In order to strengthen civic competences in AEGEE, the Civic Education Working Group has been promoting debating throughout the year. Why? Debating was proven to improve academic achievements, critical thinking, mutual understanding, as well as communication, argumentation and interpersonal skills. In short it helps you to know more and form a better-founded opinion. Today we are taking the debate online for the first time, with a topic that challenges the very basis of our organisation!
For each topic, a defending and an opposing motion will be presented. You can express your opinion and continue to debate on the forum. Note that these statements are not necessarily the person’s personal opinion, nor are the arguments they use indisputable.
I have a very vivid memory of my first contact with the Declaration of Human Rights. I was preparing for an inter-school competition on this topic and was desperately trying to memorise all 30 articles by heart. It was extremely difficult because in my naïve and unaware teenage mind, I found them trivial and self-evident and I could not imagine how and why one can be openly deprived of any of them. And please keep in mind that I was growing up in Poland during the times when memories of communist crimes were still very fresh.
In the western cultural circle, where a linear concept of time is predominant, we tend to assume that our society is constantly morally developing and the future can be only better. However, looking at an ever-repeating history, we find plenty of examples like war crimes and genocides, which clearly show we do not learn from our mistakes. This makes the Human Rights, written and declared right after Europe’s most fatal genocide in modern times, more relevant than ever before. Sadly, we don’t have to look hundreds of years into the past to see violation of Human Rights in Europe. We have seen many recent failures in the face of the refugee crisis. Even without any current crisis, we can easily point to many places on the map where Human Rights are not part of society’s everyday life.
I wish that Human Rights would be regarded as old-fashioned, well practiced and as obvious for everybody as they were for my teenage-self. But it is hard to go further if you have not even arrived at the attempted status quo.
What is more, I don’t believe any of the social developments or other 21st century context issues could possibly influence relevance of the Human Rights. It really does not matter if people are riding horses or flying cars, living in tribes or in the European Union, they still have same basic needs and deserve certain rights. Human Rights represent core values of humankind, imperative in their style of writing and applicable to every human being on the globe. It still remains innovative when it comes to the formal aspect of it being a Declaration. Even in the framework of the European Union, we witness a complete lack of cohesion when it comes to rights regarding the asylum execution. Taking into account the complexity of the world we live in and political games, there is no higher success than the recognition of a universal framework.
Last but not least, I would really not underestimate the power of the Declaration. It has a huge sophistic potential when it comes to open confrontations. The only problem is that we don’t confront those who fail to respect Human Rights as much as we should. This can not be changed by any new legislation. We don’t need another dead letter. What we need is to enforce the Declaration even more as a set of standards to measure ourselves against and keep striving for everyone to finally take seriously what we have universally agreed to.
You can read the defending motion here.
If you want to give your imputs and continue with the debate you can go to the forum via this link.
Written by Joanna, Civic Education Working Group