Intercultural Understanding and Human Rights Education ... - APCEIU

| Summary of the speech |
- Dr. Hugh Starkey
Human rights education involves
knowing the past, acting in the present
and building the future. The United
Nations was created just over two
generations ago to develop freedom,
justice and peace in the world. The
successful building of a culture of peace
requires knowledge of and acceptance of
human rights as codified in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. A right is
not a right unless you know about it. For
the past 60 years people have had to
struggle for their right to learn about
human rights, although organizations
such as UNESCO and the Council of
Europe have promoted human rights
education, as have NGOs.
International understanding implies
relations between governments.
Intercultural understanding is about
relationships between people both within
and between states. The globalize world
of the 21st century requires human rights
as global standards for living together.
What needs preserving and what
changing We must change: mentalities
that use human rights as ideological
weapons; that see them as problems of
others; that define them as alien Western
values. We must build on our inheritance
of universal and indivisible human rights
instruments. They are an on-going
programme of action. Human rights
respect multiple identities. We can apply
human right principles to education, to
social and political situations and to
reflections on identities. We face the
challenge of helping people to see
themselves as having a common universal
identity and destiny as human beings with
entitlement to equality of dignity. This is a
prerequisite for intercultural understanding
and peace. (please refer to page 52 for
full text)
International Symposium on a Culture of Peace 15