In this post about human rights, I'll seek the answer for four questions that we don't usually ask ourselves, but are quite important when it comes to understanding how society works (or should work). Let's get right into it.
1. What are human rights?
Probably, the most popular answer would be: the rights we have just for being human. It's not a bad answer but, more precisely, human rights are a series of freedoms and rights that must be guaranteed for every human in order to ensure the respect we all deserve (and also want out of empathy).
2. When and why were they created?
Throughout history, there has been many attempts to create a list of human rights, but the one that has lasted until now and is accepted around the world is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was created in 1945, after the Second World War, by the United Nations (in New York). The list was created to ensure that a chatastrophe like the recent war and other ways of injustice wouldn't ever repeat.
3. How many human rights are there?
There are a total of 30 human rights.
4. Which human right were you not familiar with?
To answer this question, I'll further explain one of the thirty human rights that you can find listed here. In particular, I will talk about Article 4. Here you can see what it is about:
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Now, according to the question that I intend to answer, of course I knew that freedom of slavery was a human right, and that slavery is forbidden in every way. I also knew that, sadly, there still slaves today. What surprised me greatly was the fact that, nowadays, there are more slaves than ever. More than 27 million. Around 30 million slaves. My first thought when I heard about this in this video was: How can this be possible? How did we not realize? And worse than that: Do we know about this but do nothing against it?
According to this article, here's a map that shows where most slaves in the world live:
We can see that the countries that are more affected by slavery are in Africa and Asia (India is one example). On the other hand, the less affected would be the United States and European countries.
Slavery is illegal all around the world, but the right of freedom is still violated everywhere. Nowadays, slaves are forced to endure slavery by descent, bonded labor, forced migrant labor, sex slavery, early or forced marriage, child labor... And, sadly, many more. There are many ways in which these slaves are exploited, and this has to come to an end.
But why is this possible? How can we allow this scourge of society to go on? Just in the United States, "the land of the free", there are 60,000 slaves today. It seems like we are turning our backs on them and we shouldn't do it. We all have rights, and if we don't fight against this oppresion we lack of respect for humanity itself. Even if we aren't living slavery in the flesh, we still can't act as if it's not a real problem. I think that the governtments should do more in order to crack down slavery, to stand up for human rights and equality.
Here you have a video from Youth for Human Rights that I think is quite touching and that sends a clear message to society, which seems to be blindfolded.
