Rights by Design: Mainstreaming Human Rights Information, Education and Culture

Abstract

‘Rights by Design: Mainstreaming Human Rights Information, Education and Culture’ explores the numinosity of human rights; that is, the intrinsic relationship between an individual and their rights. It is a timely reminder, in the post-Covid era of fragility, reflection, reckoning, and reawakening, that human beings are at the heart of human rights. The state-centricity of human rights discourse is increasingly giving way to and making room for authentic, post-colonial, localised voices in civil society and at grassroots, ‘glocal’ community levels, empowering the individual with the unprecedented but thus far largely unrealised power to shape a human rights future. In this future, human rights can – consciously and by design – be protected, respected, and rigorously defended from the creeping digital, ideological and political authoritarianism that is destabilising democracy and the international rules-based order on every continent in the world. To realise this power, we as individuals must be empowered with the information, knowledge, and advocacy skills to respect, protect, defend, and consciously live by human rights values in our everyday lives. In an ‘Age of Alternative Facts’, we must be equipped to counter human rights misinformation in our infospheres and reverse the global ‘information deficit’ on what human rights are and who they were designed to protect. This thesis is a call to action and a framework for empowering the individual so that we may more meaningfully integrate human rights knowledge, principles and values in our everyday social, economic and cultural lives – at home, in our family lives, and our local communities; through every stage of education, from early years, primary and secondary to tertiary, postgraduate, vocational and lifelong learning; in our digital worlds and social information environments; and in our worlds of work. It is an ambitious and original imagining of what Eleanor Roosevelt meant when she said, in 1958 on the 10th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that human rights begin in “small places, close to home ... [in] the world of the individual person".