Human rights

Introduction

“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Human Rights constitute prominent part of lives of all of us around the globe. Their violations in various perspectives cause one of the main problems the world (and thus also our own) society faces today. People encounter cases of these violations in their everyday life, often without real competence to identify them and defend against them.

In order to fight these violations which concern us, we ought to know what human rights are, what is their background and what is their role in our lives. It means that we should be able to recognise our rights and the rights of the others, as well as to distinguish when they are violated. Then we should know mechanisms that could help us to stand up against infringement of human right and develop skills to use them in practice. Understanding human rights in our local context will then help us to understand human rights violations in their global complexity.

Thanks to this module you will find out what your human rights are and how to cope with people or institutions which violate them.

Syllabus:

• 26 pages
• 2 big quizzes - one at the beginning, one at the end
• 1 short optional quiz in between two sections
• 2 practical tasks, using the knowledge you have gained, you will even have to leave your screen and investigate human rights in your surrounding

Estimated length of the module: approx. 4 hours