Human Rights Cities Program
Human Rights Cities Program
The Program “Human Rights Cities” has been fostered by the People’s Movement for Human Rights Education (PDHRE) in different places around the world and has the approval of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Created in 1989, PDHRE is a non-governmental organization responsible for the Declaration of the Decade of Education of the United Nations, which lasted from 1995 to 2004.
In the words of its founder, Shulamith Koenig, “imposed ignorance is a human rights violation in itself, and I sustain that the fundamental change could only be attained if every human being was aware that he or she is a human rights owner, that everybody should be human rights educators, monitors and driving forces from generation to generation.” Consequently, the first requisite to be able to exercise a right is to know it.
The conviction of the need for continual human rights learning in the city is the starting point for:
Enhancing knowledge
Clarifying values
Changing attitudes
Developing critical understanding
Promoting solidarity
Altering personal and institutional behaviors and/or practices
There are three pivotal premises to the approach applied:
1- Universality, indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights.
2- Gender perspective
3- Inclusion of fundamental principles in people’s daily lives
How is the program implemented?
Basically, through 5 steps, although the idiosyncrasy of each place will determine its own and particular characteristics.
1. Summoning
2. Creation of a Steering Committee
3. Draft of a plan of action.
4. Citizens that learn and adopt human rights as a way of living.
5. Citizens that through learning, monitoring and documentation commit themselves to city planning.
The Steering Committee is representative of society’s different sectors, and works on the community’s critical issues.
The plan of action must emerge from collective participation, which calls for a training stage and the sharing of knowledge.
It must be taken into consideration that this is an everlasting, ongoing process, whose success will be guaranteed by the extent of participation of the different social, economic, cultural and academic sectors, which will be getting involved as they are summoned and consensus is achieved.
It is not the kind of process that can be developed top-down, even when in some cases the first summoning is sent by governmental institutions. And this premise is not a minor point, since human rights learning –the core of the project- implies a real commitment to the change of personal and institutional practices, which can only become a reality through the embodiment of human rights.
In a democratic state, in-depth changes are the result of public policies based on the interconnection of laws, governmental actions and cultural transformations that demand reflection, time and conviction.
The experience in Rosario
In Argentina, the development of human rights starts in 1977, during the military dictatorship, through organizations that addressed themselves to claiming civil and political rights. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Grandmothers, Relatives of the Missing, the Human Rights Ecumenical Movement, among others, waived the human rights flag in our country during very hard times, when state terrorism committed the most outrageous violations.
Later, when democracy was restored, new organizations were created, broadening the human rights’ scope: women’s movements, defense against the auction of housing destined to living only, protection of the environment, economic, social and cultural rights, minorities’ rights. In tune with what was happening on the regional and international level, where the human rights paradigm was being broadened, our society was getting organized and taking over its own defense.
At the same time, the state started to set up its own organizations at the municipal, provincial and national level, in agreement with democracy, to guarantee, protect and promote human rights, as in the case of the ombudsman’s offices, the bodies regulatory of privatized public services, the assistance centers for victims of sexual abuse, the woman’s national council, the municipal and provincial human rights departments, just to mention a few examples.
Most of the countries in the region have endorsed the human rights covenants, treaties and conventions, both of the United Nations’ system and of the Organization of American States’ (OAS). In the case of Argentina, they have been integrated into the 1994 constitutional plexus.
But this is hardly enough. It is not enough because in practice neither the States guarantee the respect and promotion of all the human rights of all and every one of their people, nor the inhabitants acknowledge themselves as subjects of right. And this happens here and in the rest of the world.
It is in this local and international framework in which our experience takes place.
The city of Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina, was the first one to be declared Human Rights City in 1997, boosted by the program carried out by the Institute for Gender, Law and Development (INSGENAR), headquarters of PDHRE in Latin America.
On July 30th 1997 more than 35 institutions (human rights organizations, indigenous peoples, sexual diversity groups, academic bodies, development associations, the women's movement, etc.) signed the Commitment Act in the Auditorium of the City Hall of Rosario, in the presence of city mayor, the director of INSGENAR, Dr Susana Chiarotti, and the president of PDHRE, Ms. Shulamith Koenig.
This is how Rosario became the first link in this ambitious program that is to sow the world with cities where human rights are known and exercised.
The Steering Committee
The Steering Committee of the City was progressively constituted by governmental and non-governmental organizations which INSGENAR has been working with for some years in different activities.
This Committee meets regularly to debate and discuss their interventions and activities.
INSGENAR has stimulated the training of the participating organizations through seminars and courses.
These organizations hold a plurality of ideas, varied backgrounds and differing views. In a fragmented society such as ours and in the exacerbated individualism of postmodernism, we believe that this is the program’s core: the challenge of articulating a medley of institutions demonstrating that it is possible to agree on proposals and carry them forward, working on what we have in common and creating areas to analyze the conflicts we go through and find plausible answers in the human rights framework.
Our purpose is to widen the Steering Committee –as we have been doing all these years- incorporating as many actors as possible, always on the basis of mature and productive agreements.
Development of the Program
The proposal provides for two working areas:
a) Rosario, Human Rights City: with the aim of internalizing the human rights culture and creating a space for the prevention and resolution of conflicts characteristic of human coexistence. It includes different activities for different sectors, ages, interests:
* human rights learning for teachers, security forces, health agents, magistrates, professionals, children, artists, social communicators and district organizations.
* promotion of gender equity.
* care of the environment.
In order to accomplish our aim we make use of different tools, such as contests, workshops, research, seminars, articles in mass media and others.
b) Latin American and Caribbean Program for Human Rights Education: Training of human rights educators, chosen among people with the capacity of leading processes of cultural changes in their own communities. This program was implemented in 2004 with the International Seminar on Human Rights and is sustained through a network of educators who exchange experiences, information and pedagogical material.
Which is our main objective?
To contribute to the construction of a culture based on the knowledge, debate and exercise of the principles and values of human rights, conceived from a gender perspective and the principle of universality, indivisibility and interdependence.
We are not unaware that the main reason for human rights violation is the unfair distribution of wealth.
Perhaps it is not in our power to solve immediately the injustice produced by the huge gap between the haves and those who are marginalized from all possessions, but we can report it and take it into account in our analyses and proposals. To make discrimination visible and denaturalize it is the first requisite to be able to combat it.
It is vital to understand that basic needs cannot be at the mercy of the charity of state programs and policies, but that they must be defined as rights.
This perspective offers a different view in front of needs and demands, both to the governing class and to society as a whole.
The task is daunting, but not impossible.
As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has put it in his book Eager to Do, “They are little things, they don’t put an end to poverty, they don’t get us out of underdevelopment, they don’t socialize the means of production and exchange, they don’t expropriate the Ali Baba’s caves. But maybe they trigger the happiness of doing and translate it into acts, and after all, to act upon reality and change it, even if a little bit, is a way of proving that reality can be transformed.”
And that is what we set out to do: to show that step by step even the harshest reality can be transformed; that we are not content with the passive acceptance that it has always been like that, that there must be a reason for it, that it is naturalized that people live in permanent insecurity because of lack of food, housing, health care, or because they get them in meager supplies, as handouts from the State when, in fact, it is a right that belong to them because every person for being human has the same rights as everybody else, in a multicultural context in which differences make the extraordinary richness of the human race.
We agree with the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos when he states than “We have the right to be equal when our differences make us inferior, and we have the right to be different when our equality decharacterizes us. Hence the need of equality that reproduces differences and difference that does not produce, feed or reproduce inequalities.”
And that is why Rosario, Human Rights City is more than a program. It is a shared dream, a hope, a challenge, a deeply-held conviction and firm commitment.
Viviana Della Siega
Coordinator
Program’s Steering Committee
Rosario, Human Rights City