognition of the need for more nuanced strategies for infusing human rights into all subject areas and the environment of the whole school community.Although still evolving, HRE in South Africa provides valuable learning for human rights educators everywhere.
Beyond South Africa, a lack of information, as well as concrete socio-political structures, still prevent most African people from claiming and exercising their human rights, and most governments are doing little or no HRE to address this problem.Although Africa has a regional right treaty, the African Charter on Human and People's Rights (1981), it remains unknown to most Africans.
Most HRE in Africa has been initiated by UN agencies or NGOs and has generally been in responses to specific issues or crises like civil war and the AIDS epidemic.For example, before independence in Southern Sudan, UNICEF undertook extensive HRE aimed at curtailing child marriage and child soldiers.Outstanding among issue-focused NGOs is Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), a pan-African network with members in thirty-one countries, which uses HRE as a capacity-building tool to further women's rights especially on issues like inheritance, political participation, domestic violence, and education.

HRE in the Middle East
Because many tenets of human rights law contradict Sharia law, HRE in most Muslim countries has had little implementation, especially with the contemporary rise of fundamentalism.For example, the UDHR affirms the right to change one's religion whereas Sharia denounces this as apostasy, a capital crime in some countries.Similarly the consistent affirmation of the equality of the sexes in human rights documents contradicts traditional practice in some Muslim countries that make, for example, a woman's court testimony worth half that of a man, as well as other discriminatory cultural practices.In fact, as in Africa, some of the most effective HRE in the Middle East and other Islamic areas has been in the field of women's human rights.Organizations like Sisters in Islam and Women's Learning Partnership have sought to harmonize human rights concepts with the Koran and Hadith and distinguish custom and tradition from the teachings of the Prophet.These HRE efforts rarely reach the public schools, however.
A shining exception to the general resistance to HRE in the region has been the work of the Shafallah Center for Children with Special Needs, a Quatari NGO.Shafallah has led a global alliance for the rights of persons with disabilities and supported the development of HRE materials and trainings to teach people with disabilities and their allies about the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006). 9Here too, however, HRE has a limited, issue-specific target audience.

HRE in Europe
The European Convention on Human Rights (European Convention, 1953) is generally regarded as the strongest of all regional human rights treaties.The Council of Europe, which furthers cooperation among its forty-seven European member states, oversees enforcement of the European Convention through the European Court of Human Rights and actively promotes HRE throughout the region.As its 2010 Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education proclaims:

Education plays an essential role in the promotion of the core values of the Council of Europe: democracy, human rights and the rule of law, as well as in the prevention of human rights violations.
More generally, education is increasingly seen as a defense against the rise of violence, racism, extremism, xenophobia, discrimination and intolerance. 10 a result of the efforts made by the Council of Europe, which are supported by the human rights institutions of individual European countries, human rights are an integral part of the elementary and secondary education of most European children.Certainly, standards and degree of integration vary among countries, with newer Council members from the former Soviet bloc necessarily lagging behind Western European countries with an established tradition of HRE.However, the Council continues to provide training and curriculum resources that address pressing regional human rights issues such as homophobia, bullying, and racism, especially against Roma and immigrants.Despite strong institutional support for HRE, European teachers continue to feel themselves inadequately prepared to teach about human rights.Recent countrywide assessments of HRE by national human rights institutions consistently report that while teachers are interested and willing to bring human rights into their classrooms and school environments, most feel they never received sufficient background, either in school or in their teacher training. 12The hope is that new generations of teachers, with human rights as part of their basic education, will come to the classroom with more confidence in their understanding of human rights.However, the UN itself did not actively promote HRE until the establishment of the UN Decade for HRE, 1995-2004.Largely a response to pressures from NGOs at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, the Decade called upon "all States and institutions to include human rights, humanitarian law, democracy and rule of law as subjects in the curricula of all learning institutions in formal and non-formal settings." 13th a few stellar exceptions (e.g., the Philippines, Costa Rica, Latin American countries), most governments responded half-heartedly, with many, including the United States, simply ignoring the Decade. 14However, the Decade did provide a much-needed international forum for practitioners to engage with each other, which along with the advent of the Internet made for a rich crossfertilization among human rights educators in different parts of the world.

The United Nations and Human Rights Education
Since the UN Decade for HRE, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has continued to play a significant role in encouraging HRE around the world.In 2005, it established the ongoing World Programme for Human Rights Education, which has set forth guidelines for effective HRE initiatives and activities.Structured in consecutive phases, the Programme has focused thus far on primary and secondary school systems, higher education and professional training programmes, and training for media professionals and journalists. 15 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training, the first instrument in which international standards for human rights education are officially proclaimed by the United Nations.Although the Declaration stops short of recognizing a "human right to human rights education"language that was lost in the negotiation process between states at the Human Rights Council-it does recognize for the first time governments' specific commitments to promote HRE.It also provides an important tool for civil society to advocate for HRE.For example, HRE 2020, a coalition of fourteen organizations from five continents, was founded in 2013 to ensure a systematic monitoring of states' implementation of HRE requirements in human rights documents, including the Declaration on Human  16 Most recently, the OHCHR has issued a web resource, The Right to HRE, a compilation of provisions of international and regional instruments dealing with human rights education, a valuable tool for advocating HRE as essential to a basic education. 17RE programs.Foremost among these was Amnesty International, especially its "Teaching for Freedom" and "Rights Education Action Program" (REAP), which involved bilateral cooperation with more than thirty different local Amnesty organizations in all parts of the world.

Non-Governmental Organizations and Human Rights Education
Initiated as a fund-raising campaign by Norwegian students, "Teaching for Freedom" supported HRE projects in twenty-six countries between 1991 and 1999.Its overall goals were to educate a new generation of human rights activists and to build towards a society where basic human rights are respected.Building on the successes and lessons learned from "Teaching for Freedom," Amnesty International Norway initiated the Rights Education Action Programme (REAP).At the core of REAP was the training of human rights education "multipliers"-individuals who, through their roles or positions in society, are able to influence a larger audience or groups of people.These multipliers included teachers, journalists, youth, and religious leaders.Operating in countries as diverse as Israel, Malaysia, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Poland, Russia, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia and Turkey, Amnesty had a profound impact, often providing educators their first exposure to HRE.
During the same period, the first international NGOs dedicated solely to HRE were established, such as the People's Decade for HRE (PHDHE) and Human Rights Education Associates [HREA).As HRE has spread, national and regional HRE networks have evolved, 18 including the newly established Human Rights Educators USA (HRE USA) in the United States.Important international coalitions of NGOs also focus on particular human rights issues, notably the Right to Education Project, a collaborative global initiative, supported by ActionAid International, Amnesty International, Global Campaign for Education, Save the Children, and Human Rights Watch. 19obal Challenges to HRE As a burgeoning new field, HRE is still defining itself and discovering new learners and methodologies.About some aspects there is global consensus, such as the importance of critical thinking, the limits of a strictly legal approach, and the need for "vernacularization": for local educators to translate human rights concepts into their own contexts and include pedagogy that respects diverse backgrounds and opinions, such as religious beliefs and values.Carol Anne Spreen and Chrissie Monaghan illustrate this "vernacularization" in their work with an intentionally wide spectrum of American high school students: nativeborn, refugee, migrant, gifted, and remedial students.Through shared personal narratives, students were able to connect abstract concepts of human rights and social inequality and apply them to their own varied experiences. 20ound the world, HRE faces some common challenges.On one extreme, governments may regard human rights information, values, and skills as potentially disruptive or even adversarial: One reason why . . .governments might not be fully committed to systematic HRE is the fear that it will fuel peoples' desires for rights and make rights claims on their governments that governments perceive as unwanted and disruptive. 21 another extreme, governments may co-opt HRE for their own ideological ends, denying the interdependence of rights by "cherry picking" those rights it wishes to endorse and omitting or ignoring others that may challenge its policies and priorities.Unfortunately, propaganda can easily disguise itself as HRE.
Even where the motivation for HRE is genuine and the initiative has the support of the relevant authorities, the institutionalization of HRE in schools is still a work in progress.If teachers are to feel safe addressing controversial topics and local issues, especially those that might be construed as political, religious or gender-related, they also need community support, which can only come from opportunities for human rights learning of parents and community members themselves.As well as educational institutions, HRE needs to be incorporated into all relevant state-sponsored systems, especially supports for poor community members whose most basic needs are not being met: [H]uman rights education is not a stand-alone activity but rather needs to be linked with, and integrated into, the entire gamut of human needs and social services. 22wever, such integration into state structures clearly constitutes a huge challenge for future HRE, which naturally encourages a critique of state policies and evaluates how well governments respect, protect, and fulfill human rights.
Another challenge to the practical application of HRE is the nature of rights learning itself.Educators know well how to convey a body of information, but imparting a framework of values presents daunting difficulty.Minds are difficult to change and hearts even more so, especially when that change is undertaken with respect for learners' culture and identity and stresses individual critical thinking.We know well how to indoctrinate but are only now evolving effective methodologies to convey human rights values in human rights terms.
Another challenge is the ineluctable fact that HRE takes time.Michalinos Zembylas proposes a "pedagogy of discomfort" for HRE that demands time to establish trust in the classroom, strong relationships, and compassionate understandings among people.Indeed, to develop what Zembylas calls "strategic empathy" is an admittedly long and difficult task that needs the full continuum of a child's school years: But mere understanding is clearly not enough; students will become more susceptible to affective transformation when they enact compassionate action early on in their lives starting with simple things such as learning to be more patient and tolerant with peers who do not grasp a 'difficult' concept in language or mathematics.As they grow up, children are offered opportunities to enact more complex manifestations of compassion that include action to alleviate the suffering of people who experience difficult times, no matter which community they come from. 23early to be successful, HRE requires a commitment to years of continuous effort on the part of sponsoring institutions, an investment of resources few are willing or able to make.Few school systems have the vision or the means to create and sustain HRE from pre-school through high school.
All involved-funders, administrators, educators, parents, and learners alike-need to be convinced that HRE is effective and be willing to wait for its long-term results.This wait often strains patience because the field continues to lack reliable means of evaluation or clear benchmarks for progress.

Bringing Human Rights Home
As this global survey makes all too clear, the United States lags behind much of the world in the realization of HRE.Indeed in its periodic review of human rights in the United States, the UN Human Rights Council recommended increased efforts to promote HRE.
If human rights are ever to become a part of basic education in U.S. schools, activist teachers are needed in both classrooms and schools of education.We need committed pioneers like those in Latin America who used HRE to topple dictatorships and revise ossified educational systems.We already consider the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights essential learning, but human rights go much further: they extend to every human being everywhere and include social and economic rights not mentioned in the Constitution such as education, housing, health care, and a living wage.
The challenge for American educators is to apply these universal principles of human rights to the cultures, power structures, and social justice issues of their own neighborhoods and communities.As Eleanor Roosevelt, the founding mother of the Universal Declaration, famously said: Where, after all, do universal rights begin?In small places, close to home . . .Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination.

TAKING THE HUMAN RIGHTS TEMPERATURE OF YOUR SCHOOL
One of the ultimate goals of human rights education is the creation of a genuine human rights culture.To do so, students must learn to evaluate real-life experience in human rights terms, starting with their own behavior and the immediate community in which they live.They need to make an honest assessment of how the reality they experience every day conforms to human rights principles and then to take an active responsibility for improving their community.This activity provides an excellent introduction to human rights, stimulates discussion about differences in evaluation, can be repeated at intervals during the school year to measure progress, and is equally effective as a faculty exercise.Teachers should feel free to adapt it to suit their individual learning environments.A version is available in all UN languages: see http://www.humanrightseducation.info/primarymaterial/317-abc-teaching-human-rights.html.
Ask students to evaluate their school's human rights climate, i.e., take its "temperature", by completing the survey below.

Record and discuss their findings:
In which areas does your school seem to be promoting human rights principles?
In which areas do there seem to be human rights problems?
How do you explain the existence of such problematic conditions?Are they related to discrimination?To participation in decision-making?Who benefits and who loses/suffers from these human rights violations?
Have you or any other members of the community contributed to the existing climate, either to improve or to worsen it?What needs to be done to improve the human rights climate in your school?Develop an action plan as a class, identifying goals, strategies and responsibilities.

RESOURCES FOR HRE
These are some of the principal human rights education (HRE) sources for U.S. teachers.They approach familiar social justice issues like racism, homophobia, poverty, or gender discrimination from the powerful but often unfamiliar perspective of international norms and standards.

T
http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.eduNo. 103 (Fall 2015) DOI 10.5195/rt.2015.237 Since the Universal Declaration in 1948, the UN has been the principal originator, monitor, and defender of the evolving framework of human rights documents, every one of which has called for education to make rights known.For example, Article 29 of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every UN Member State with the stunning exception of the United States, describes the education every child should receive: States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to: . . .(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.
At the same time as the UN took up HRE as a strategic goal, established NGOs also began to develop important INTERNATIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS IN SCHOOLS OF THE ORDER OF SIST http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.eduNo. 103 (Fall 2015) DOI 10.5195/rt.2015.237 http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.eduNo. 103 (Fall 2015) DOI 10.5195/rt.2015.237 Although Europe has the world's most comprehensive HRE programs, supported by both governmental and intergovernmental institutions and NGOs, it still faces http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.eduNo. 103 (Fall 2015) DOI 10.5195/rt.2015.237challenges typical of the rest of the world, especially pushback from conservative elements and a lack of adequate teacher training.The most high-profile case of opposition to HRE in Europe was the 2006 firing of Mirosław Sielatycki, Director of the Polish In-Service Teachers Training Centre, for distributing Compass, a Council of Europe HRE curriculum that includes lessons on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.Although Poland is a State Party to the European Convention, the Polish Minister of Education justified this dismissal on the grounds that Mr. Sielatycki had disseminated materials that could be regarded as promoting homosexuality and were contrary to "patriotic education" in Polish schools.The Secretary General of the Council of Europe protested, saying "I do not understand how teaching tolerance can be grounds for dismissal."This case underscores how teachers of HRE can be vulnerable to censure, and even the support of a powerful IGO like the Council of Europe is no guarantee of protection. 11 : Each statement cites the relevant articles of the Universal Declaration of Human rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva, 2000): http://www.un.org/wcm/webdav/site/visitors/shared/docu ments/pdfs/Pub_United%20Nations_ABC_human%20rights .pdf.Also available on-line in Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese.

Human Rights Educators USA (HRE USA) http://www.hreusa.net
This new network to promote HRE in the USA offers:

University of Minnesota Human Rights Resource Center http://www.hrusa.org
Creates and distributes HRE resources via electronic and print media.Especially useful to teachers are: The 5-part Close the Gap documentary series on ways to recognize and eliminate race, class, and place disparities: http://hrusa.org/closethegap/main.php This is My Home: a statewide HRE curriculum for K-12: http://www.hrusa.org/thisismyhome/project/about.shtml