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Introduction:
Helen Chauncey explains why the human rights movement is very inspirational
for their work on coexistence. Over a 50 year period, human rights workers have
"stayed the course" and now, while not universal, the notion of the legitimacy of
"human rights" is very widely accepted worldwide. Coexistence workers need to aspire
to the same kind of effort, and the same result.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Inspiring Work on Human Rights
Helen Chauncey
The Coexistence Initiative
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A source of inspiration is one that I've
actually touched on briefly, but it's worth stressing. The human rights movement
in many ways came into being as a gleam in the eye over 50 years ago. I had a
vision to create a set of standards that are embedded in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that were way ahead of their times, in fact their
still ahead of our own times. If one goes back and reads that document, if you
haven't read it recently, there is a certain amount of it where you say, oh we
are doing this, and a certain amount of it, you say this is still vision, we are
not there yet. Given how visionary that document was in 1948, it was almost the
equivalent of saying there should be peace in the world, period we're done. The
peace movement would very much like to not only say, but to have peace in the
world, we're done. We are nowhere close to that, and yet human rights movements
stayed the course.
Year after year, decade after decade, it worked to embed it's
values, and slot them into every opportunity that it could find- newly
emerging nations, political movements such as the civil rights movement in the
US. This was an equal opportunity need around the world, even for international
law, all major players, including the US, the US was in some cases reluctantly
have become to sign on. We are now 50 years plus into the progress of the human
rights movement, and we are now really beginning to get to that goal that I
mentioned a little earlier that is the litmus test goal for the CI. When we get
there, and that's probably another 50 years down the line. The goal is the
internalization or the embedding if we can sort of extract that word back from
the Iraq war and use it to embed it into our real life. We're embedding those
values, and not only expecting them or hoping for them, but demanding them. I
see the human rights movement in that sense as highly inspirational because it
was willing to have a vision early on that was way ahead of its time, and then
stayed the course in such a way for those values to work in practice. They
have over time, and are increasingly becoming embedded in our daily lives.
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