We all have human rights. We know that. The right to food and water, to a roof over our head, to freedom from violence… it’s a very long list and this blog is not the place to go into them all. We also all know that every single day, human rights are ignored, rejected and actively repressed. And you must be living in some sort of fairyland if you think that doesn’t happen in the UK at the behest of our own government as well as because of individuals.
What continues to shock me on an almost daily basis is quite how oblivious most people are to the extent of these rights, and what they actually mean in practice. I work with a demographic who are doubly, or event triply for the girls, vulnerable to having their rights left unfulfilled. This has been recognised by the UN and on top of the human rights that we all have, they have extra protection through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Excellent stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.
And yet if I mention these rights in a meeting, people look at me like I’ve turned up to a conker match armed with a rocket launcher. Everyone gets defensive and suddenly the atmosphere is as if Somebody Mentioned The War. How dare I make the suggestion that rights abuses go on in the sacred halls of this hallowed isle? These children are fed, aren’t they? They’re healthy, aren’t they? They’re hardly the stuff of famine relief adverts from the 90s.
No, they’re not. They go to school, they having loving families, they’re (hopefully) not going to find themselves living in a conflict zone. But that isn’t everything. Human rights are, by the UN’s definition, indivisible. This means that you can’t pick and choose, they come en masse – if you are going to respect rights, you have to respect all of them for everyone. And yet, I go to these meetings and I hear things from people in positions of authority saying ‘but you can understand why we’re not going to consult with children, can’t you?’ and ‘obviously we want this project to be inclusive, but we do have to be cost effective which means we cannot include transport [for disabled children to participate]’
So I pull out the rights card and everyone goes goggle-eyed. ‘I understand you’re on the children’s side, but you have to see it from our perspective too.’ No, I don’t think I do, actually. While they are wonderful kids in their own ways, I’m not really ‘on their side’ as individuals, but rather on the side of their right to… well, rights, I suppose. I can’t help thinking that if all councils and decision-making bodies had a position of Rights Research Officer to flag up when a decision contravened rights, this country would be in a much better position, and this and this wouldn’t have happened. Though as one of my colleagues said when I mused on this in the office, their working lives would be made miserable and they would have no friends.
Well that’s fine, because I don’t want to be friends with people who don’t value rights. For now, I’m quite happy to be the stone in the shoe, the thorn in the side, knowing that my small voice has the weight of the UN behind it. I can be fairly safe in the knowledge that I’m one of the good guys, right?
One Foot in the Door 