Teachable moments: Human rights in class

In 2000, the United Nations set eight goals aimed at cutting global poverty in half by 2015. The Millennium Development Goals pledge to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and establish a global partnership for development.

There are currently 1.2 billion people going hungry every day and 2015 is only five years away. There has been definite progress, but overall the major underlying factors that drive poverty and claim the lives of so many women during childbirth certainly have not been improved. There have been initiatives put forth by the United States this year, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recently announced 1,000 Days campaign, which focuses on the crucial 1,000 days in a child's life spanning from conception to age two, a time during which poverty causes the most damage to mother and child.

But that is just this year - five years away from when these goals should be achieved. World learders - 189 of them, to be exact - made promises to transform billions of people's lives and they had the audacity to twiddle their thumbs until they're forced to think about it again in 2010? How many human beings will be in extreme poverty come 2015? Three billion? How can the U.N. possibly sit by and take themselves seriously as they let the deadline pass and the goals go unfulfilled? These world leaders let the progress stall up to this point, since they are the ones who set the goals. It's not about a slap on the wrist because something didn't work out the way it was expected to; it's about the fact that they will have let such a mindboggling amount of people continue to suffer and struggle to survive. And these same leaders call the shots to crack down when there are food riots erupting because starving people have finally had enough?

It is indeed a big, complex world. Leaders of foreign governments certainly have a lot on their plates at any given moment, which is why it's good there are other sectors dedicated to dealing with humanitarian assistance and development. But these two sectors are generally not working together to facilitate the kind of dialogue necessary to implement positive development policies. Human rights also get brushed aside as something trivial when in fact they are an essential component of development policy. This is not surprising, though, because you cannot expect someone to incorporate them into their thinking when they were taught to focus on other things.

If future policy makers could learn how to think using human rights as a cornerstone of policy, they might be able to start making the world a better place. The curriculum for a government and politics major at this university is a perfect example. There are no required courses that focus on what human rights are and why they matter. There are a few international development classes offered, but by making them optional, students who do not think about human rights will probably be disinclined to take such classes. That is not to say all government and politics majors do not care about human rights, but it illustrates how lacking the dimensions of politics and policy are when it comes to addressing something that is so foundational.

It is not simply a matter of making policy that is "sympathetic" to human rights; it is about learning how things connect. This means changing the approach from check boxes to fulfill basic requirements to understanding why those requirements are there in the first place and how they work to determine the success of a policy.


(2010-09-24/diamondbackonline)