Topic 1: Introduction to Reporting and Resisting Human Rights Violations

There are certain conditions that impact people’s lives and make it more difficult to develop or maintain a healthy democratic society, political and economic well-being, an improving level of health, and a stable society. These conditions include Government behaviour and structure, armed conflict, economic factors, and conditions that affect agriculture and the food supply, like drought, flooding and locusts.

These may give rise to humanitarian crises as well as human rights violations and severely impact the social needs and development rights of national or regional populations. It is important that the international community helps affected nations put in place strategies to secure these rights. One such is the suggestion made in UDHR Article 25 of this course about securing the right to preventative health, which is more sustainable and does not burden the national exchequer with expensive pharmacological dependency. There are also new technologies that can produce nutritious, organic food at a very low cost.

In Sudan, the expansion of the Sahara Desert has caused changes to the migration patterns of nomadic herdsmen and their families. The thousands of nomads and their tens of thousands of animals pass through areas of settled pastoralists provoking conflict over access to grazing and water. The easy availability of Kalashnikov AK47 rifles in the markets of towns along the route makes any conflict that ensues all the more deadly.

These external conditions are explored in Human Rights Conditions: What We Know and Why It Matters by David Weissbrodt, University of Minnesota Law School, which is included in MODULE 13, Further Reading and Research.

Before we can report on violations of Human Rights, we must know what Human Rights are. By studying this course to this point, you should have a good grasp of the most widely known and accepted list of Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Know them well.

Webster’s dictionary definition of violation that applies to Human Rights is an infringement or breach of a law, rule, right etc. It can be an action omitted or an action committed – something that should have been done but was not done or something that should not have been done that was done.

A violation of a person’s human rights means that a rule or law has been broken. The Rule of Law section of the course refers to ‘effective remedy’. An effective remedy is a procedure that corrects the wrong action that has been done or the right action not done.

We all have an innate sense of fair play, particularly when it is our own rights that are at stake. When we know the human rights we are in a position to evaluate actions being done or not done to others. Knowing which human right has been violated indicates a course of action.

Human rights violations can be small or large, less or more serious and involving one or more individuals to whole populations. Serious human rights violations are most likely also to be violations of criminal law. If they are not against the law in the country where they occur, most people would feel that the criminal law is inadequate to serve the needs of the people.