Human Rights is a broad topic, so broad in fact that I hold an undergraduate degree in the subject. I might have written on any human rights issue but today I'm writing about the right which has always been the most important in my mind, the right to life, liberty and security of the person, which I'll be describing here as the freedom from violence.
The right to life, liberty and security of the person is the first right listed in the UN Declaration on Human Rights. It is also found at the front of many national rights documents including in Canada and the U.S. and the idea enjoys some primacy when discussed as part of a hierarchy of rights. Its spirit is also at the root of other rights including the freedom from torture, however I feel it is adequate enough to say that without life, liberty or security of the person it would be difficult to enjoy any other human right.
Why am I calling it freedom from violence? I feel that security of the person and the right to life necessarily suggest freedom from violence. I also feel that violence is a private threat to the enjoyment of the basic tenets of human rights as well as a public issue. While the state may not overtly exercise violence over a population, the failure to intervene in private violations has many of the same results, the inability to access the means necessary for a basic standard of living.
One of the reasons I'm focusing on violence for this blog is that September 21, 2013 was a difficult day for my friends. Several of my friends lost their friends in the siege of Westgate Mall in Nairobi Kenya. The tragically ironic part was that those lost included people who were working towards an end of violence and poverty in East Africa and other places in the World. It was also a bad day for my friend Mzi who was nearly beaten to death for his watch and wallet in Cape Town South Africa. Although I work with issues relating to violence on a daily basis I was not prepared for these events to affect people who I am close to and gave me the opportunity to see violence from this very real and close perspective.
I'm also writing this post for the people who I've met through my work both academically and as a development practitioner. As an academic I have had the opportunities to interview individuals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who spoke about the violence perpetrated against their family and friends and sometimes themselves. Sadly these stories make up only some of the statistics of the over five million people who have died there, the 400,000 women and men who have been raped and millions more who have been forced to flee their homes.
As a development practitioner the majority of my work has concentrated on victims of violence. The refugees that I have worked with in Canada have shared glimpses of their past lives and what brought them to Canada but the cooperative members I worked with were much more direct. I worked with entire communities that had been displaced by the Lord's Resistance Army who primarily described peace as the absence of violent conflict and the presence of development products such as education, healthcare and improved markets at which to sell their goods and produce.
Violence can be perpetrated by individuals, groups, corporations and states. Each individual case is different while equally horrible. However, there are some universally accepted and experienced consequences of violence. Of course people experience trauma, injuries, displacement and sometimes death. Violence has a societal impact too. It can lead to missed days of work, the inability to fulfill societal and community obligations and it can also lead to pervasive insecurity. Armed violence in particular has a known link to stagnant or even the reversal of development in low income countries and fragile states meaning that not only are people in countries such as Syria and the DRC victims of war but they also cannot access health care if they are sick or injured, their children cannot go to school and it is incredibly difficult for local farmers and entrepreneurs to do their jobs.
We need to do better for each other to ensure that everyone can enjoy a basic quality of life which includes the respect of their basic human rights.
On an individual level we can do quite a lot to effect change. We can live our own lives peacefully which should be reflected not only in our actions but in our language and thoughts towards one another. We can support friends and neighbours who have been affected by violence whether it came from spousal abuse or violent crime. We can also support those in our own communities by volunteering for organizations that support victims of violence including women's shelters, distress lines, refugee settlement programs and other.
Nationally we should hold our governments accountable for actions they take both nationally and internationally that may result in violence when it is safe to do so. This may include responding to police brutality, economic and political divestment from weapons manufacturers and the support of peaceful interactions between countries.
Internationally we can support organizations who provide humanitarian support to the victims of violence including the Red Cross and MSF and those who work towards preventing violence and human rights violations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Project Ploughshares in Canada and many others.
In Peace.
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