“Together we can make a Difference”
UN Launches Year-Long Human Rights Advocacy Campaign
By Rosa-Maria Ndolo
“Today marks the launch of a year-long advocacy campaign for Human Rights”, Under-Secretary-General Kiyo Akasaka said to welcome the audience on the occasion of Human Rights Day at United Nations Headquarters on 10 December 2007.
"We have succeeded in raising awareness for the Millennium Development Goals, we have mobilized 44 million people to stand up against poverty in one single day, and now I ask everybody in the UN system to participate in this advocacy campaign", Mr. Akasaka said.
A panel discussion titled “Digital Dignity – Human Rights and New Media” was organized to highlight the importance of new media in the work on human rights.
Craig Mokhiber, Deputy Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said that new approaches and technologies were needed in the human rights network. He added that the United Nations was definitely open to using new tools and tactics. Mr. Mokhiber quoted Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that “everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” He said how forward thinking the Covenant had been at its entry into force in 1976 and how it was very relevant to the theme of the panel discussion. Mr. Mokhiber added that although new media could transmit information faster and easier, it could also carry anti-human rights messages, and that while it could monitor human rights violations, there always remains the question of authenticity and verification.
Following up on Mr. Mokhiber’s remarks, Jenni Wolfson, Acting Executive Director of WITNESS mentioned concrete examples of how new media raised awareness of human rights violations in the recent past and helped prosecute the perpetrators. She said that only through the “participatory culture of the internet” and the help of new media such as cell phone cameras, cases like the forceful disruption of demonstrations in Myanmar, the “tasering” of a student at the University of California (UCLA), or the beating of a bus driver by Egyptian police could be documented and the perpetrators held accountable. Ms. Wolfson stressed that people wanted to participate actively in policy making, therefore more messages could be heard, which allowed for a different kind of dialogue on human rights violations. WITNESS is supporting this development and has recently launched “The Hub” a multi-lingual online portal dedicated to human rights media and action. Through its measures, WITNESS strives to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations, empowering people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice and the promotion of public engagement and policy change. She said that WITNESS felt it needed to create a new platform because the problem with popular websites like “You Tube” was that videos often disappeared in the mass of footage being uploaded every day. Videos could often be miscategorized or mistaken for comedy, therefore losing their power.
Another panellist, Ms. Katrine Verclas from mobileactive.org, said that the most powerful tool these days was the cell phone. With over 80 per cent reception coverage worldwide, mobile phones have become user-friendly and affordable. She said that her network was seeking participation by “the next billion human rights activists” to draw attention to human rights abuses.
The audience expressed concern that the UN has not been embracing new media technologies sufficiently and that the organization was still using “stone age tools” and lacked immediacy. Mr. Akasaka responded that the UN was advancing by recording and webcasting an increasing number of its conferences which could be accessed by 1.4 million people. Mr. Mokhiber said that cameras were increasingly important for investigators and the recording of testimonies in the context of human rights and added that all meetings of the Human Rights Council have been webcast which opened it to a broader audience and was a first step to change.
