Safe Spaces Human Rights Education in Diverse Contexts

LIAM GEARON
group for the proposed Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training. It is
important, argued Emmanuel Decaux, that human rights education is highlighted in
the commemorative ceremonies of the 60 th anniversary of the Universal
Declaration. Human rights education, he argued, is critical to a sensitization
process that encourages vigilance in terms of respect for the promotion and
protection of human rights values.
The role of the Advisory Committee, created by the Human Rights Council for
elaborating the proposed Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training,
consisted in standard setting, as stipulated in Human Rights Council Resolution
A/HRC/6/10, adopted in September 2007. One of its main tasks was to collect
information on normative instruments and key initiatives relating to human rights
education, most of which came out of the Decade for Human Right Education. The
Committee also took into account other existing initiatives such as the Plan of
Action of the first phase for the World Programme for Human Rights Education. In
2008, the future work of the Committee was seen therefore as building on existing
strengths in the field of human rights education. Politically and pedagogically
pervasive, human rights education was conceived (from primary, secondary,
tertiary to higher education, and informal settings) as critical to civil society as a
whole.
With the United Nations having now produced a draft (2011) Declaration on
Human Rights Education and Training, Professor Cornelia Roux’s Safe Spaces is a
most timely and critical engagement with these issues. The book provides an
admirable range of theoretical and empirical perspectives from and the impressive
range of authors. Each chapter in one way or another resonates with a problem
perennial to human rights and human rights education: the transformation of
articles of intention to the actualities of implementation and practice.
As Keet argues in the opening chapter: ‘The importance of HRE [human rights
education] on the broader political landscape lies with its capacity to contribute to
the development of a critical citizenry as prerequisite for sustainable democracies.
HRE needs to consider the ideological, economic, cultural and social functions of
human rights. ... the deep experience of human suffering which authentic
expression is suffocated by a dominating rights discourse as its inversed image.
This is so because it is, within the discursive truth regime of rights, possible to
legitimize both an advertising language for simulated transformation and equality
on the one hand; and a social reality of stellar inequalities and human suffering on
the other.’
As General Rapporteur the 60 th Anniversary Commemoration at UNESCO, I
observed firsthand how such difficulties are accentuated in nation states which
have suffered and continued to suffer under autocratic and dictatorial governance.
The title of this book, with its emphasis on protection and refuge, thus resonates
with the foundations of human rights and human rights education in modern policy
and governance.
Article 14 of the Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training is in this
regard important: ‘States should take appropriate measures to ensure the effective
implementation of and follow-up to the present Declaration and make the
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