Saturday, 11 June 2016

Champions of Human Rights

Champions of Human Rights 

27 million people live in slavery—more than twice the number during the peak of the slave trade. And more than a billion adults are unable to read. Given the magnitude of human rights violations—and those listed in the Human Rights Abuses section of this website are only a glimpse of the full picture—it is not surprising that by survey 90 percent of people are unable to name more than 3 of their 30 rights.
Who, then, with so many unaware of their most basic rights, will make sure that human rights are promoted, protected and become a reality?
To answer that question, we can draw inspiration from those who made a difference and helped create the human rights we have today. These humanitarians stood up for human rights because they recognized that peace and progress can never be achieved without them. Each, in a significant way, changed the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr., when championing the rights of people of color in the United States in the 1960s, declared, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The great advocate of peaceful resistance to oppression, Mahatma Gandhi, described nonviolence as “the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, declared that “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”






1) MAHATMA GANDHI (1869–1948)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is widely recognized as one of the twentieth century’s greatest political and spiritual leaders. Honored in India as the father of the nation, he pioneered and practiced the principle of Satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass nonviolent civil disobedience.
While leading nationwide campaigns to ease poverty, expand women’s rights, build religious and ethnic harmony and eliminate the injustices of the caste system, Gandhi supremely applied the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience, playing a key role in freeing India from foreign domination. He was often imprisoned for his actions, sometimes for years, but he accomplished his aim in 1947, when India gained its independence from Britain.
Due to his stature, he is now referred to as Mahatma, meaning “great soul.” World civil rights leaders—from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Nelson Mandela—have credited Gandhi as a source of inspiration in their struggles to achieve equal rights for their people.






Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)

 Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the twentieth century’s best-known advocates for nonviolent social change.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, King’s exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage first attracted national attention in 1955, when he and other civil rights activists were arrested after leading a boycott of a Montgomery, Alabama, transportation company which required nonwhites to surrender their seats to whites, and stand or sit at the back of the bus. Over the following decade, King wrote, spoke and organized nonviolent protests and mass demonstrations to draw attention to racial discrimination and to demand civil rights legislation to protect the rights of African-Americans.
In 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, King guided peaceful mass demonstrations that the white police force countered with police dogs and fire hoses, creating a controversy which generated newspaper headlines throughout the world. Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march that attracted more than 250,000 protestors to Washington, DC, where King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech in which he envisioned a world where people were no longer divided by race.
So powerful was the movement he inspired, that Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the same year King himself was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. Posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, King is an icon of the civil rights movement. His life and work symbolize the quest for equality and nondiscrimination that lies at the heart of the American—and human—dream.

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