Human Rights Cities

Civic Engagement for

Societal Development
Human
Rights
Cities

Stephen P. Marks and Kathleen A. Modrowski

with Walther Lichem

Preface : Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka

Foreword : Shulamith Koenig

ISBN 978-0-9731134-6-4
Human Rights Cities
Civic Engagement for
Societal Development

Stephen P. Marks and Kathleen A. Modrowski

with Walther Lichem

Preface : Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka

Foreword : Shulamith Koenig
 Program on Human Rights in Development

Art Cover: Tatyana Koenig and Yehonatan Koenig

Graphic Designer Cover: Matías Delfino
Layout: Gerónimo D. Desumala, III

Copyright © 2008

PDHRE, People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning

[email protected] ; www.pdhre.org

ISBN 978-0-9731134-6-4

Sextant publishing

Printed in the Peoples Republic of China.

The publication of this edition was made possible

by the generous contribution from
the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, Austria.
“The city… is the point of maximum
concentration for the power and culture
of a community.”

L. Mumford
Contents
PREFACE 7
Dr. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka

Foreword 9
Shulamith Koenig

Introduction 17
stephen P. Marks & Kathleen A. Modrowski

Chapter 1 21
The Urban Context of the Global AGENDA

Chapter 2 39
What are Human Rights Cities?

Chapter 3 51
National experiences with human rights cities

Chapter 4 145
The Way Forward

NOtes 153
INDEX 157
ABOUT THE AUTHORS 164
 Human Rights Cities

PREFACE
Dr. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka
Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director,
UN-HABITAT

This publication is an outstanding document demonstrating on

how learning about human rights as a way of life at the community
level can lead people to play a pivotal role in citizen’s owning
sustainable and meaningful urban development.
I want to express my thanks to Prof. Marks and Prof. Modrowski
as well as Ambassador Lichem who authored this book and to
Shulamith Koenig who has initiated the Human Rights Cities
Program, together they have been driving force in this program. In
particular, I would like to congratulate those authors who provided
the lively descriptions of their human rights cities in the various
countries and regions of the world. They have described very well
how their local activities have made human rights cities a living
example of how the concept has improved the lives and dignity of
many people and communities.
The approach pursued by the human rights cities initiative is
complementary to UN-HABITAT’s strategy for sustainable urban
development, which lays emphasis on the need for inclusionary
urban governance to achieve this. I note with satisfaction that
in the general overview chapter several UN-HABITAT flagship

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 Human Rights Cities

reports are cited extensively and that many other UN sources are
referenced. It indicates how the UN system’s work as a whole is
key to addressing sustainable urbanization and development.
The Habitat Agenda, adopted in Istanbul 1996, is a key source
document which reflects insight the conviction that progress in
sustainable urban development and shelter for all can only be
achieved through broad-based partnerships guided by the
holistic human rights framework. The Habitat Agenda identified a
whole range of partners, which include local authorities, women,
youth, parliamentarians, the private sector and civil society,
whose contributions are essential to people being empowered to
participate in the decision that determines their lives. It is important
to note that the Habitat Agenda, which is an inclusive document
drafted by governments and civil society has 29 explicit references
on human rights as well as 19 references on civil society.
This book cites the Secretary General of the United Nations
who states that “it is necessary to broaden partnerships between
all stakeholders, such as the civil society and the private sector.”
However, the benefits of partnerships in reducing urban poverty
are not as great as they could be because of a narrow focus on pilot
and demonstration projects. Reaching large numbers of people
can only be achieved through effective broad-based partnerships
at the global, national and local level. The full participation of the
private sector, which normally provides 80 percent of the required
financial resources for urban development, is a prerequisite. It
is my view that the United Nations is uniquely equipped to be a
catalyst for creating the partnerships necessary for the success
of a human rights-based approach and has demonstrated this
capacity ever since its inception.
The Human Rights Cities Program ventures to demonstrate
the creation of such viable and practical partnerships worldwide.

8
 Human Rights Cities

Foreword
Shulamith Koenig
Recipient of the 2003 United Nations Human Rights Award
Founding President of PDHRE,
People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning

IN YOUR HANDS – The realization of a dream

We welcome you to join us in a voyage founded on a vision, and
a promise. It is a journey to advance Human Rights Cities as a
vision of the future of humanity in which communities learn about
human rights as a way of life and generate innovative and exciting
social and economic transformation.
A city is a microcosm of the world, where the multiple issues
and formidable concerns of humanity emerge painfully and
restlessly, calling out for sustainable solutions through meaningful
and positive change. Sixty years ago all nations defined a powerful
vision of a holistic human rights framework as a response to the
challenge of freedom from fear and freedom from want. This
overarching framework offers communities a moral, political
and legal support system for women, men, youth and children,
wherever they are and whatever their culture, religion, history or
identities, to determine their own futures. Moving from humiliation
to belonging in their community in dignity with others…participating
in the decision that determines their lives in equality and without
discrimination…moving from charity to dignity.

9
 Human Rights Cities

Indeed what a marvelous promise that answers succinctly

hopes and expectations of thousand of years—a dream that must
be realized is now in your hands!
The Human Rights Cities initiative involves the formation
of local communities-of-learning. These are municipal spaces
where citizens learn about human rights as relevant to their daily
lives and concerns. They embark on highly motivated voyages,
led by local groups and organizations concerned with economic
and social justice, and plan, reconstruct and advance their goals
step-by-step, guided by the wisdom, norms and standards of the
holistic human rights framework.
Eleven years ago this audacious idea took shape in Rosario,
Argentina, through the initiative of Susana Chariotti, with whom I
had shared the idea at an international conference. A few weeks
later she called me with great enthusiasm, telling me that Rosario
was about to become the first Human Rights City in the world. I
flew form New York to Rosario to join in a meeting in the Mayor’s
office, where 120 representatives of local NGOs and community
groups joined in signing a declaration. I will never forget the
representatives of the Toba community—a local indigenous group
of 100,000 in a community of one million—a woman and a man
signing on to a dream in a city they had never really felt part of.
With enormous contentment and after many months of hard work,
Susana sent me a message saying: “Shula, you dream and I have
to work very hard.” Indeed, Rosario and other cities that have
since made similar commitments to vigorous statements of values
and to action plans for human rights learning have required the
dynamic energies of the most committed and active members of
the community.
Their achievements, as detailed in these pages, clearly
demonstrate that dialogue and learning about human rights have
had a significant place in their lives. Our organization, PDHRE,
the Peoples Movement for Human Rights Learning, has been
honored to walk the first steps of this journey with them for the

10
 Human Rights Cities

last 20 years.
I am humbled to have been present as these cities, villages,
or communities embarked on their own paths to collective human
rights dialogue and learning. They have created a practical
model for true citizenship where every inhabitant—rich or poor,
powerful or oppressed—learns and recognizes the importance
of respecting, protecting and promoting all human rights of all,
striving to breathe and live human rights in every waking moment
and in every impossible dream.
PDHRE was founded in 1989 as an international service
organization with a deep belief in the power of human rights
learning for communities to achieve economic and social justice.
We have worked directly and indirectly with networks of affiliates
and partners in over 60 countries around the world to develop
and advance the learning about human rights as way of life. We
facilitated programs that enabled women and men to re-imagine
their lives and discover their own power to define the destiny of their
community. Participating in the planning of their future, the human
rights about which they learn provide them with the principles with
which to pursue their hopes. As a result of internalizing the praxis
of human rights communities and assuming social responsibility,
communities are constantly being revitalized by actions that create
wider spaces, choices and possibilities for meaningful change.
Imagine living in a society where all citizens have made a
pledge to overcome fear and impoverishment, to build a society
that provides human security, access to food, clean water,
housing, education, healthcare and work at livable wages, and to
share available resources with all citizens—not as a gift, but as a
realization of human rights. That is what Human Rights Cities do
by providing an energetic space that demonstrates that living in
such a society is possible!
We live in a world where a multitude of organizations work
to solve the enormous problems humanity is facing, one project
at the time. In 20 years of accumulating rich experiences, we

11
 Human Rights Cities

are convinced of the practical value of a holistic human rights

framework for the betterment of the lives of women and men at
the community level. Forming into a Steering Committee, they
develop learning programs throughout the city. In the process they
develop critical thinking with a gender perspective of broad issues
of poverty, patriarchy, and power, as well as a systemic analysis
not only of symptoms, but more importantly of causes of their
lack of clean water, education, food and employment. These are
issues that can be solved if the decisions made by communities
are guided by a holistic human rights framework.
Fifty percent of the world’s population is under twenty-five
years old and many of these young people, often uneducated and
unemployed, have joined the two billion people living in cities to
find their future. Tragically, many young women and children are
being trafficked to the cities. The world is on the move and the
movement is towards urban spaces. The reasons for this vast
migration are many—wars and conflict, climate change, economic
gain, the promise of education, and in general the hope for a better
life. These overwhelming challenges call for an inclusive, holistic
yet practical plan devised by engaging both citizens and local
authorities, vertically and horizontally, to act with transparency and
accountability to make a visible difference in citizens’ lives. Basing
such a plan on a human rights framework builds on humanity’s
historic memories, narratives, aspirations and hopes; it aims at
a future in which human rights will be guaranteed for all without
discrimination of any kind, such as race, sex, sexual orientation,
language, religion, origin, property, or birth.
The following pages demonstrate that human rights provide a
powerful tool for action towards genuine societal development. We
have no other option but to develop ways and means for people
across the globe to learn human rights and use them to challenge
impoverishment and deprivation that undermine the future of
humanity. Human Rights Cities draw on the comprehensive
human rights instruments by enabling all citizens to participate as

12
 Human Rights Cities

equals in the decision-making processes affecting their lives.

We are inspired by the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
that, “a necessitous man [or woman] is not a free man [or woman],”
and by those of Nelson Mandela who said, “we face the urgent
task of deepening the culture of human rights.” He also said,
“However good the policies of the government are, nothing will
come of them without the active participation of each and every
one of us.”
But let us face it, most people around the world do not know of
the existence of international human rights, even though they were
proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, “for all peoples and all
nations.” People know traffic regulations that enable us to move
safely towards our chosen destinations as socially responsible
and free human beings, but they do not know the rules of human
rights that allow us to lead lives in society as socially responsible
and free human beings.
Make no mistake about it: for many millions of our brothers
and sisters the enormous potential of all to live a life they value is
shattered by the vicious cycle of humiliation, which forces people
to exchange their equality for survival. When women and men
internalize human rights as their own, hidden capacities come
and throw light on the path toward freedom from injustice.
The acquired knowledge informs actions to reach to what is
offered to humanity in the inclusive human rights agenda. Having
become aware of the structures of injustice, people find meaning
and relevance in the two International Covenants (one on
economic, social and cultural rights, the other on civil and political
rights) and in the Conventions on race, torture, discrimination
against women, and rights of children, migrants and persons with
disabilities, to name subject areas of the main UN human rights
treaties. These and more have been ratified by most countries of
the world, which thereby promise to modify their laws and practices
in order to give effect to the obligations they have accepted. Yet,
the general public in the North or South remains to a large extent

13
 Human Rights Cities

ignorant of what their governments have agreed to on their behalf

and the enormous improvements respect for these obligations
could make to their lives. Our call is to redress the human rights
violation of imposed ignorance by learning and dialogue leading
to social change and dignity for all.
This rich framework enables women and men to realize
their potential, identify opportunities and choices to overcome
the prevailing imbalance of dignity. When people know and own
human rights they start believing in their abilities; they develop new
capacities and call for good governance to develop democracies
to deliver human rights. They even start looking at the environment
in a new way and consider the life of other species as an integral
part of being in dignity in their community and the world around
them.
And more: varied civil society groups in the city that focus
on issues like women, labor, children, housing, food, health,
education, poverty and religion, discover common ground for
collaboration and solidarity guided by inclusivity and indivisibility
of human rights. All gain by pulling together sparse resources in
developing agreed upon city plans and creating alternative budgets
to achieve their goals without competing with one another. Thus
inhabitants of a Human Rights City, through their groups and
neighborhoods representatives, create a vibrant new space of
living in mutual recognition, dignity and freedom. They move from
“shame and blame” to realize the promise of democracy. Indeed
we have no other alternative but for human rights to become a
universal support system for maintaining and sustaining sanity,
collaboration and cooperation in difficult urban environments.
As part of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations
General Assembly declared, at the initiative of Benin, that 2009 will
be the “International Year of Human Rights Leaning.” (Resolution:
A/RES/62/171) The resolution further states:

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 Human Rights Cities

…Every woman, man and child, in order to realize

their full human potential, must be made aware of all
their human rights and fundamental freedoms…[and]
human rights learning should serve to transform the
holistic vision of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights into a way of life…
The General Assembly decided to devote the International
Year of Human Rights Learning, “to activities to broaden and
deepen human rights learning… on the basis of the principles of
universality… constructive international dialogue and cooperation,
with a view to enhancing the promotion and protection of all human
rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural…”
Human Rights Cities offer a structure for locally run
investigation, evaluation and analysis of what is needed to prevent
violations and promote realization of human rights. Each member
of the community becomes a mentor and monitor as they move
relationships, laws, policies and resources from the vertical to the
horizontal with respect and trust. They develop a new vision of
the world.
Inspired by what people have done so far, PDHRE continues
to facilitate the creation of new Human Rights Cities, which now
can emulate existing ones. This book is tells their stories. We do
so with much pride and expectation that these cities will multiply
around the world. We nurture the hope that every country in the
world will have at least one human rights city to serve both as
a magnet and a radiating beacon, a space where communities
advance learning about human rights as a way of life, celebrating
the full and vibrant dimensions of their society guided by the
holistic human rights framework, their legacy to humanity in the
21st century.
We all must assume the responsibility to replicate these
experiences and make these communities a living reality. We
have no other option.

15
 Human Rights Cities

To send you on the road let us look back to Rosario and the
change in the lives of the Toba indigenous community:
As part of learning about the Millennium Development Goals
and mapping the human rights in their community, youth living in
the slums decided—even though hesitantly and believing that it
was useless—to obtain a meeting with the Mayor. They wanted
to request the replacement of the many shuttered and broken
windows in their school. The meeting was granted and within two
days all windows were replaced. These young people realized
their human right to be educated in an environment that recognizes
their dignity and protects their human right to good health. They
received a gift of trust and respect. The students became aware
that they could make a difference. They have become mentors
and monitors in their now changing community.
Another short story…
In the process of learning about human rights, representatives
of the Toba people, inspired by the UDHR, wrote a ten point
document to articulate their quest for dignity, trust and respect
in the community. After long deliberation they came up with the
first point: “It is our wish to be able to go to buy what we need
in the new shopping mall in Rosario without being looked at as
thieves.” The pain and the hope that filtered through these few
words expressed their desire to live like the other inhabitants of
the city. Truly they saw human rights as a way of life—one to be
lived in dignity and non-discrimination—infusing all aspects both
great and small.

We have no other option!

16
 Human Rights Cities

Introduction
stephen P. Marks &
Kathleen A. Modrowski

The Fourth Session of the World Urban Forum on November

3-7, 2008, brings together in Nanjing representatives of all
governments, of multilateral institutions and civil society to grapple
with the problems affecting people living in cities and not enjoying
the core value to which Millennium Development Goal 7 aspires
in its target 11, namely, security of residential tenure among the
urban poor. The efforts of the international system are not likely
to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the
target date of 2020. The prognosis of 1.5 billion slum dwellers
by 2020 unless significant programs are implemented to improve
access to water, sanitation, secure tenure and adequate housing
is daunting and calls for innovative strategies.
This publication reviews one strategy that addresses both a
broader and a narrower dimension of urban poverty. The Human
Rights Cities Program is not directed toward securing legal title
as a means of protecting the urban poor from market eviction and
gentrification or to catalyze investment in low-income housing.
It is rather a broader strategy of empowering inhabitants of
communities to find collectively the ways and means of ensuring

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 Human Rights Cities

respect for their human rights, including the right to adequate

housing, component elements of which are security of tenure,
access to basic urban services, transport and mobility, financial
services and credit, women’s empowerment, urban citizenship,
income and livelihoods. It is thus a broader strategy than securing
legal tenure.
This Program encourages local communities to take charge
of their own future by understanding their needs and the causes
of the various forms of deprivation from which they suffer and
acting on that understanding. Where a vibrant civil society and
responsive local government exist, human rights communities
complement and reinforce their efforts to tackle poverty and
social ills. The added value of the Human Rights Cities Program
in such a context is to channel those efforts around national and
international commitment to human rights. Where local government
is ineffective, corrupt, or non-existent and few opportunities are
available to mobilize beyond the family and clan, a human rights
cities initiative is a vehicle for raising awareness and transforming
that awareness into action for social change.
Traditional strategies of aid and financing development
have done little to stem the tide of “urbanization of poverty” and
“feminization” of urban poverty. Recent crises in Kenya and
Zimbabwe have underscored the limitations and sometimes
exacerbating effect of relying on the political opposition—
legitimate though it may be—to build on local resolve to challenge
the economic, political, and social forces that push 100 million
people into slum conditions. Human Rights Cities certainly are
no panacea; they serve to reinforce a more systematic effort to
provide local solutions to urban problems, including the growth
of slums, impediment to gender equality in rights to property and
inheritance, social, economic and political exclusion in cities, and
hindering access of the urban poor to livelihoods. Change will
occur when slum dwellers can exercise true power to advance
slum upgrading, gender equality, social inclusion and urban

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 Human Rights Cities

livelihoods.
The difference between the particular strategy of Human
Rights Cities and other approaches to community empowerment
is the focus on a holistic understanding of how housing rights
relate to the entire panoply of human rights and how citizen
empowerment provides both an alternative to fatalism and a set
of skills for making the legal and administrative systems to work
for rather than against the urban poor. Among the outcomes of
such a strategy is the application of the instruments available
internationally and nationally to enforce housing rights.
At a time when UN-HABITAT’s Strategy for the Implementation
of the MDG 7, Target 11, is highlighting best practices and good
policies to advance housing rights and security of tenure; rental
housing appropriate for the urban poor; gender equality; urban
social inclusion; urban poverty reduction and urban livelihoods,
in sum, practices and policies that are pro-poor, inclusive and
gender-sensitive, the experience of Human Rights Cities is worth
examining, not as the simple solution to the complex problems
of urban poverty but as a small scale set of initiatives that show
promise in grounding these practices and policies in community
action.
Walther Lichem, former Austrian Ambassador to Canada and
member of the PDHRE Board of Directors, wrote the first chapter,
on “The Urban Context of the Global Agenda.”He places human
rights cities in the context of the Millennium Development Goals
and international concern over the political, economic, and social
dimensions of urban poverty. He draws on the insights of a long
career of international diplomacy during which he has been at
the center of UN and European institutional measures to address
priority issues and has come away deeply committed to the
Human Rights Cities project as a strategy for addressing societal
realities.
In the second chapter, we lay out the approach and methods
of the Human Rights Cities initiative, what it is, and how it relates

19
 Human Rights Cities

to the broader objectives of human rights education and learning.

We also outline the steps that are taken to establish and sustain
a Human Rights City.
Giving voice to key players in the creation of Human Rights
Cities across the globe, the third chapter contextualizes the human
rights in two cities in Latin America, two in Europe, fifteen in Africa
and two in North America. Actors in the establishment and running
of human rights cities provided the description of each of these
experiences. The following persons are the primary voices behind
the descriptions of their human rights cities:
Ghana - Raymond Atuguba, Tuinese E. Amuzu

Kenya – Rose Nyawira

Mali – Mohamed El Moktar Mahamar

Austria –Wolfgang Benedek

Canada – Satya Das, Joy Fraser, Renée Vaugeois

United States – Jean-Louis Peta Ikamabana

Argentina - Susana Chariotti

Brazil – Carlos Alberto Silveira Netto Soares

Hundreds of their fellow citizens have made Human Rights
Cities a living reality through their imagination, courage, and
commitment to bettering their own condition through the of civic
engagement. We are convinced that their examples offer hope
to the hundreds of millions who only know despair in the urban
environment and to those who are sensitized to re-imagining the
urban environment in the spirit of dignity and greater freedom for
all.

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 Human Rights Cities

Chapter 1
The Urban Context
of the Global AGENDA

We live in a time when the priorities facing the international

community have shaped a new global agenda based on the
interrelatedness of a wide range of sectoral challenges, which
can no longer be understood and addressed in isolation. To deal
holistically with the full range of these interrelated issues requires
not only conceptual breadth but also institutional capacities
beyond the reach of traditionally fragmented responsibilities and
capacities of governments and international institutions, to say
nothing of local-level institutions, whether municipal, village or
neighborhood. This chapter outlines the salient features of the
global agenda as they relate to the specific challenges facing urban
development and conclude with a discussion of the significance
of human rights as a strategy for advancing an integral approach
to this agenda.
Two forces pulling in different directions have characterized
the evolution of the international agenda, one accentuating
transnational interactions and the other focusing on non-state
actors and individual citizens. As transactions cross borders,
human beings emerge simultaneously as victims of processes

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 Human Rights Cities

beyond their control, as perpetrators of wrongs against fellow

citizens and other persons far away, and as holders of rights
and bearers of responsibilities. These multiple roles are reflected
in three key ideas that define the global agenda—at least as
reflected in agreed priorities of the United Nations, namely, human
rights, human development and human security. A recent policy
innovation with institutional ramifications is the Responsibility to
Protect,1 which arguably places human sovereignty even above
state sovereignty. While protecting people against abuses by
their own state, this concept also recognizes individual criminal
responsibility, including before the International Criminal Court.
These innovations in addressing global issues also relate to urban
development, as will be discussed below.
This “dialectic interdependence of the local and global
dimensions of economic, political and cultural processes” is called
“globalization.”2 Global issues require a plurilevel approaches
to governance, not only at global and national but also at local
levels. The challenge is not only to create new capacities for
multilevel interventions but also new structures of cooperation
and role definition at the various levels of governance. Each
level of governance, including the participation of citizens and of
communities through local democratic processes, bears a degree
of responsibility for component elements of the global agenda,
defined primarily as peace and security, economic and social
development, environmental sustainability, societal cohesion, and
good governance. Cities can mediate the reciprocal relationship
between globalization on the one hand and economic and human
development on the other. The potential of the local, urban level
in addressing the issues of this global agenda is being ever
more recognized in the national and in the international policy
framework, since it is at that level that relational attitudes among
persons and communities are worked out and inter-generational
responsibilities for sustainable development protective of the
environmental and natural resources endowment are shared.

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 Human Rights Cities

Urban growth
The 2007 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects
predicted an increase in the world’s population until 2050 by
2.5 billion, passing from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion.3 The population
living in urban areas, however, is expected to grow by 3.1 billion,
passing from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 6.4 billion in 2050. Already
in 2008 the majority of the world’s population is living in urban
areas clearly making cities and urban communities a key element
in addressing our Global Agenda. In many countries population
growth accounts for 60 percent or more of urban expansion. The
share of urban population will grow significantly in developing
countries reaching by 2050 an average of 67 percent of the
total population. Sustainable urbanization has become a prime
objective of our agenda and the implication of population growth
for economic, social, security, sustainability and societal issues
will increasingly have to be addressed in the urban context.

Economic development
Since the Middle Ages, the development of cities has been
closely linked with economic, social, societal and cultural
development. Urbanization and economic progress have
been mutually reinforcing.4 Today, cities both bear the brunt of
economic globalization and constitute the primary settings for
economic development. Foreign direct investment and industries
in information and communication technology are concentrated in
the cities, as is manufacturing and the establishment of industrial
parks. Economic development at the urban level vastly increases
the revenues and financial resources of local governments and
generates gains in productivity and competitiveness.
Data from developing countries show that the development
of urban settlements can account for a considerable share in
the growth of national income. In all regions, cities generate a
disproportionate share of gross domestic product (GDP) and
provide huge opportunities for investment and employment.

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 Human Rights Cities

Urban-based economic activities account for up to 55 percent

of GDP in low-income countries, 73 percent in middle-income
countries and for up to 85 percent in high-income countries.5
These opportunities have to be seen in the context of globalization
where the enhanced linkages of urban settings with the global
market put cities in the very center of economic development.

Urbanization of poverty
According to the report on The State of the World’s Cities
2006/2007 there will be 1.4 billion persons living in slums by 2020.6
Poverty, in its multiple dimensions of slums and hunger, sanitation
and health, education and employment, is increasingly a problem
facing cities. Although today most of the world’s poor live rural
areas, by 2035 cities will become the predominant sites of poverty
and in urbanized developing countries there are already twice as
many poor in urban than in rural areas. This is to be understood
as one of the most challenging problems facing the world today.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) defined, as
a follow-up to the Millennium Summit of the United Nations,
the shared priorities of governments and of the UN system
in addressing poverty through global partnerships and social
development. Most of the MDGs require action at the local,
including urban level, whether the eradication of extreme poverty
and hunger, achieving universal primary education, reducing
child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS,
malaria and other diseases, and, as targets in the context of
achieving environmental sustainability, halving the proportion of
the people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and
basic sanitation, and improving the lives of at least 100 million
slum dwellers by 2020.7
To take one example, the risk and prevalence of HIV/AIDS
is very much enhanced in urban settings. At the same time the
opportunities for reducing the pandemic are greater in cities than
in rural areas. Sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis,

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 Human Rights Cities

which increases the acquisition and transmission of HIV/AIDS,

are also more common in urban areas. Urban poor, like the rural
poor, die young due to the consumption of contaminated water
and food. Pneumonia and diarrhea kill each year more than 2
million children in developing countries.
Education assumes a critical role in the overall responses to
development and globalization. In slum areas there are often not
enough primary schools. Globally 113 million children have not
been enrolled in school and 130 million young have grown up
illiterate. Cities, therefore, can and should offer new and broader
opportunities for education.

Environmental issues
The UN global environmental agenda focuses both on
the impact of global change on local quality of air, water, and
biodiversity, as well as the global impacts of local action. Indeed,
urban settlements often exacerbate air and water pollution,
climate change, unsustainable production and consumption
patterns, water resources management and water supply, land
use including the issue of polluted industrial sites and natural
disasters.
The “urban footprint” stretches far beyond city boundaries.
Urban settlements influence and are affected by broader
environmental developments. Urban pollution provides the
greatest proportion of carbon dioxide emissions. Higher sea levels
induced by global warming will affect urban concentrations at or
near coastlines with disastrous consequences.
Natural disasters, which have more severe effects in the urban
context due to the sheer concentration of people and infrastructure,
have been on the increase. Over the past two and a half decades
disasters worldwide increased from 428 to 707 per annum.
The poor are particularly affected by natural disasters because
their buildings and roads crumble and fall in the wake of major
tremors, landslides and floods. Today 75 percent of the world’s

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 Human Rights Cities

population lives in areas that were affected at least once by an

earthquake, a tropical cyclone, floods or droughts. In developing
countries natural disasters cause on average seven times more
losses of life than in industrialized countries. Understanding the
particular urban vulnerability by natural disasters is a first step
toward developing mitigation strategies, improve the resilience
and reduce the vulnerabilities of urban settlements.

Societal challenges
The greatest challenge to urban development, as a salient
component of the 21st century global agenda, is the sharp
increase in population, combined with social complexity, resulting
in the destabilization of social institutions and potentially societal
collapse.8 Progress in urban development is dependant on societal
dynamics, which in turn are affected by measures to protect human
rights, advance democratization, and preserve values and culture
through participatory governance and acknowledgment of plural
identity of urban societies. As noted in the Human Development
Report 2004, devoted to the theme of “cultural liberty in today’s
diverse world,”
From disaffected indigenous groups across Latin
America, to unhappy minorities in Africa and Asia, to
new immigrants across the developed world, failing
to address the grievances of marginalized groups
does not just create injustice. It builds real problems
for the future: unemployed, disaffected youth, angry
with the status quo and demanding change, often
violently.9
An example in Salzburg, a relatively small provincial town
of 150,000 inhabitants, which is today the home to 148 different
nationalities, including migrants with different ethnic, cultural,
linguistic, and religious backgrounds. The limited capacity for
otherness, that is for societal inclusion and for the affirmation of

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 Human Rights Cities

plurality, in many urban communities, however, has fragmented

societies, resulting in socially differentiated groups benefiting
from radically different levels of education, health services and
infrastructure.
The security agenda and its growing privatization in response
to these developments reflect the disintegration affecting many
societies. Organized crime, especially trafficking in narcotic drugs
and in children and women, as well as new forms of slavery and
forced prostitution feed on discrimination and humiliation and the
failure of social institutions to provide for inclusion, integration
and societal cohesion. These ills are exacerbated by the failure to
ensure the rule of law and consequential segregation, exclusion,
confrontation and vengeance.

Societal development
In the context of urban development it is important to distinguish
the term “societal” from the term “social.” While “social” refers to
the various dimensions of the productive capacities of the human
being and of communities (health, age, education, standard of
living, employment, hunger, etc.), “societal” refers to the relational
capacities of a citizen and of a community (capacity for plurality,
acceptance and affirmation of the value of otherness, relativization
of one’s own identity, values and visions, commitment to identify
and implement the common good, etc.). “Societal” ultimately
refers also to the understanding of one’s own human dignity and
human rights and implicitly the recognition of the human rights
and dignity of the other.
“Societal” includes, most importantly, the capacity for
otherness and for a plurality of identities, the ability to relativize
one’s own position and identity and the ability to move into public
space, interacting democratically with others in the definition and
implementation of the common good. “Societal” refers to the
capacity of the human being for living in dignity with others as
well as the capacity for change/development and for a vision of

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 Human Rights Cities

the future.
Societal capacities in different societies have so far largely
been seen as a given and considered to be essentially internal
and hence excluded from international discourse and policies.
However, many of the recent crises and related development
failures in different regions and especially in urban areas suggest
an increasingly urgent need to address the societal dimension
from a development perspective. This means that societal
capacities are to be included in economic and social development,
in approaching environmental sustainability and in relation to
conflict prevention and post-conflict peace-building efforts.
Concrete action is required to assure comprehensive learning,
socialization and education processes which capacitate a society
for peaceful, inclusive convivencia in equity and justice. Societal
development, in terms of today’s world, is the vehicle by which
the notion of world citizenship und thus the demand for equality
among the peoples can be realized.
Societal development no doubt is a long-term process, with a
certain inter-generational dimension. There is also a need to look
at societal development as a multi-faceted, participatory program,
which will require the activation of all social and governmental
structures at local, national, regional and global levels.
Societal development must be rooted in local cultural traditions
and be understood in its necessarily comprehensive, all-inclusive,
multi-level, long-term nature and eventually find appropriate
institutional recognition in local, national, regional and global
governance processes of the United Nations.
Citizens and societies acquire societal capacities, behavioral
patterns and values by processes of socialization, by education
and by learning. A development approach to societal capacities has
to focus on these processes keeping in mind the need for rooting
socialization, education and learning in the cultural values and
traditions of each society. It is to be noted that all cultures, faiths
and historical traditions offer ample ground on which to build locally

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 Human Rights Cities

defined processes of capacity building for human dignity, identity

plurality and societal inclusion. A UNESCO multi-cultural, multi-
religious international committee of personalities found already in
the late 1940s that there are human rights commonalities among
cultures, values that are of such fundamental moral nature in our
cultures that they can be called “human rights.”10
The “social” and the “societal” dimensions of our peace and
security agendas as well as of the development potential of a
given society are, of course, closely interrelated yet need different
approaches in the context of comprehensive development
processes. The question has been asked as to what extent
economic capacities of a society would also be included in the
concept of societal development.

Peace and security

For the last half century the traditional peace and security
agenda has shifted from wars among states across state borders
to intra-societal violence and insecurity. Today more than 90
percent of wars and conflicts occur within national boundaries
with 95 percent of the victims being civilians not belonging to
armed forces. State security has given way to the idea of human
security.11 The processes of urbanization have posed new
security challenges, which are exacerbated in failed and fragile
governmental structures and states.
Urban crime and violence do not exist in a vacuum. They
are realities that emerge from social, economic and societal
conditions that accentuate urban fragmentation. Criminal activity,
such as trafficking in small arms and narcotics, are related to the
processes of societal disintegration and urban insecurity. The
emergence of private security services and the retreat of wealthy
communities behind walls and barbed wire are responses to this
insecurity and deepen segregation end exclusion, of which they
are also the symbolic representation.
Among the sources of urban insecurity, terrorist acts have a

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concentrated yet devastating impact. The terrorist attacks of 9/11

caused $33-36 billion of damages in infrastructure, buildings, jobs
and other assets in the city of New York.12 The harm of these
attacks to the world economy beyond New York and Washington,
D.C., has been inestimable.
Conflicts and violence, including terrorism and organized crime
are threatening not only the societal cohesion within countries
but the very existence and functioning of failing states and
governments. Such violence and challenges to societal cohesion
are experienced in countries of all regions. However, their impact is
particularly damaging for the development potential of the poorer
countries striving to improve the economic and social conditions
of their societies. Societal disintegration is to be considered a
major factor contributing to poverty and lack of development.
The processes of societal fragmentation and disintegration
have multiple effects on human security. They may lead to a
militarization of gangs, of police, militias and other armed groups.
Failures of state structures affect human security of citizens and
enhance the disintegration of societies. Corruption and fraud
enhance the growth of organized crime. Violence and crime
have been on the rise in many cities. Excessive population
growth in cities also contributes to civil conflict. Cities with annual
growth rates greater than four percent were twice more likely to
experience civil conflict than those cities where urban growth has
been more paced.
Societal fragmentation is often also associated with a
differentiation of human security-related public services.
Inadequate urban water supply and sanitation, sewage treatment
and health services in the poorer quarters of cities may enhance
the risk of infection and related losses of life. An important factor
contributing to urban crime and violence is societal neglect rather
than the condition of being poor. Crime flourishes also where
policing, judicial and civil society systems have not yet developed
or have broken down through corrupt or weak governance.13

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Crime and the “gating” of society

Rapid and often chaotic urbanization has been identified as
one of the main causes of reduced urban safety and security
worldwide. According to UN-HABITAT14 crime rates in the world
have increased between 1980 and 2000 from 2.300 to over
3.000 crimes per 100.000 people. While crime rates fell in North
America and Western Europe over the past two decades, the
police recorded in 2001 almost 50 million property and violent
crimes in 34 industrialized countries. UN-HABITAT further notes
that during the first five years of the 21st century 60 percent of
urban residents in developing countries have been victims of
crime. Murder and burglaries occur primarily in urban areas. The
report also underlines the significance of urban poverty and slums
in the context of daily urban risk and vulnerability to crime and
violence.
As a response to this development the richer sectors of
urban societies have tended to surround settlement areas with
walls, barbed wire and provide these spaces with private security
services. According to UN-HABITAT the number of private security
guards has increased by 150 percent since 1997. This “gating”
of the well-off population underscores however the divisions
existing in many cities, impeding even further communication and
reflecting the lack of cross-identification among the increasingly
different and divided sectors of the urban population. While
the well-off get “gated” there are as many as 100 million street
children, a number expected to rise even further as urbanization
advances. The increased privatization of security and public
space is an indication of the loss of confidence in the ability of the
relevant authorities to cope with the growing levels of crime and
violence. The “gating” of societies is a clear indicator of the failure
of societal development.
Combating crime requires other essential elements of societal
development: the rule of law and freedom from corruption.
Organized crime is often linked to corruption. Drugs, arms and

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human trafficking are among the principal activities of organized

crime. The lack of effective legal process not only fosters the
operations of organized crime, but also stifles effective participation
of civil society in urban governance processes.

The challenges to societal cohesion and inclusion

The process of urbanization has been closely linked to
processes of up-rooting, losses of rural identities, cultures and
communities. Traditional single-identity societies of sameness,
where the basic elements of identity, such as ethnic background,
religious beliefs, language and cultural traditions, are shared
among the members of the community, are being replaced by
societies of a wide diversity of different identities. These pluri-
identity societies need capacities for otherness, considering the
other, different identities, beliefs, and cultures not as a threat but
as an asset, moving beyond the old concept of tolerance.
Rapid urbanization, however, can exacerbate acculturation
tensions and conflicts. Migrants from rural areas, foreign workers,
and refugees in urban settings are often spatially segregated
without an affirmation of their being and identity. Ethnic groups
of migrants in some cases have tended to be self-segregating
in urban spaces creating ethnic enclaves. Such migration, in
particular when it involves culturally different populations, can
lead to humiliation and exclusion, feelings of rejection, or denial
of human dignity, all of which can foster crime and violence.
Very often urbanization unleashes new patterns of social
relations, such as when patriarchy and expectations of obedience
among migrants clash with the host society’s horizontal relations
of equality, democratic partnership and sharing. Adaptation of
migrants to horizontalization of social relations requires, however,
new skills and capacities of solidarity and community-building
rather than blind obedience to authority.
Urban governance needs citizens who are willing and able
to move into public space and to participate in the definition and

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implementation of the common good. Communities in the urban

context would therefore have to be increasingly defined by an
affirmation of values, of belonging, of solidarity and of a shared
vision of the common future. This transition into urban societal
horizontality and participation, however, needs a new approach
to developing and securing human dignity.
The horizontalized market society in the globalized economy
is essentially a competitive society where the “loser” is often left
with the feeling of exclusion and discrimination. These attitudes of
not belonging are not only directed against the local “winners” but
towards the increasingly globalized market economy as a whole
and towards its actors. The distance between the wealthy and the
poor sectors of our societies has been growing dramatically with
multiple implications. The disparity between the poor and the rich,
the losers and the winners of our economy and our society are
particularly articulated in the urban setting, defining urban space,
education, employment, health, and wellbeing.
These new societal dimensions of urban development need
enhanced attention in view of the fact that societal disintegration
and fragmentation has now been recognized as a basic element
impeding economic and social development, and in the failures of
achieving a sustainable use of natural resources. Societal failures
prevent the attainment of a violence- and crime-free society.
We have to recognize that development, as a process of change
towards “larger freedom” needs policies and programs of societal
inclusion and cohesion, affirming plurality of identities, developing
the capacity for otherness and for the common good among all
urban inhabitants. These capacities are of particular significance
in the context of coping with the consequences or mitigation of
natural disasters increasingly affecting urban communities and in
addressing the effects of climate change on urban safety.

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 Human Rights Cities

“Public space” and participatory governance

Governance, different from government, which is a vertically
structured process of norm setting and norm-implementation at
different levels, is a horizontal process of partnership in “public
space.” “Public space” is defined as that abstract space of a
society in which the common good is defined and implemented. It
is the key element of participatory governance processes in which
state and non-state partners cooperate to achieve the realization
of shared visions, through cooperation and partnership in defining
and achieving the common good.
Societal capacity for “public space” is fundamental for
democratic governance. The capacity for public space is part
of the horizontalization to be achieved in societal development
towards democracy. Command and obedience societies,
military or ideological dictatorships know no “public space.” The
undemocratic head of government decides about the common
good. Citizens are not invited to cooperate. Usually their only task
has been to obey.
Cities provide the perfect setting for developing capacities for
participatory democracy. They contain both constitutional public
power and space for decision-making of importance to the society
as well as the personal proximity to the decision-maker. Societies
in transition from vertical structures of command and obedience
do need societal development for governance building among the
non-state structures for partnership in city governance.
Effective urban governance has to be based on the
participation and contribution of different non-state partners
including civil society, the private sector and academia. In order
to overcome the societal fragmentation cities will also benefit
from the participation of ethnic and religious communities and the
poor sectors of the city. At the same time linkages to the national
government and to international programs and objectives will be
valuable, keeping in mind the local affectedness of global change
and the local responsibility for global development and peace.

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 Human Rights Cities

Such encompassing, holistic approach to urban governance

will succeed in enhancing human security, reduce crime and
violence and reduce the physical divisions of the various societal
fractions by way gating and exclusion. At the same time economic
development will be facilitated while social development will be
recognized in its fundamental importance for economic and
societal well being and security. An urban society liberated of
its fragmentation will suffer less from the inter-sectoral or inter-
generational externalization of costs. Democratic governance will
lead towards capacity for sustainability.
The effectiveness of democratic governance will also depend
on the values, sense of responsibility and accountability of public
officials and civil servants. Freedom from corruption is both a
reflection of the societal development achieved in a city and of
the public structures’ sense of responsibility vis-à-vis society.

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The human rights dimensions of urban development

The 2006 World Urban Forum pointed to the need for a more
comprehensive, multi-sectoral approach to urban development,
including social, economic and environmental dimensions, in line
with sustainable development.15 Echoing the Human Development
Report, the Forum alluded to the human rights dimensions of
gender and age sensitive approaches to urban development
and the interrelatedness of human development, human rights
and human security.16 In his Report to the 2005 Summit on the
implementation of the outcome of the Millennium Summit the UN
Secretary-General articulated very clearly the interrelatedness of
the development and security agendas, identifying “human rights
for all” as the very lynch pin of an increasingly interrelated global
agenda.17 Development and security are mutually dependent
and both will flourish in “larger freedom” with human rights and
democracy as the linking elements ultimately defining both
agenda areas.
This interdependence has implications at the urban level. The
Monterrey International Conference on the State of Safety in the
World’s Cities underlined that safety in cities is a complex issue
and recommended a, “comprehensive approach to urban safety
that addresses issues such as inequality, marginalization and
poverty.”18 At the same time it has become clear that societies
which disintegrate and suffer under crime, violence and a absence
of the rule of law are not suitable for investments and economic
development with as a consequence impact on the social
development agenda. Corrupt governance has its environmental
costs, which in turn hamper economic development and urban
safety.
If the societal dimension of our urban development agenda is
to be seen as a lynch pin in the achievement of our objectives with
regard to economic and social development, cultural development,
environmental sustainability and our combating crime, corruption,
and intra-societal violence we may well have to ask ourselves

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how the defining position of human rights is to be addressed in

the urban settlements and communities
Human rights values have moved center stage in the definition
of societal capacities of citizens, societal cohesion and solidarity
and the sense of a shared destiny. In fact, the human rights
agenda is acquiring a new horizontality in its societal dimension.
The traditional legal quality of human rights as defining the relation
between state and citizen is being increasingly complemented by
human rights as the defining element for intra-societal relations
between people and between communities. The achievements
of the women’s movement supported by international policies
and legal instruments provides a recent example for how human
rights development can have a concrete impact on the quality of
relations between human beings.

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 Human Rights Cities

Human rights education, learning and socialization are key

strategies for achieving societal development. They provide each
human being with the ability to understand his/her human dignity
and hence the dignity of the other. An effective culture of human
rights becomes the defining quality of a community, making it
inclusive and providing it with a sense of shared purpose and
future. The enhanced empowerment of people through human
rights brings a new capacity and commitment of sharing the public
space and for becoming a partner of the government in processes
of governance.
Human rights education as an element of educational
programs provides awareness about dignity and equality with
others in dignity. However, knowledge alone may settle into mere
abstraction.
Learning processes translate knowledge into understanding.
Human rights learning facilitates the movement of individuals
and communities to becoming self-asserted actors. Human
rights learning aims at enhancing knowledge, developing critical
understanding, promoting values clarification, bringing about
attitudinal changes, building solidarity and changing behaviors.
Human rights as a public commitment has to enter the shared
public space. Monuments, street names, public holidays need to
reflect better a human rights based societal culture and contribute
jointly with other public and private structures to a socialization
into human rights related values, capacities and behaviors.
Human rights education, learning and socialization are to
create a culture of human rights, a human rights related “way of
life.” As such it will provide the set of distinctive spiritual, material,
intellectual and emotional features of every society or social
group. It will encompass lifestyles, ways of living together, value
systems and beliefs. A human rights based culture will provide the
direction for societal development. The key objective is to live in
dignity.

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 Human Rights Cities

Chapter 2
What are Human Rights Cities?

The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of

maximum concentration for the power and culture of
a community. It is the place where the diffused rays
of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with
gains in both social effectiveness and significance.
The city is the form and symbol of an integrated
social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the
market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning.
Here in the city the goods of civilization are multiplied
and manifolded; here is where human experience is
transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of
conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues
of civilization are focused: here too, ritual passes on
occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated
and self-conscious society.19 (Lewis Mumford)

Human Rights Cities are community-based initiatives, locally

conceived and directed by local groups around the world, which
combine participation, empowerment and social change with

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international solidarity based on agreed principles of human

rights education and sustainable development. To understand
the phenomenon of Human Rights Cities, this chapter will
recall the commitment of the international community to this
understanding of human rights education and learning, the origin
of the movement for human rights cities, the experience, the
objectives and expected results of the program, and its relation
to the urban condition. The next chapter will present the voices
of those who have transformed the concept into daily practice in
their communities.

The Commitment of the international community to

human rights and human rights education and learning
In the Millennium Declaration of 2000, heads of state and
government pledged that they, “will spare no effort to promote
democracy and strengthen the rule of law, as well as respect
for all internationally recognized human rights and fundamental
freedoms, including the right to development.”20 Toward this end,
they resolved to take specific measure relating to full protection
and promotion of all human rights in all countries, to democracy,
to combating violence against women, to protecting rights of
minorities, migrants, migrant workers and their families, to
eliminating acts of racism and xenophobia, to allowing genuine
participation by citizens, and to ensuring freedom of the media
and the right of the public to have access to information.21
The UN Secretary General, in his Road Map Toward the
Implementation of the Millennium Declaration, placed human rights,
“at the centre of peace, security and development programmes”
and added, “it is necessary to broaden partnerships between all
stakeholders, such as civil society and the private sector.”22The
Human Rights Cities project reflects a similar commitment to
human rights as a participatory strategy engaging civil society in
building communities that resolve issues of development at the
local level through human rights learning. In most settings in the

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developing world, the starting point is an awareness of the hardship

that globalization brings in an increasingly interdependent world,
which generates, along with unprecedented growth, severe and
increasing inequalities, massive numbers of displaced persons,
genocidal wars fueled by ethnic conflicts, large scale human
trafficking, numerous domestic conflicts generating humanitarian
disasters, proliferation of weapons, terrorism, urban collapse
and the marginalization of vulnerable groups. These threats to
human development and human rights are not being solved by
resolutions adopted in New York or Geneva or by charity from
foreign donors. Support from the international community for local
implementation of human rights is only useful to the extent that it
complements action by communities to alter the power structures
responsible for the social injustice they endure.
The United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995-
2004), proclaimed in 1994 by the General Assembly,23 defined
human rights education as, “more than the provision of information”
and declared that it, “should constitute a comprehensive life-long
process by which people at all levels in development and in all
strata of society learn respect for the dignity of others and the
means and methods of ensuring that respect in all societies.”24
Government acceptance of human rights education is further
reflected in the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which
was adopted on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.25 That Declaration covers
human rights training and education, including the duty to facilitate
human rights education at all levels of schooling, and in particular
in the training of lawyers, law enforcement officials, members of
armed forces, and public officials. The Declaration recalls various
human rights treaties establishing the duty of States parties to
adopt measures to promote human rights through teaching,
education, and training; to ensure the widespread dissemination
of information about national and international human rights laws;
to report to UN treaty bodies; and to encourage states to support

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the establishment of independent human rights institutions, such

as human rights commissions and ombudspersons.
This understanding of human rights education was recently
reinforced by the declaration of the year commencing on 10
December 2008 as the International Year of Human Rights
Learning.26 The resolution calls on the UN, “to increase its efforts
to promote a human rights culture worldwide through education
and learning.” How is this human rights culture to be created and
fostered? The Peoples Movement for Human Rights Learning
(PDHRE), among other civil society initiatives, has endeavored
for more than a decade to work with local communities to answer
that question.

Transformative nature of human rights learning

The most salient feature of this mode of human rights education
(HRE) is the concept and practice of a transformative pedagogy
of human rights, which holds the potential for altering the power
structure behind most forms of oppression and repression. Indeed,
if people everywhere commit to building a political culture based
on the right and responsibility of everyone to respect, ensure,
and fulfill human rights for all, the space for abuse of public trust,
violence against the physical and mental integrity of others,
and exploitation of the vulnerable will contract. The concept of
transformative learning is a well-known concept in educational
theory akin to the “deep approach” to learning or active learning
according to which the learner reaches, “a personal understanding
of the material presented… [and] has to interact critically with the
content, relating it to previous knowledge and experience, as well
as examining evidence and evaluating the logical steps by which
conclusion have been reached.”27 It challenges the “surface
approach” or the traditional teacher-centered approach. As noted
in a seminal work on the application of the deep approach by
Harvard Business School, “the most eloquent critiques of the
teacher-centered approach date back to such master vintners

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 Human Rights Cities

as John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Jean Piaget, and Carl

Rogers. Their concerns are as timely today as they were when
they fist appeared.”28

Human rights education, applying traditional and active

teaching approaches, is promoted by NGOs such as Human
Rights Education Associates,29 and has been adopted in part by
the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights30 and by
the World Health Organization in the area of reproductive health
and rights.31
The approach focused more on a transformative pedagogy of
“human rights learning” is promoted by such groups as PDHRE,
the People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning, which has
published studies on human rights learning activities in a wide
range of settings.32 PDHRE actively promoted the 1994 General
Assembly Resolution that launched the Decade for Human Rights
Education and worked with various delegations on the adoption of
General Assembly Resolution 62/171, on the International Year of
Human Rights Leaning in 2009. While this pedagogy is increasingly

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practiced in school settings, the basic precepts of human rights

learning give content to the participation concept in development.
In practical terms, participatory learning as a development strategy
focuses on non-formal human rights learning in which the human
rights educator’s role is that of “facilitator” rather than “teacher.”
This approach is particularly appropriate to human rights as it
involves analysis of power relations, especially those that limit the
realization of human rights in the context of local communities.
More specifically, human rights learning engages the learners in
understanding their own situation, relating the values of human
rights to that understanding, and designing and implementing
strategies to alter the situation in ways that enhance human rights
realization.
Educators would explain that this approach to learning
involves multiple pedagogical objectives, insofar as it seeks
to enhance knowledge, develop critical understanding, clarify
values, change attitudes, promote solidarity and alter behavior
or practice.33 When all six are met, the most important goal can
be achieved: empowerment, which Richard Claude defines as
“a process through which people and/or communities increase
their control or mastery over their own lives and the decisions
that affect their lives.”34 A constant concern of the human rights
educator is that the learners, through the process of identification
and analysis of issues, become aware of their right to know their
rights and especially their right to claim them. It is in this sense
that we refer to human rights education as “transforming beggars
into claimants,” that is, shifting from development as charity to
development as the realization of capabilities. It is therefore
essential that human rights learning activities apply “participatory
methodologies” to provide an experiential foundation for learning.
The learning process, according to this methodology, is not
memorization of information communicated by the instructor, but
an experience through which learners acquire understanding
by engaging in understanding issues, analyzing processes and

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action for social change.

The applications of this approach can take many forms, from
small-group community task forces to the creation of Human
Rights Cities or communities. The concept of human rights
communities, as promoted by PDHRE, is based on the idea of
members of a community accepting human rights obligations in all
aspects of community life, whether in the family, school, market,
cultural activity, law enforcement, in sum, as Lewis Mumford put
it, “where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into
focus.”35 The most forceful examples of human rights essential
to community life relate to respect for the rights of women and
children as defined in the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) regardless of
contrary traditional practices. In sum, human rights principles
apply to all the contexts of social life and Human Rights Cities are
communities that constantly expand and perfect the applications
of these principles.
Together with local human rights and social justice
organizations, educators, and local authorities, PDHRE has
developed methodologies and pedagogies for creating Human
Rights Cities in which human rights provide practical guidelines
for urban development within a human rights framework.

Origin and definition of Human Rights Cities

A Human Rights City is a community, all of whose members-
-from ordinary citizens and community activists to policy-makers
and local officials--pursue a community-wide dialogue and
launch actions to improve the life and security of women, men
and children based on human rights norms and standards. The
process requires mobilizing people’s awareness of their rights to
influence laws, policies, resource allocation and relationships in
ways that effectively realize political, civil, economic, social, and
cultural rights. The human rights framework offers the basis for

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an analysis of institutions and policies, while applying principles

of accountability, transparency, reciprocity, participation, gender
equality and continuous education.
The Human Rights Cities initiative, as developed for more
than a decade by the PDHRE network around the world, is based
on the premise that, for international human rights norms and
standards to be effective, citizens of all countries need to learn
and understand human rights as a framework for sustainable
development of their communities.
In the cities, in-depth learning about human rights and
action for their application can be a tool for social and economic
development. Strategies and methodologies are designed for
implementation by a variety of actors, including governing bodies,
law enforcement agencies, public sector employees, religious
groups, NGOs, and community groups in the city, principally those
concerned with gender issues, children, poverty, education, food,
housing, healthcare, work at livable wages, environment and
conflict resolution.
The Human Rights Cites present a unique response to the
critical issues facing urban areas around the world. Solutions to
the complex problems resulting from climate change, population
density, human migration, violent conflict, environmental
degradation, and a globalized economy must be addressed at
the local, national and international levels. The appeal of human
rights for purposeful action at these levels lies in the acceptance
of human rights as a common language expressing universally
accepted moral principles, capable of being adapted to each local
context. All governments have accepted that everyone is entitled
to a “social and international order in which the rights and freedoms
set forth in this [Universal] Declaration can be fully realized.”36
The Human Rights Cites Program is built on the premise that
the “social order” to which the Declaration refers results from
decisions taken at the grassroots level and reverberates from the
local to the “international order” through changes at a broader

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policy level affecting relations among communities and villages,

provincial, and national authorities and eventually among states.
Action taken by a community is more than local activism to the
extent that it addresses the systemic causes of injustice and
provides a roadmap for constructing a just social order.
With the end of the Cold War, it has become clear to most
thinkers and governments that neither free market solutions
nor socialist planning--neither of which in fact exists in any
pure form--can salvage humanity from the problems mentioned
above. The single moral and legal framework that reconciles and
challenges State-centric and individualist worldviews is provided
by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the norms and
standards built upon it.
Process of establishing and developing
Human Rights Cities
Human Rights Cities are a work in progress, being the direct
expression of the dynamic process of human rights learning
itself, as described above. Each of the Human Rights Cities has
developed in a unique way that is a reflection of the specific social,
economic, historical and cultural dimensions of the community.
The cities generally follow a five-step process of establishment and
development modeled on practices of participatory community-
based research and critical pedagogy:
1. Establish a Steering Committee. Each City sets up a body,
usually called a Steering Committee, representing the main
sectors of society. The Committee functions democratically and
independent of municipal authorities, although in many cases
elected and appointed officials constitute a constructive and
valuable component of the Committee

2. Draft a plan of action. The Steering Committee then develops

specific programs for various audiences. The plan includes the
examination, with a gender perspective, of laws, policies, resource

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allocation and power relations that prevail in the city. Its strategies
and methodologies are designed to have governing bodies, law
enforcement agencies, public sector employees, religious groups,
NGOs and community groups work on such issues as women,
children, workers, indigenous peoples, poverty, education, food,
water, housing, healthcare, environment and conflict resolution.
The plan of action links the priorities of the community to learning
and reflecting about human rights as significant to the decision-
making process. This effort includes developing curricula,
workshops, training of trainers, research and development of
written and visual educational materials, and other media.Implicit
in this process is the systemic analysis of challenges facing the
city in realizing human rights and the linkages of those challenges
to broader national and global issues.

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3. Implement learning activities and other action. For that

purpose, the Steering Committee and as many sub-committees
as are necessary, create a vertical and horizontal progressive
learning process. Step-by-step, neighborhoods, schools, political,
economic and social institutions, and NGOs, examine the human
rights framework and relate it to their traditional beliefs, collective
memory and aspirations with regard to environmental, economic
and social justice issues and concerns. As agents of change they
learn to identify, mentor, monitor and document their needs and
engage in one of the most important action in the city: developing
an alternative participatory budget. Training and other activities
take place in schools, homes, community centers and through
sports activities, the transactions of daily business, churches
and other places of worship, workplaces, marketplaces, and in
the practice of customs, traditions and artistic creation. Learning
results in action that engages the community in social and
economic transformation.

4. Evaluate the work of the Human Rights City. The Steering

Committee is responsible for monitoring and evaluating the
outcomes and effectiveness of the learning activities. The
evaluation process is ideally carried out at all levels of the
community. Such evaluation enhances the understanding of the
linkages and complexity of social dynamics and can leverage
expectations for well being in the community. Members of the
Steering Committee can take responsibility to design and apply
the monitoring and evaluation tool or they can use tools provided
by funders as part of the reporting obligations. In both cases
identify areas where improvements can be made.
5. Publicize and expand the effort. As positive results
are obtained and documented, many Human Right Cities have
been able to publicize their experience throughout the country
and assist other communities in adapting the model to their own
settings. They share resources with the emerging new cities and

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help them consolidate plans to move through the above steps.

The process of sharing experiences among Human Rights Cities
in difference parts of the world is done through virtual networking,
seminars and existing global networks focused on women, the
environment, and other issues.
All five components of the program share the common
objective of contributing to a process of societal development
based on the change of attitudes of citizens, officials and
organizations, guided by human rights. A critical component of
the plan of action phase is what is called a “mapping exercise,”
during which the participants develop their own assessment of
power relations, often symbolized by the geographical location of
clinics, religious structures, municipal offices, military and police
barracks, proximity of transportation and schools, and similar
elements of the spatial configuration of the community, which
is often the stimulus for participants assessing themselves the
obstacles to the full enjoyment of their human rights. Through this
mapping exercise, they can better design a plan of action that will
address and hopefully transform power relations in ways that are
conducive to the realization of human rights.
It is in this sense that we describe Human Rights Cities as
a strategy of urban development through civic engagement.
The long-term goal is that social actors across the spectrum
reach a consensus on human rights as a framework for societal
development, with respect for cultural diversity. The approach and
results of each of these steps varies from one social context to the
next. It is therefore the lived experience that defines what Human
Rights Cities are and is the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 3
National experiences
with human rights cities

What we learned about human rights allowed us

to reduce misunderstandings among ourselves.
Before, we married women, and looked at them as
slaves. Now we understand, we each have roles in
the family. Women now understand they are equal,
ands men agree with it. (Man from Human Rights
City of Kati, Mali)

We want human rights to be discussed in the

newspapers, radio and television to motivate people
to take actions for human rights for all the people in
the city. (Women from Human Rights City of Rosario,
Argentina)

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The experience of PDHRE

PDHRE, the implementing agency of the Human Rights
Cities Program, has organized or facilitated seminars, workshops
and training-of-trainers programs and projects in human
rights education for social and economic transformation since
1989, working in more than 60 countries. PDHRE’s network
is continuously training community leaders in human rights
principles and activities and raising their awareness to gender
and other issues so that they can mobilize their communities and
improve living conditions through action. PDHRE has associates
and partners in Africa, South Asia, Asia Pacific, Latin America and
Europe engaged in training based on human rights norms and
principles adapted to the specific cultural and social contexts in
which they operate. PDHRE is engaged in building capacity both
through the training of trainers and through community organizing
to achieve sustainability and long-term impact. Trainees are
carefully selected after a selection committee develops specific
profiles to meet the needs and through outreach to local NGOs
who submit their candidates.
However, PDHRE acts as no more than a facilitator. The
full responsibility for planning and running Human Rights Cities
rests with the local communities. Anticipating the more detailed
discussion of the experience of Human Rights Cities worldwide,
we will illustrate to degree of local ownership of the process with
the cases of Argentina, Ghana, and Mali.
The first was Rosario, Argentina, which has been a Human
Rights City since June 30, 1997. Since the people of Rosario
proclaimed theirs a Human Rights City, they have expanded
learning and action in accordance with their growing needs. In
1998 the range of participating local institutions and organizations
was enlarged. It adopted an ambitious action plan, including a
Court on the Violation of Girls’ Human Rights, a Training Seminar
on Girls’ Human Rights, the publication and diffusion of the
book Boys and Girls’ Human Rights, the shooting of three short

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films on boys and girls’ human rights, human rights training of

the police and a report on the ill-treatment and persecution of
transvestites and prostitutes. In 1999 financial support from the
Ford Foundation made it possible to continue with the cooperation
of 12 organizations and individuals who constituted a Coordinating
Council of the Human Rights City. That year’s activities included
a Congress on Human Rights Education for teachers, a Seminar
on City Security and Human Rights, and a Children’s Contest
to paraphrase the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 50
schools of the city (1,000 children attended the final ceremony).
In 2000, the main activities included contributing a chapter to the
Shadow Report submitted to the Human Rights Committee on
Argentina’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, Human Rights Training Workshops in the
Toba community of Rosario, and a traveling cinema supported
by the Inter-American Development Bank. In 2001, examples of
activities expanded to a participatory budget for the City Council,
a seminar with the participation of 60 principals of the Teachers’
Training Colleges of the province of Santa Fe, a series of movie
debates on women’s human rights co-organized with grassroots
NGOs, unions, and community organizations and a project
with the participation of the Toba community. On December
10, 2001, human rights organizations, legislators and teachers’
union representatives (AMSAFE) lobbied successfully for the
enforcement of a provincial law that establishes human rights
education as a compulsory school subject.
Another example is the Bongo District in Ghana in 2008
where community human rights activists, women’s organizations
and religious leaders united their advocacy efforts to ban the
dehumanizing practice of traditional widow’s rights that obliges
the woman to be stripped naked in public. Along with the abolition
of these rites are programs for equal distribution of inheritance
land and greater access to education for women and girls.

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Project identification in the case of each Human Rights City

grew out of intensive planning meetings of the Steering Committee
and processes with stakeholders in different combinations to
identify needs and set indicators of progress, which depend
on the development environment. These have included NGO
activists and community leaders, human rights activists, labor
representatives, women’s and children’s groups, indigenous
groups, the academic and religious communities, educators,
local authorities both in their political and executive capacities,
government agencies involved in development of the specific city,
and PDHRE as a partner throughout the process, with UNDP
assisting in the design of the various projects.
A third example is Mali, where Mali-PDHRE, UNDP Mali,
UNESCO, UNICEF, the Malian National Commission for UNESCO,
the Canadian Embassy, and the Ministry of Justice worked with
other human rights focal points to design the program. The
Human Rights City of Kati established a working committee of 32
people chosen from among 200 originally selected by members
of the community. In Ghana, stakeholders included chiefs and
Queen mother, members of Parliament, men’s, women’s, youths
and community groups. In other instances stakeholders met with
representatives of other UN agencies or bilateral donors.
Human rights learning and action develop concurrently in
the Human Rights Cities. Two elements stand out as strong
determinants in the scope of action: the strength and commitment of
the parenting organization (usually translated into the composition
of the Steering Committee) and the degree to which the Human
Rights City is supported financially or though the will of its citizens.
Financial support can mean a large grant from a bilateral donor
or the allocation of an office space in the municipality—in other
words, moral support must be matched by material support.

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Representative Case Studies of HR Cities

For more than a decade the initiative to make human rights
learning the foundational core of societal development has been
implemented in disparate urban centers and with varying results.
An examination of the formation and history of Human Rights
Cities in Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America will
record some of the achievements as well as the challenges these
fledgling cities still face.
A. Human Rights Cities in Africa
More than in any other region Africa has seen the flourishing
of Human Rights Cities. Although one could be tempted to group
all the cities into a single category this would be a mistake. While
certain similarities exist among the critical issues encountered in
each city, the local and national histories, culture and external
condition conditions, such as climate change and environmental
sustainability, not to mention the history of conflict – both internal
and external- have made categorization of these fifteen African
Human Rights Cities impossible.
1. Ghana
The Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a respected Ghanaian
non-governmental organization with a strong human rights
mission, provided the leadership for the creation of Human
Rights Cities in Ghana. The mission of the LRC is to build human
rights capacity for groups and individuals with a view to helping
expand the frontiers of democratic development in Ghana within
the framework of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana. Inherently
embedded in the core mission of the LRC is the deployment and
utilization of essential skills of Research, Advocacy and Advisory
Services (RAAS), and bridging the gap between grassroots
democratic and governance institutions and their counterparts
at the national level. This approach proved to be an excellent fit
withthe model and mission of the Human Rights Cities movement.
All activities carried out by the LRC fall under either of the two

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main programs, Human Rights Cities (HRCs) and RAAS, which

are complementary.
The existing Human Rights Cites, Nima, Maamobi and
Newtown and Bongo and Walewale, are all in communities where
LCR had established offices. They are located is vastly different
settings, Nima, Maamobi and Newtown are urban communities
in Accra, while Bongo and Walewale are located in the upper
east and northern regions of the country close to the border with
Burkina Faso.
Nima, Maamobi and Newtown

Historical Background of the Human Rights Cities

Nima, Maamobi and Newtown are neighboring communities
located within the urban center of Accra. These communities are
urban slums. They are mainly settler neighborhoods historically
providing temporary accommodation for small-scale merchants
from other parts of West Africa and Africa as a whole. Most
dwellers in these communities were veterans from World War
II. As the number of people seeking accommodation in these
areas increased, some people eventually settled and made these
areas their homes. Nima, Maamobi and Newtown have all the
characteristics of urban slums. The communities are heavily
congested with little or no planning for social amenities. There
is a varied group of ethnic and religious populations in these
communities.
The potential of Nima, Maamobi and Newtown as a Human
Rights City became compelling shortly after the LRC began work
there in 1998. Relying somewhat on its researchers’ bias, they
chose Nima, Maamobi and Newtown as one of the communities
to work towards implementation of its programs for the realization
of the human rights, particularly the economic, social and cultural
rights of the inhabitants of the area. Clearly, the LRC’s choice of
Nima, Maamobi and Newtown was informed by the fact that these

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areas are recorded in national statistics as among the poorest

neighborhoods in Ghana.
The normal struggles (absence of potable drinking water,
irregular supply of electricity, high insecurity, absence of places
of convenience, sanitation problems, high crime rates and so
forth) in the daily lives of the people of Nima, Maamobi and
Newtown provided ample evidence that there was a lack of
human rights knowledge (substantive and processes) within
these communities.
Developing the Human Rights City
After an initial building of stakeholder confidence in the
processes that it intended to use in its work with the communities,
the LRC began public human rights education on topical issues
as identified by a combined team of young lawyers, social
scientists and community members. LCR convened a Community
Leaders Forum in 1999-2000. This group was converted into a
steering committee when the HRC was declared in 2001. Several
stakeholders have been involved of the processes leading to the
establishment of the Nima, Maamobi and Newtown HRCs. Some
of these actors included chiefs, women groups, youth groups, civil
servants within the community, lawyers and human rights activists,
interns working with LRC, LRC staff, ethnic leaders, police and
army officers, representatives from associations of persons with
disability, and school authorities.
The HRC works through a Steering Committee, which is not
as effective as could have been. The weakness of the steering
committee is due to the difficulty of its members to commit their
time, especially over the long-term, to the program. It does,
nevertheless, effectively apply participatory approaches to
problem solving. The LRC’s interventions in these communities
led to the use of formal and informal structures for the resolution
of many of the problems of the communities.

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The critical issues in Nima, Maamobi and Newtown

The critical human rights issues within the Nima, Maamobi
and Newtown HRCs cover practically the whole gamut of the
international human rights norms. They include civil and political
rights violations with police brutalities as a key concern for the
community. The human rights violations also cover economic,
social and cultural rights such as access to justice, titling, and
housing rights of the people of Nima, Maamobi and Newtown.
There are further concerns of sanitation, the right to health, and
reproductive rights issues for women. Issues concerning the right
to education, particularly at the basic level, are also of concern to
these communities as there is limited number of public schools
in these areas with the result that as poor as the majority of
the population is, they are forced to send their wards to private
schools.
New Ideas and Innovations in Nima, Maamobi and Newtown
Some of the innovative ideas include using the community-
based organizations within these cities as the medium by which
change must come or be achieved. The LCR used the strategy of
directly soliciting community-based organizations (CBOs) to join
in with citizen engagement programs. The main organization that
joined in the Nima, Maamobi are the Federation of Youth Clubs
(FYC), Muslim Family Counseling Services, Red Cross Mothers’
Club of Nima and Mamobi and Gender Action Unit.
Through extensive training and sensitization these community
organizations now directly engage with government functionaries
in the pursuit of their interests. An example is the way in which
the organizations met with police and local officials to stop police
brutality directed in particular towards young men and boys. This
had been an ongoing concern and joint meetings gave the ordinary
person opportunities to contribute to shape the development
agenda of their communities. Having gathered the information
and formulating a strategy makes it easier for people to go to

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authorities. Acting as a community gives them strength and using

the human rights framework creates a powerful purpose.
Collective problem solving involves having the people identify
the problems, prioritize their needs and lay out the strategies. In
principle this allows the community to sustain an action and build
upon it. There is still room for improvement because LCR is often
called upon to intervene.
The ability of community members to identify human rights
violations and seek redress signifies progress as in the case of
police relations in the community. As a result there is an improved
relation between community leadership and several other
important stakeholders such as the Police and other informal
security operatives.
Use of formal and informal structures for dispute resolution is
one of the strengths of the program. Rather than go directly to the
court system, the people in the community use less formal means
for information gathering, such as, conversation with people who
are directly and indirectly concerned with the problem. Once they

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have enough information they rely on negotiation, mediation and

arbitration; only relying on court action as a last resort.
Future Plans–Nima, Maamobi and Newtown
The future of Human Rights City in Nima and Maamobi
communities is bright but has a lot of challenges in terms of
dealing with the youth provided the right and adequate resources
will be available.
Citizens-government engagement process interlinks with
issues of human rights and the formation of a Human Rights City.
It is therefore prudent that people are given more training and
develop greater sensitivity to human rights concepts.
The LRC being the institution that initiated the course of
human rights city in these communities provides space and other
logistics at the disposal of the program for both administrative
and activity purposes. The offices are open to the community and
create a space that legitimizes the existence of HRC. In addition
the contact with diverse people including lawyers, students,
community leaders and ordinary citizens promotes dialogue and
knowledge sharing.
Bongo and Walewale
The Bongo and Walewale communities in the Upper East
and Northern regions of Ghana have incidents of poverty and
other elements similar to the Nima, Maamobi and Newtown
communities. The idea of forming these HRCs came as a result
of demands from these communities for services from the LRC to
meet their developmental and poverty reduction issues. The role
of the LRC was to play a facilitator role as opposed to running the
show for the community. LRC’s intent was to keep alive the desire
of the community and all stakeholders to make a declaration of
their communities as human rights cities. The LRC conducted
knowledge sharing sessions on human rights as it relates to
development within the communities.

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The unique characteristics of these cities are the high level of

commitment to the idea of forming an HRC and preparedness to
undertake HR training. It is noteworthy that about 60 to 70 percent
of the people in these communities are illiterates and hold very
fast to the practice of their cultural rites. Some of these cultural
practices are dehumanizing. An example is the widowhood rites
practice in the Bongo community which involves stripping women
naked and taking riverside baths in the presence of all community
members including the widow’s own children. In Walewale, there
were complaints of child abuse and neglect by fathers, especially
for the upkeep of their children.
The Bongo/Walewale Human Rights Cities commenced
in May 2005 by the LRC following the Nima, Maamobi and
Newtown model. The LRC conducted research in these areas on
local knowledge of human rights and good governance issues.
It became necessary to establish the HRC in these communities
because human rights learning was almost non-existent. There
were also considerations of the alarming levels of poverty in these
communities.
The commencement of the HRC followed a series of
meetings and trainings on human rights learning. In particular,
in 2003 and 2004, the LRC facilitated a series of human rights
education workshops in Bongo and Walewale. These training
sessions involved the introduction of new concepts, which helped
the participants to identify the problems affecting them in the
community and to indicate the agency responsible for fixing the
problem and how these problems manifest themselves in the
community. The LRC believes in collective participation of the
participants to help resolve their problems rather than seeing the
LRC as coming to resolve those problems.
These initiatives were taken within the context of the
mandate of the LRC to build human rights capacities for groups
and individuals in most of the deprived communities in Ghana.
Within the context of the LRC Strategic Plan, the LRC envisions

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conducting a nationwide education and sensitization program on

human rights principles and the practical benefits of living by them
on a daily basis.
As in the case of Nima, Maamobi and Newtown, the
affairs of the Bongo and Walewale HRCs are managed by
steering committees comprising stakeholders from traditional
authorities, and identifiable local groups. These organizations
include in Walewale the Human Rights City and Neighbour in
Need Foundation. In Bongo they are Gowrie United Front for
Development and the Bongo Human Rights City.
The HRCs work hand in hand with the local government
structures including the District Assembly, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) as well as other institutions like the
Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice
(CHRAJ) and National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE).
The critical issues in the HR City­–Bongo and Walewale
The critical issues for the Bongo and Walewale HRC do not
vary greatly from those of Nima, Maamobi and Newtown. Specific
examples of these issues are the high rate of child abuses,
violation of women’s rights through some cultural practices such
widowhood rites. Other specific areas of concern include the right
to education for the boy child, particularly because these boys
are used as shepherds, farmhands. There are also health related
concerns. Populations in the thousands of people have only one
doctor to attend to anyone. Other concerns included bad cultural
practices such as female genital mutilation, early marriages,
widowhood rites, deprivation of women from inheritance, and
refusal of men to allow women to own property.
New Ideas and Innovation
The Human Rights City established an Alternative Dispute
Resolution Centre (ADR) in these communities to provide a
medium for an amicable resolution of problems. This center

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along with massive education on human rights in the community

is changing the way the way ordinary citizens see themselves
and interact with local authorities. The LRC, in collaboration with
management of the Human Rights City,has established a Human
Rights City Office to educate and inform the people. One notable
achievement in Bongo is the abolishing of the degrading cultural
practice of widowhood rites. It is now unlawful for widows to be
subjected to traditional widows rites Bongo District. Activist from
the human rights city, LCR and other human rights organizations
advocated for the abolition of these rights.

As another example of civic engagement in the Human Rights

City, take the issue of public health, which had long been ignored
by the government administration in Bongo. The Bongo Human
Rights City was determined to make the National Health Insurance
Scheme (NIHS) pro-poor, and planned to educate the community,
encourage de-politicized popular support, and increase the
effectiveness of channels of communication. They succeeded in
gaining all their objectives, which led to mass registration of people
above the elderly and young children for health insurance.

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General Outlook for the Human Rights Cities in Ghana

The public interest activities and litigation, which take place
within the human rights cities naturally, generate a lot of interest
in members of the public. Some of the issues are generated by
persons who have attended programs organized by the LRC.
Practice in the human rights cities illustrates that working
towards the realization of human rights means working towards
achieving human dignity for all manner of people irrespective of
their gender, nationality, race, social status and so forth.It also
means working towards achieving the aims of those who drafted
the International Covenants and other major human rights treaties,
which codified the norms as contained in the soft law provisions of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Human Rights Cities initiative, as developed by the
PDHRE network around the world, is based on the premise that
for international human rights norms and standards to be effective
citizens of all countries must understand human rights as a
framework for sustainable development of their communities. This
approach has been particularly useful in Ghana in fostering civic
engagement to move society toward dignity for all people.
2. Kenya
Background
Korogocho is a low-income informal settlement (commonly
known as an urban slum), which is located on government land.
It has been in existence since 1952. However, according to the
government, the people are settled there illegally. Korogocho is
divided into nine villages, which are inhabited by people from
across Kenyan society. There is a significant presence of Luo,
Kikuyu, Borana and Somali ethnic groups, all of whom have
diverse cultural practices.
As Korogocho is the third largest slum in Kenya with a
population of over 100,000 residents it is considered one of

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the most densely populated areas in East Nairobi. Poor living

conditions are almost universally prevalent and have taken a toll
on most people. HIV/AIDS is a major problem as it is throughout
Kenya. Many children are orphaned or living in a household where
the adult is stricken with the disease. Malaria, tuberculosis and
other diseases resulting from lack of proper sanitation or clean
water are common and can attribute for the high rate of infant and
child mortality.
People suffer immeasurable burden ranging from
impoverishment to inequalities in relation to human rights. Civic
participation in decision-making has been negligible. The youth,
who form the greatest population, live in a lot of insolvency as they
are poor, illiterate, and unemployed, affected by crime, substance
abuse and so on. Further, they are faced with a multitude of
stereotypes that deny them the opportunity and support to
articulate their issues and implement them.
Experiences and previous studies conducted in Korogocho
indicate that ignorance and lack of knowledge contribute greatly

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to the human rights violations. The most common are police

harassment, domestic violence, child abuse, lack of education,
malnutrition, lack of proper shelter and sanitation, maternal health
issues, personal security, participation and decision making.
Mobilizing the Community
The Miss Koch Initiative was founded in 2001 as a renaissance
movement of the Korogocho youth. It was established by the
youth of Korogocho who came together to respond to violations
of girl and women’s rights that were then rife in the area then.
Since its inception Miss Koch has evolved from the search of
the girls’ emancipation to the fundamental transformation of the
entire Korogocho community and is registered as a self-help
group under the Ministry of Social Services. The organization is
widely supported in the community having as its vision, “To create
a society that respects and promotes wholesome development
of its male and female members.” The organization is dedicated
to improving education, developing and empowering girls, raising
community awareness of the rights of girls, creating opportunities
for social and economic development of the community and
developing AIDS awareness programs.
It was on this background that Miss Koch introduced the
Human Rights City program after having learned of it from the
director of the PDHRE-Human Rights Cities in Ghana. The
realization that ignorance of their own human rights was one of
the greatest impediments to social and economic development
moved Miss Koch in the direction of becoming a Human Rights
City. A first step was taken by contacting community leaders and
heads of organizations and associations to participate in a two-
day workshop in May 2006 that introduced human rights learning
and provided the direction for the Human Rights City.These
community leaders were designated to become human rights
educators throughout the community.

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Developing the Human Rights City

Following the May workshop a steering committee was
formed that brought together elders, community leaders of all
ages, representatives from local organizations and religious
organizations. The committee and the community were united in
their belief that “knowledge is power.” They realized that more
resources were available than reached the community and that
the powerful human resources in the community itself had never
been tapped into adequately. Therefore, spreading knowledge of
human rights – especially the social and economic elements –
and building the capacity of people in the community to cooperate
with one another regardless of ethnicity, status or age, to create
partnerships with international NGOs and government agencies,
learn to analyze and plan projects effectively and present
compelling arguments for their needs were actions that could be
undertaken by the Miss Koch-Human Rights City. By using the
existing programs already developed by Miss Koch and reframing
them in a human rights context, the new program would have
greater unity, a wider community involvement and could easily
reach out to other communities in Kenya through the common
language (and issues) imbued by human rights.
Community Learning Forums were instituted to have people
learn about their human rights in all nine neighborhoods.
Teaching and learning through theatre, music and dance were
widely used. A community radio, Koch fm, had become an
exciting presence in Korogocho and now began broadcasting
programs about human rights and the Human Rights City. The
radio station and the office of Miss Koch- HRC are adjacent to a
vast open space known as the Community Centre. This is also
the site of the community-build and operated health clinic, the
chief’s office, the police building and the community building. The
open space is the heart of the community. Periodically women
come here to perform their traditional tribal dances and display

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their handicrafts. Young people hold dances and competitions

here. These events are recent and speak of a new-found pride in
traditions the many migrants brought from home. It is also a way
of entertaining a dialogue across generations. The street lights, a
rarity in Korogocho, illuminate the night and benefit public safety,
especially for women and girls.
While robberies and rape still occur the previously high
frequency of these acts has been somewhat curtailed through
the formation of street security guards. Young, unemployed
youth often broke into the rickety shacks or accosted people
on the streets at night. Many of these youth have been enlisted
into a corps of guards whose role is to protect the community.

The inhabitants regularly pay into a fund and a small amount is

given to each guard along with an identifying tee-shirt. Besides
improving security, this practice gives the youth a positive status
in the community.
Many such accomplishments are underway and show the
vitality of the people as they refuse to accept the dominant

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stereotypes. The image of Korogocho and in many ways the

prevailing reality, is one of poverty and danger. Taxis refuse to
enter the community. One instance in which this fear compounds
the danger to the community occurs in the case of women giving
birth. Most often women facing a difficult delivery or who are
infected with HIV/AIDS cannot reach a hospital because there
simply is no way out.
Progress and Accomplishments
Human rights training tended to focus on the themes that
intersected with principle concerns and programs begun in the
community by Miss Koch. These programs gave form, in effect,
to actions that could be described as social and economic
transformation. Several examples will illustrate how the community
programs were related to social and economic human rights and
to good governance.
Understanding the broad scope of fulfillment of the human
right to health and then acting upon this knowledge is a priority. As
previously mentioned there is a significant rate of people suffering
from AIDS. Many are widows themselves or single parents
who were heads of households. Donor organizations provide
food—although not enough for daily nourishment—but getting
the food from the distribution area to the household is difficult if
not impossible when a person is too sick to walk a distance. In
addition the AIDS medication if taken without food has serious
side effects. Realizing the problem, a committee of women and
girls was formed to assure the food distribution and to see that it
was cooked, that the dependents in the family were fed and that
water was brought to the house.
No permanent medical institution existed in Korogocho that
offered daily service. With sporadic assistance from international
NGOs and other organizations the people themselves built a
small clinic that offered AIDS testing, emergency care first aid, and
medication for common illnesses, such as, malaria, dysentery, and

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dehydration. Several people from the community were trained to

give first aid and dispense medications. The steering committee
has written several grant proposals for specific education in the
right to health coupled with a request for a qualified nurse to be
on site several days a week. The post–election conflict scuttled
these plans for the immediate. Simply receiving the funds and
resources was seen as unsustainable without the complement of
human rights training. As one community activist put it, “If we get
something that is nice but we will not understand that this is our
human right and we will not know that we must make sure that we
will always have what is our right. Some people think that what
other people have and they do not have is by luck; they don’t
know that it is for everyone.”
Water scarcity is big problem in the community. Tanks of
potable water must be brought into the community. Locally elected
officials had control of the water distribution, which was free,
however, the water arrived irregularly and the distribution was
never equal. People took for granted the corrupt and inefficient
service of water distribution until Miss Koch –Human Rights City
members investigated the system and realized that they had the
right to the water and that arbitrary distribution was not the way it
was intended to work. Once they understood their rights people
took control of contacting the water providers and distributing it
throughout the community. They charged each user a nominal
fee to guarantee that those in charge would carry out their duties
correctly and would not be tempted by bribes or selling water at
a market rate.
Violence committed against women and girls and the status of
widows, women and girls in Korogocho has remained an important
issue. This was one of the prime motives for the creation of Miss
Koch and it has not been ignored in human rights training. In fact,
the rights of women are a cross-cutting theme and one that is
strongly affirmed by the many women and girls who participate in
the activities of the programs.

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Although Korogocho is an informal settlement, residents

hold elections and have representatives who have political and
administrative relations with government and municipal offices
in Nairobi. In anticipation of the December 2007 elections,
community activists created a human rights report card that
scored the candidates on the basis of their human rights record.
They also held a voter awareness campaign to encourage people
to vote and to convince them that by voting they could influence
policy. Engaging the voters in the process of critically assessing
the merits of the candidates – presidential and other- rather than
voting along ethnic and regional lines, was their goal.
Interrupted Plans
Preceding the 2007 elections, teams from the Human Rights
City were active in getting people to understand the meaning of
the right to vote and publishing human rights “report cards” of
the candidates. When the violence erupted it seemed miraculous
that Korogocho was spared the deaths and destruction suffered
in the neighboring slums. The people in Korogocho acted in

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solidarity with one another regardless of ethnic origins. Only two

of the eight villages of Korogocho were affected by the violence
and the attacks came from outsiders. People from the Human
Rights City played a positive role: They participated in the peace
dialogue and facilitated strategic sessions for building peace
and preventing further violence. Young people performed street
theater promoting respect for human rights and their community
radio, Koch fm, kept broadcasting a peace message and collected
donations for people who fled to Korogocho and the camps to
escape the violence in the neighboring slums. Now the entire
community is engaged in trauma healing and trying to find ways
to maintain their community.
Aftermath and Rebuilding
The future of the Human Rights City is very important. Poverty
is worse than it has ever been and people are afraid to go out
to look for work and food. The Human Rights City headquarters
has moved into temporary offices after the former office was
destroyed during the violence. The Committee has made plans
to begin human rights training in a more decentralized way.
Since normal daily routines are still uncertain they are planning
to introduce Human Rights Cafés, which are training sessions
run by a facilitator where people congregate during the day. For
example, sessions can be held for those who shine shoes where
they are located, and adapted to other groups who do not have
free time and are not stable. The lack of resources is preventing
an immediate start of this project.
Yet, despite the dire situation, the people of the community
approached Rose Nyawira, head facilitator of the Human Rights
City and insisting that they restart the activities, “This is a noble
idea, it will never die. People will come and go BUT the idea is
here to stay, it is part of our life now and it will remain with us.”
Rose insists, “People in Korogocho have taken up the idea of the
Human Rights City and they will keep it alive.”

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3. Rwanda
Background
Fabien Kanyangusho Karamira, a consultant in Ministry of
Justice in Rwanda, was impressed by the developments taking
place in the Human Rights Cities that he witnessed during
training programs held in Mali. Others shared Karamira’s idea
that bringing human rights learning to all people in the community
was quite simply the only way to draw upon the existing resources
to restore the tattered social fabric that remained following the
genocide. Tutsi people experienced genocide atrocities. 4256
people were killed in the catholic church of Musha; many others
were massacred in their homes and places where they took
refuge. The Genocide Memorial Site contains countless remains
of genocide remainders. Today there are 50,875 survivors of
genocide in Musha administrative sector
Rwanda had nearly recovered its pre-1994 economic capacity
by 2005, but this has not been the case in Musha. The mines
are no longer exploited for cassiterite, coltan, and gold, although
some miners still go down to the mines despite the grave risks.
The local population has been thrown into deep poverty living
mainly on agriculture. Added to the extreme poverty other
consequences of the violent upheaval include an elevated rate
of illiteracy, violence against women and children, child labor and
prostitution, inadequate healthcare and discrimination. This last
problem was especially significant as it included some of the most
vulnerable groups, such as, orphans, widows, pygmies or Batwa
people, the mentally and physically handicapped, people with
HIV/AIDS and people whose family members had been involved
in the genocide.
The founding nucleus of the first Human Rights City in
Rwanda, registered their organization, People’s Movement for
Human Rights Education in Rwanda (MPEDH/RWANDA°), and
began to build on those attributes that would enable Musha

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to become a Human Rights City. Musha, located due east of

Kigali, is easily accessible by road and has an infrastructure
that can handle communication and outreach. Local authorities
are supportive of the Human Rights City initiative as is the local
population. Most importantly the founding members are driven by
a great deal of determination and dedication to make the program
work for the people of Musha. The Musha Human Rights City
project was officially launched on October 29, 2007, presided by
the Representative of the Mayor of Rwamagana District, the vice
Mayor in charge of economics affairs. Local authorities see in the
Human Rights City of Musha a important support for the policy of
good governance, a principle to which Rwanda is committed. That
is why the authorities are committed to support the project. The
President of the steering committee is the counselor of Musha
sector.
Building the Human Rights City
The first step and one that required careful thought and
planning was to bring together representative of the entire Musha
population. The genocide and its consequences, was the veil
that enveloped all considerations. Imagine the will it took to bring
together genocide survivors and relatives and children of those
who carried out the genocide. Or to open a dialogue between
the police, who had little tolerance for children, and youth left to
care for their own welfare and these children who were left to

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fend for themselves by any means. All strata of society—farmers,

women, religious leaders, local authorities, police and civil society
organizations needed—to define their work and common goals.
All these people needed to see themselves as part of the Human
Rights City. Through discussion and meetings in the extended
group and in their communities they identified the key problems
listed above.
They concluded that social integration was a first step
towards moving forward to build a human rights community. This
meant bringing into the steering committee the people who were
marginalized, among these; people living with HIV/AIDS, orphans,
widows, people with disabilities, those who escaped the genocide
and pygmies (Batwa people).
Eliminating discrimination against women is a high priority.
Although the political will supports promotion of woman in Rwanda,
and has taken policy steps to assure this, such as imposing a
quota of 30 percent to women in posts of decision makers, offering
access to education and encouraging NGO mobilization in favor
of women’s rights, Rwandan woman still face a number of serious
problems. Most of them live in extreme poverty. Certain traditional
values hinder women’s participation in development due to the
lack of motivation in family planning, use of traditional agro-
pastoral methods, food habits leading to malnutrition, and refusal
to send girls to school. Women do not have access to preventive
medical care and are victims of gender-based violence.
Children have endured great hardship in Musha. So many
children, mainly genocide orphans, are heads of households in
Musha that their situation is among the most urgent. Allowing
these children (and all children) access to education is not only a
current need but one that will have an big impact on the future life
of the community.
Normally, the primary school education is guaranteed to
every child. However, several factors hinder the progressive
realization of “education for all’’. Obviously orphans receive little

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encouragement to go to school and their main job is looking after

their own and their brothers’ and sisters’ survival. They cannot
pay for materials or fees. Poor parents as well are unable to pay
some supplementary fees designed for motivating teachers;
children’s work is considered as a source of income for very poor
households like those of widows.
Poverty is a national challenge that Rwandans face. According
to official statistics, 65 percent of Rwandan people live below
poverty line. Poverty is very high in rural areas like Musha where
the only source of incomes is agriculture, which cannot generate
enough income to ensure the life of peasants. Even if they do
cultivate the land it is never enough and traditional farming
methods are often inefficient. In Musha as everywhere in the
country, access to land is the main source of conflicts. Vulnerable
groups, among them, widows and genocide orphans, the very
aged people supporting families, handicapped people are in need
of particular attention.
Once the priorities were identified the next step was to
examine the laws that protected these groups from a human

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rights perspective, including; the Constitution of the Republic of

Rwanda, and laws related to poverty reduction, children, women,
gender-based violence and national policies towards education,
work, gender and health. This is an ongoing activity and one that
increases its relevance as it translates into action.
Human rights learning in the community goes hand in hand with
the drive towards building a coherent, unified and caring society.
While any categorization by ethnicity, region or race is strictly
forbidden in Rwanda, there remains the need for understanding
the human rights of various groups who are discriminated against
and for those who have particular needs because of their identity.
Therefore, community training in the human rights of women,
children, people with disabilities, indigenous peoples and freedom
of religion was carried out. In addition programs emphasizing
the advances made through the national process of unity and
reconciliation—ongoing since 1999—were incorporated into the
Human Rights City along with training in conflict resolution and
mediation. A warning system of potential conflicts was set up
to sensitize the members of the community to any threatening
symptoms. In designing learning activities and action plans the
steering committee has taken advantage of existing programs in
order to unify efforts. This is especially important in view of the
lack of material resources that is a persistent problem.
Accomplishments and Innovations
The Human Rights City Program has been enthusiastically
received and support by Musha’s inhabitants and by local
authorities. Inclusion of a broad, representative part of the
population has allowed for involvement in learning and activities
that otherwise were more restrictive. The fact that people from
different social groups (ordinary citizens, local authorities,
policemen, soldiers, members of different religions, etc.) discuss
human rights for the development of Musha, is building hope for
the whole community. The community must now show that human

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rights are not a utopian idea but a reality.

The model of using a human rights framework for community
development makes a great deal of sense. By offering various
groups the opportunity to have an honest dialogue about the
need that each group and each person has for achieving their
human rights has led to a better understanding of tensions in the
community and the circumstances that could spark a conflict.
Where conflict or potential conflict is identified timely mediation
is now available. Seeing that the most vulnerable groups have
human rights and learning that it is the duty of the community to
protect and restore these rights has put the need for work, schools,
food and healthcare into another perspective. The connection
between realization of human rights in Musha and the role of
good governance has been made through dialogue and mapping
exercises. These ideas that are essential to understanding the
way human rights can work in the community are innovative
and have led to heightened expectations on the part of Musha’s
citizens.
Challenges to Change
Now that human rights are seen as something tangible and
within the reach and expectations of everyone in the community,
people also must face some limitations. Conditions of extreme
poverty make it difficult to have people’s basic needs—food, work,
education and healthcare—fulfilled. Consideration of problems
including greater access to land, rights of succession and the
great number of thefts are all quite urgent.
Violence against women and children remains high. This
includes domestic violence as well as physical and sexual violence
that occurs outside the home.
And then, the underlying conflicts that are tied to the genocide
are still present. Often these tensions are unspoken and, in some
cases, unrecognized or incorrectly identified. Trust needs to be
restored between those who escaped the genocide and families

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who have relatives who took part in the crimes of the genocide.
Many people still feel a need for vengeance.
The continuation of human rights violations in neighboring
Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Kenya have a
destabilizing effect on Rwanda and this in turn filters down to
Musha. Rwanda shares the boundaries with these countries.
Political unrest and insurrection in those countries spill over into
Rwanda. Traffic flow among the countries is nearly impossible to
control. In addition, Rwanda being a landlocked country depends
on Kenya for many of its imports. The traffic of people across
connecting borders, the existence of the same ethnic groups in
Rwanda, Burundi and in the DRC make that the human rights
violations mutually contagious.
Citizens have learned that they can and ought to participate
in finding solutions for conditions that prevent them from fully
realizing their human rights. However, political and administrative
local authorities are wary that the process will infringe on their own
power. There is also some discouragement on the part of ordinary
people that they will ever be able to address the injustices when
they are committed by government officials.
While these obstacles are serious, recognizing their existence
is a positive step. Now that men and women in Musha know their
human rights and are strengthening their ability to take action they
are less likely to become discouraged.
Actions being taken in Musha
Through the human rights learning programs people in the
city have come to see the importance of birth registration. Being
recognized and counted as a citizen in Rwanda is connected to
many advantages linked to basic human rights, such as, education,
healthcare and protection of a child’s rights. The displacement
of the population because of the genocide, the great number of
orphans living without relatives or living with distant relations who
ignore the details of a child’s life, and children born to parents who

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were not married or children born as a result of sexual violence

are among the reasons for a high number of children who have
no form of legal registration. The Human Rights City is carrying
out a program creating awareness among adults and children on
the need for legally registering births. In addition, the action plan
they submitted to local authorities highlights support for genocide
orphans and children heading households, including payment of
school fees, food, clothing, etc. The local authorities are supporting
the initiative. Members of the Musha committee have put together
a similar proposal inclusive of all communities in Rwanda. It is a
good example of the way that a human rights city initiative can
spread to neighboring communities.
Another project on palliative care for people sick with HIV/AIDS
and aged people without family support is in the works. Even if the
mentality about HIV /AIDS has known a tremendous evolution in
Rwanda, there is still prejudice concerning the disease. People
infected with HIV/AIDS are discriminated by those who refuse to
share food, allow their children to play with those who are infected
with HIV or have sick family members, and consider victims to be
sexual delinquents. Women in particular bear this burden as they
have a higher infection rate than men (3.6 percent against 2.3
percent).
The steering committee of the human rights city has built
on the efforts of the Rwandan Government’s unity and national
reconciliation program. These programs, along with the Gacaca
jurisdiction, have helped restore dialogue among genocide
survivors and families whose members were complicit in the
genocide. One deliberate step in this direction was the inclusion
of genocide survivors and families members of jailed génocidaires
as strategic actors in the creation of the human rights city. The
aim of this inclusiveness was reconciliation of different national
components in accordance with Government policy.
The first initiative of the project was bringing together the
different social representative groups to sit around a table to

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exchange ideas on how human rights as a way to self development,

could be applied to Musha. The next step will consist of planning
community actions. One of the actions was training in human
rights and conflict resolution. At the end of the training the group
put in place, a committee in charge of prevention and conflicts
management in Musha.
Community action in the Human Rights City of Musha has
been limited; however, the inclusiveness of the program is in itself
a positive outcome and opens the way for cooperation among
all people. Medium or long-term progress can only be made
when everyone is aware of human rights issues and everyone
is involved in the dialogue. Without the support of local officials it
would be very difficult to move forward, but that is not the case.
The Human Rights City is, at present, perceived as a link in the
national process of reconciliation and development.
4. Mali
History and Background
Mali is among the poorest countries in the world with 64
percent living below the national poverty line, rising to more than
73 percent of the country’s rural population. It ranks 173 out of
177 on the Human Development Index.37 UN-HABITAT estimates
that 31 percent of the population lives in cities with a 93 percent
slum to urban population rate.38 Several successive draughts,
a generally arid climate with greater than one half of the land
desert or semi-desert along with high birth and infant mortality
rates, a high rate of preventable infectious disease are among the
challenges that need to be addressed.
While education is free and compulsory for all children
between the ages of seven and 16, the literacy rate is still less
than 50 percent of the population. Twelve percent of women
are literate and 27 percent of men. Health, education, income
disparity and employment are strong indicators of Mali’s poverty.
Despite this portrait, which mirrors problems facing many

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African countries, commentators both inside and outside the

country have recognized the strength of Mali’s social capital and
associative life. While there are regional variations, Malians, as
a group, have a strong sense of belonging and long history of
consensus building to solve problems. Adherence to local NGOs,
associations, unions, cultural associations, and similar civil society
organizations and the social coherence of families and lineages
supported by reinforcing customs constitute vehicles for people to
make their voices heard.
In 1997 Adama Samassekou, then the Minister of Basic
Education, invited PDHRE to discuss launching a national
program on human rights education. Samassekou met Shulamith
Koenig at a UNESCO conference in Hamburg, Germany, and
was impressed by PDHRE’s approach to learning, inspired by the
theory developed by Paolo Freire in the 1960s. Freire, a Brazilian
philosopher and educator believed that the educator and the
learner must enter into a dialogical and democratic relationship
in order to make social change the goal of learning—change that
corresponded to the needs and vision of the oppressed, thus
bringing into focus an analysis of the power relations in society.
Samassekou recognized that the approach to human rights
learning at the heart of PDHRE’s work was a process of societal
development focusing on social and economic change. He was
attracted to the way PDHRE expanded on the Freirian concept
to make human rights central in the process of analyzing critical
issues facing the community.
At the invitation of Samassekou, two PDHRE members held
a series of open discussions in Bamako in 1997. These meetings
brought together a widely representative and vocal audience
eager to learn more about human rights and apply them to their
daily lives. By 2000, under Samassekou’sleadership, a group of
women and men created a chapter of PDHRE, “PDHRE–Mali,”
with the goal of making Mali a human rights country. This founding
organization included educators and professionals in the fields

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of women’s rights, economics, history, law and the media. Each

was involved in a civil society organization and held professional
positions at established institutions, such as the University of
Bamako, government ministries, information services and the
private sector. All were united by an ardent desire to work toward
the realization of human rights throughout the country. Some of the
people had lived through the transition from the French colonial
regime to independence in 1960. All had witnessed the toppling of
the twenty-year dictatorship of Moussa Traoré led by Lieutenant
Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré (known as “ATT” and elected
president of Mali in 2002 and 2007). The coup was the culmination
of a long struggle carried on by students, unions and political and
civil groups. In 1992, Alpha Oumar Konaré was elected president
of the Third Republic of Mali, an event that brought with it great
promise and the flourishing of civil society through local NGOs,
community radio stations and general civic engagement. In this
atmosphere, the very expression “human rights” was a powerful
symbol, even though the concept was only loosely understood.
Kati, the First Human Rights City in Africa
Individual members of PDHRE-Mali took the lead in developing
the Human Rights Cities, in contrast to the first Human Rights City,
Rosario, where the initiative was based on strong NGOs. Members
of PDHRE in Bamako met frequently to develop a concept of
the Human Rights City that corresponded to local conditions
and culture. The designation they adopted was “Communauté
consensuelle des droits
humains” (“Consensual
Human Rights Community”
(CHRC), a terminology
designed to underscore the
participatory and democratic
approach. Although Mali
remains a largely rural

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country, the capital, Bamako, is the fastest growing city in Africa

with a population of over 1,640,000. The idea of making Bamako
a Human Rights City was considered but then rejected in light of
its unmanageable size and complexity.
Kati, 15 kilometers from Bamako and a thriving market center
with a military garrison appeared more suitable as its population
was approximately 40,000. Several of the key members of
PDHRE-Mali were from or lived in Kati. Among Kati’s advantages
as a potential consensual human rights city were the presence
of a well-developed civil society and coexistence of multiple
religions, combined with the encouragement of social action by
the local municipal administration. In addition, several community
leaders had been trained in community organizing, human rights
and participatory community action. A progressive community
school based on popular education was successful in engaging
the community on local issues and the military garrison and central
market offered an influx of newcomers in the town, who could
spread the word about human rights to their home communities.
Of course, many of the social problems related to poverty,
discrimination, health, education and employment experienced
throughout Mali were present in varying degrees in Kati, thus giving
ample room for human rights-based problem-solving. Members
of PDHRE-Mali began sensitizing local NGOs, associations,
youth clubs, schools, unions and public administrators to positive
potential for social and economic development inherent in the
process of human rights learning.
The mayor and local administrators were strong supporters
of the consensual Human Rights City. Representatives from
the various neighborhoods of Kati along with leaders from
representative organizations, civil society, unions, associations,
and other institutions participated in a dialogue on human rights
in the community. During these sessions PDHRE-Mali described
the process of founding a steering committee and drafting
a charter. Kati was officially declared a Human Rights City on

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December 9, 2000. To underscore the importance of the even,

Her Excellency, Mrs. Adame Ba Konaré, wife of the President,
along with the Ministers of Justice, Education, Labor, Youth and
Women attended the dedication ceremony.
Developing the Consensual Human Rights City
The first task was to assemble the Kati Steering Committee.
PDHRE insisted, and insists generally that all Human Rights
Cities have a ratio of 50 percent women and 50 percent men on
the committee in order to set an example of non-discrimination
and allows a broader human rights perspective than would be the
case in a male dominated committee. The first meeting gathered
representatives from local NGOs concerned with women’s
rights, children, youth, teachers, police, the judiciary, teachers,
students, religious leaders, health care, the military and municipal
representatives, who formed a steering committee.
The Steering Committee chose Kadiatou Keita, one of its
members, to be the chair. That the majority elected a woman to
head the group became a problem,
especially among the traditional
and religious leaders who voiced
their strong objections. If the
Human Rights City was to live up
to its consensus-building goals
and if any substantive work was to
be done in Kati, this group could
not be alienated. A solution was
found by creating a Committee
of Wise Men and appointing the
high-ranking men to this group
where their wisdom and honor
would be respected as consultants to the steering committee.
While the launching of the CHRC in December 2000
captured the attention of Kati’s inhabitants, maintaining the

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momentum became the real challenge. Kati is divided into distinct

neighborhoods, which became the organizing base for human
rights learning. A diverse corps of facilitators, many of whom had
worked as trainers in popular education at the Institute for Popular
Education in Kati, carried out evening sessions on human rights
in each of the neighborhoods. By focusing on issues identified by
the local population discussions led to planning direct community
action based on human rights.
The community radio picked up on the human rights ideas
that resonated throughout the community. A weekly program
had reporters gather and record questions about human rights
from neighborhoods residents. During the live broadcast, invited
specialists would respond to these questions. The personalization
of human rights issues in the community raised awareness as
it underscored the relevance of human rights. This weekly radio
program has continued to have a permanent place in the life of
Kati. In December 2006, the radio held a contest to highlight
knowledge of human rights. The shows were interactive with
listeners winning prizes. The programs were a big success and
motivated the community audience to gain specific knowledge
about their human rights. Of course, human rights learning
involves more than learning facts in order to respond to questions
but the radio shows were effective in generating interest in the
human rights needs of the community.
Mapping Human Rights Issues in Kati
In 2002 a team consisting of members of the Kati Steering
Committee, a UNDP observer, a professor of human rights from
Harvard and a member of the education project team from PDHRE
came to Kati for a two-day seminar. The purpose was to launch
popular human rights learning in the neighborhoods and with the
citizens of Kati develop a model for identifying the urgent issues in
the community. After a briefing and discussion on the implications
of social, economic and cultural human rights, approximately

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seventy people representing the various neighborhoods broke

into groups to map the geographical space and the institutions
that were key to solving problems in the community.
The group presentation of findings was in itself a powerful
testament to the ability of local groups to identify their problems,
correctly analyze the causes (and not merely the symptoms) and
relate these to principles of human rights. For example, most
reports cited the location of the animal market and abattoir and
unrefrigerated meat storage as being a serious violation to the
right to health. This led to discussion of the need for greater
municipal regulation of the food supply and health standards and
the fact that the right to health included guarantees for clean food,
water and proper sanitation and accountability to deliver these
goods to the population.
Using the same mapping process, women participants
identified an issue that should have been evident but was not:
while many women gave birth in their homes, especially in nearby
villages, cases of difficult births came to the local hospital, where
the maternity ward was located up a flight of stairs and therefore
inaccessible! The men had ignored this inconvenient and potentially
dangerous building plan. All persons agreed to investigate ways
of changing the set-up as the discussion grew into a more general
observation that policies and practices regarding women’s health,
especially reproductive health were most often made by people
who were not directly affected. The exercise brought out the
need for better education for men and women about physical and
mental suffering of women, which should not be treated as an
inevitable condition of their gender.
Through identifying challenges to the realization of human
rights, the mapping exercise initiated a dialogue among
inhabitants of Kati and local administrators. This dialogue and the
subsequent action plan launched a process of capacity building of
ordinary citizens, local NGOs and government agents, all of whom
acquired new knowledge, skills and networking behaviors. No less

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important in the process was the introduction of the human rights

language. The human rights framework permitted the integration
of multiple perspectives into problem solving and planning.
Neighborhood groups have continued to be central in the
strategic plan of the Consensual Human Rights City. On September
7-9, 2006, members of the “Neighborhood Human Rights
Education Committees” held a workshop to train a group of human
rights educators in charge of the promotion and enhancement of
human rights learning and understanding at the grassroots level.
The workshop focuses on learning about human rights through
the dynamics of rights and duties of the citizens in their city. This
meeting was followed by a social mobilization and information
campaign on human rights for social transformation through a
change in behaviors and practices in all 14 neighborhoods of
Kati. During the campaign, Kati residents were encouraged to
identify human rights violations occurring in each neighborhood
and helped in finding local solutions to them.
Training and action were not limited to the neighborhoods.
Several meetings and workshops took place to engage municipal
representatives of Kati’s City Hall, administrative agents, and
representatives of civil society organizations in human rights
learning. Training workshops for 30 to 60 neighborhood trainers,
civil society organizations, local administers and guests from
human rights cities in other regions of Mali and West Africa have
been organized on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on
the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and on
the relation of these treaties to human security and strategic
planning.
The Kati-Human Rights Consensual City program plans,
monitors and expands these activities through regular meetings of
the “General Assembly of the Strategic Actors,” the “Operational
Bureau,” and the “Orientation and Coordination Committee.”

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The representative character of these entities reinforces the

involvement in and commitment to the program by a wide range
of social actors.
Effecting Societal Change
A human rights clinic was established in the town and
operated on market days. Kati’s market draws people from a
wide radius of the thirty-seven villages and towns that are part of
the administrative sector, Cercle de Kati, who come to buy and
sell produce, attend the livestock market, visit the two hospitals
and carry out administrative business. The clinic, which is open
to all, began as a designated locality where people could bring
questions about human rights and engage in conflict mediation
based on human rights principles. Issues, such as inheritance
rights—guaranteed to all by the law of the land but skewed by
custom and traditional practices—and equal rights of women,
including widows, are among the issues brought to the clinic.
In many of these cases the local Imam and other religious and
traditional leaders are brought in to support a claim for human
rights and justice.
One day a young man, hesitant in his approach, entered the
clinic. Now a teen, he had never been recognized by his biological
father. Throughout his life he had been marginalized by this fact
and he suffered greatly from the perceived rejection. He knew
who his father was and had seen him often. He explained to the
human rights mediator how painfully he felt the injustice. The
mediator offered to go with the young man to his father’s house
that same day. The mediator introduced herself at the doorway
to the father and then the young man intervened, saying, “I am
your son.” The mediator observed that when standing side-by-
side the two resembled each other as identical “drops of water.”
Embarrassed, the father did not want the issue of paternity to
upset his household and tried to offer his son money but was
refused. The boy said, “I want you to recognize me and know what

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you have denied me each day of my life and how you have made
my mother suffer.” All this happened outside the doorway but the
formal recognition took place as the father signed the paternity
papers at the municipal hall. Father and son were never reconciled
but the boy gained his dignity. He later told the mediator, “I came
to you because I wanted a witness when I killed my father. I had
a knife with me…but when I told him who he was [to me] I was
satisfied and now I can walk with dignity. I don’t need him to care
for me. He is not a good man. I have all I need.”
Incidents such as these along with the introduction of human
rights concepts into the community are putting into another
perspective long-held practices as citizens recognize the need
to change traditions that are harmful to the full development of
their society. To emphasize the links between traditional practices
and human rights, PDHRE-Mali and the Faculty of Letters,
Languages, Arts and Social Sciences (FLASH) at the University
of Bamako received a UNESCO grant to study attitudes in local
culture towards human rights and peace. Part of the study,
carried out in all eight districts of Mali, examined the strength of
traditional instructions for moral and communal behavior. Many of
the stories, sayings and local histories are vibrantly present in the
culture. These stories, and adages are used as natural bridges to
human rights concepts during training workshops and in support
of changes in attitude and actions that chart the way towards
greater inclusiveness and nondiscrimination in the community.
Going Forward, Reaching Out
The example of Kati as a Consensual Human Rights City has
had a continuing effect on the local and surrounding communities.
As previously mentioned, market day brings people from the
surrounding villages in contact with activities in the CHRC. In
2002 a core group of human rights learning facilitators, trained
under the sponsorship of the Institut d’Education Populaire (IEP),
a member of the PDHRE executive committee, spent four months

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running human rights training in the surrounding villages. The

training sessions were received with enthusiasm but the program
could not be continued once the grant ran out because covering
even the modest expenses of the trainers was not possible for the
community to absorb in a such a poor country like Mali. Although
many people are willing to devote time to these initiatives few
have the luxury of sacrificing any moment from employment that
sustains a family, be it manual labor, gardening or selling in the
market. A reality that must be acknowledged is that resources are
scarce and transportation limited. Even kerosene for lighting the
lamps for an evening meeting in a rural locale must entail some
sacrifice.

Despite these contingencies, the Consensual Human Rights

Cities Movement in Mali has grown substantially. To date there are
nine CHRCs, beginning with Kati in 2000 followed chronologically
by Timbuktu, Kayes, Sikasso, Konna, Gao, Bara Sara and the
5th District of Bamako. In each city, civil society has taken the
initiative to request that PDHRE and the CHRC movement

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facilitate their development. In most instances the municipal

administrators have been supportive although the role of head
of the steering committee can only be held by someone from an
organization representing civil society to avoid the politicizing the
movement. Though each city is working according to their means
and capacity, it is worth noting that Timbuktu, Gao and Kita have
remarkably strong participation and development.
All three cities owe their strength in part to the fact that
leadership was assumed by an influential local NGO that was able
to lend material support and some funds to the development of the
CHRC. Another advantage was having a corps of local volunteers
who were already committed to working in the community so it
was not necessary to recruit and explain to newcomers how their
volunteer efforts were good for the community. Often people
would like to work for the Human Rights City and go to training
sessions but the demands of daily life are too overwhelming to
add one more responsibility.
The steering committees in these cities were able to begin
activities as soon as they integrated the holistic human rights
framework into their perspective. Timbuktu’s first activity was a
self-study on the state of human rights made in 2004. Part of
the information campaign on human rights in Timbuktu was the
introduction of billboards, which informed and motivated the entire
community. All cities have followed a consistent pattern of forming
a steering committee that as closely as possible has gender
balance. Next comes the task of organizing neighborhood training
workshops and giving seminars on specific human rights, such as
those reaffirmed in CEDAW or CRC. The CHRCs establish and
reinforce mutual bond by sharing staff for training of trainers aand
by holding exchanges with other CHRCs in Mali.
One advantage—and indeed a necessity—for having so
many Human Rights Cities is the fact that Mali has eleven official
languages. French is the official language but it is far from being
universally spoken and understood. Training materials have to be

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translated in local languages and, given Mali’s strong oral tradition

and low levels of literacy, learning requires audio tools in local
languages. With training of facilitators held at numerous locations
in the district—several languages may be commonly used in a
single district—this problem can be lessened.
The connections created by adherence to a political party or
trade union are more constrained that those that emerge through
a network of Human Rights Cities throughout the country, which
is conducive to building solidarity around a broader range of
themes that the political or union agenda.. It has been the goal
of PDHRE-Mali to have a Human Rights City in each of the eight
administrative districts by the celebration of the 60th anniversary
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This would be a
step in the direction of realizing the original dream of making Mali
a human rights country.
B. Human Rights Cities in Europe
Austria is the only country in Europe so far to have a fully
developed Human Rights City in cooperation with PDHRE.
Indeed, Graz was the first such city. The second Human Rights
City, Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is in a early stage of
development. The concept of human rights is integrated in
many of Europe’s parliamentary systems and its principles are
strongly reflected in the policies of the Council of Europe and
the European Union. This does not necessarily mean that these
principles have been integrated into the consciousness of ordinary
citizens, who are often beneficiaries of a full-fledged human rights
regime without comprehending the richness and scope of this
birthright. Population movements, environmental changes and
armed conflicts place stress on the stability of this region, making
it increasingly important that ordinary citizens know their human
rights and act within the framework of these principles.

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1. Austria
History and Background
The role and the suffering of the city mark the local history
and culture of Graz during the two world wars, which remain alive
in the collective memory. Thousands of prisoners were detained
in the proximity of the city and died of epidemic diseases or from
the harsh conditions in the First and Second World Wars. At
the beginning of the Second World War Graz was a particular
stronghold of Nazi-ideology. Although less numerous than in
Vienna, Jews had long been counted among the local population
of Graz. During the Middle Ages a thriving Jewish ghetto existed.
The small Jewish population (approximately 2000 in 1938) was
driven out by the Nazi so that by 1940 Graz was declared Judenrein
or free of Jews. Religious intolerance was not aimed only against
the Jews. In the 16th century, when a majority of the nobility and
population converted to Lutheran Protestantism, their Catholic
Habsburg rulers gave them the choice to reconvert to Catholicism
or to leave, thus bringing the country back to Catholicism. Only in
1781 was freedom of religion restored. Perhaps this background
of intolerance has led to the development of a critical tradition
towards authorities in Graz in the post-war era, which emerged
strongly in the 1970s as civic movements with citizens requesting
participation in the city government decision-making. From this
developed a strong civil society engagement and impact in local
politics.
The city of Graz is quite unique with a relatively strong right-
wing political element, an engaged civil society, and an avant-
garde in the field of culture. Graz is a university town with the
effect that of its 250,000 inhabitants more than 40,000 are
students. It also has a large, long-standing population of retirees.
As an important European economic center there is a great deal
of movement in the population and a solid middle class. Under
the social-democrat mayor operating in coalition with the Peoples’

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Party, many social and cultural initiatives were supported, which

culminated in the year 2003, when Graz became the Cultural
Capital of Europe, a European Union-sponsored distinction.
Since the victorious Peoples’ Party has formed a coalition with
the Green Party in 2008 human rights have gained exceptionally
high standing. The human rights city of Graz was able to build on
these traditions.
Development of the Human Rights City
The initiative for Graz to become a Human Rights City
germinated at a seminar on human security, human rights and
human development organized for the Human Security Network at
the European Training and European Research Centre for Human
Rights and Democracy (ETC) in Graz in 2000. Shulamith Koenig,
Founder-Director of PDHRE, proposed that Graz become the first
European Human Rights City. Later that year, in speech at the
Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations,
the former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Austria, Benita Ferrero-
Waldner, announced that Graz would become a Human Rights

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City. This announcement accelerated efforts at the city level,

leading to the inauguration of Graz as a Human Rights City by
unanimous decision of the City Council on 8th February 2001.
Graz was already fertile terrain for such an initiative thanks to a
number of existing human rights activities promoted by the Mayor,
Alfred Stingl, and the Counselor for Cultural Affairs, Helmut Strobl,
who represented the two main political parties, the Social-Democrat
and the People’s Party. Various activities in the social and cultural
fields earned Graz the title of the “most refugee-friendly city of
Austria.” However, this reputation has been somewhat marred by
anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant slogans pronounced by right-wing
political parties during the municipal elections in January 2008.

Evidence of the desire of Graz’s citizens to heal past wounds and

move towards social inclusion was seen in the re-building and
re-opening of the Graz Synagogue which was destroyed during
Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938 by a pro-Nazi mob.
Graz now has a reputation as a place for inter-religious dialogue.
Meetings, such as, the Second European Ecumenical Assembly

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in 1997, the Buddhist Kalachakra in 2002, and the first meeting

of European imams in 2004, have sustained this reputation. A
vibrant civil society active in various fields of human rights thrives
here as well.
The European Training and Research Centre for Human
Rights and Democracy (ETC) in Graz, which opened in 2000
and in cooperation with the University of Graz, has done much
to stimulate awareness of human rights through research and
training programs in the fields of human rights, democracy and
the rule of law. Graz is a university town with the effect that from
its about 250,000 inhabitants more than 40,000 are students.
The Human Rights City initiative was well received from the
start because it had real potential of being put to practice. The
mayor, his partners, and also civil society were keen to introduce
the socially innovative human rights city during the millennium of
2000. The political parties represented in the city council at that
time where less polarized than now, which allowed them to reach
unanimity on the basic decision to start a Human Rights City.
Development of the Human Rights City of Graz was undertaken
following the model suggested by PDHRE. Accordingly, a steering
committee consisting of more than twenty people representing
various organizations and institutions was formed. Three working
groups were set up in order to map the situation with regard to
civil and political, economics and social as well as cultural rights.
They completed a study on the human rights situation in Graz in
May 2002 and translated it into a problem index and an action
program with a staggered scheme of priorities. The result was the
identification of six principle areas of concern: needs of women, of
children and youth, of persons with disabilities, of migrants, of the
elderly and of socially disadvantaged people. This analysis and
the related action program were widely disseminated and became
reference points for further work. The whole process, in which
more than 100 people took part, was coordinated by the ETC
Graz. However, the action program was never formally adopted

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by the city council, because of delays and the election of a new

city council in the end of 2002.
After 2002 the Steering Committee did not continue in its
original form. A change in the political climate and lack of support
on the part of the city government created a period of less
“official” sponsorship. However activities within the human rights
city continued to be carried out by organizations like ETC and
other civil society groups. After a long wait the city reacted to the
original request to set up a visible and active human rights body
and in April 2007, the Human Rights Council was established,
which is functioning as a steering committee.
Critical Issues in Graz
The Human Rights City of Graz today is facing two major
problems: (i) the integration of the new minorities and (ii) the
needs of children and youth, the older generation and people
with special needs. The rise of populist parties in Austria, some
of which managed to win seats in the Graz city parliament on the
basis of xenophobic and islamophobic slogans, has precipitated
the need to deal with Islamic phobia and right wing extremism.
The city has institutions for dealing with freedom and equality
in the expression of religious belief and opinion. Other important
challenges pertain to discrimination due to sexual orientation,
age, disability as well as gender and ethnic origin in the workplace
and the access to goods and services such as health, education,
housing and others for which there are also federal laws based on
European regulations. In 2006, a new unit was established in the
mayor’s office dealing with issues of integration, which presently is
being strengthened. Issues of homophobia and sexual orientation
will also become more prominent with regard to assuring non-
discrimination in the future. The Human Rights Council’s program
of activities will deal with many of these issues. Non-discrimination
and homophobia are high on their agenda.

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Accomplishments
The Human Rights Council was confirmed as a permanent
institution. It will implement projects on its own initiative with
the support of the city of Graz. The 25 members include
representatives of all the political parties, except the two right-
wing parties (although one of them may still be invited). The
Council also represents institutions and civil society in a good
mix of people who are mainly acting in their personal capacity
and have been nominated and appointed by the mayor based
on the proposal of an independent group. The Council reviewed
city regulations with regard to anti-discrimination activities in the
field of procurement. Accordingly, companies who want to do
business with the city of Graz must demonstrate that they follow
non-discriminatory policies. With regard to integration, laws and
policies are currently under review in order to make them more
conducive to integration.
A number of new and innovative ideas and practices have
been developed since Graz became a Human Rights City in
2001. However, not all of them have been implemented so far. For
example the proposal to secure funds for civil society organizations
regularly active in the field of human rights is awaiting action. Yet,
as is often the case, once the concept of “human rights” became
identified with the city, organizations began to act in accordance
with these principles and peoples’ awareness and knowledge of
human rights advanced in many ways.
During the celebrations that took place when Graz was named
an EU Cultural Capital, ETC contributed a project on the “Culture
of Human Rights” by holding numerous participatory activities
focused on human rights. A “Human Rights Walk” was designed
through the city center, leading people to various places that are
connected with human rights violations or injustices in the past
or good practice in human rights. Places of interest visited on the
Walk include the old Jewish ghetto, as well as places associated

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with the restoration of Catholicism in Graz, when the city was

predominantly Protestant. And then, at a later time, the trail
comes to a place that evokes the tolerance law, which allowed
the Protestants to have their church again. The dark days of the
Nazi regime are also recalled in the Human Rights Walk when
participants come to the beautifully restored Jewish Synagogue
on the site where the old one had been destroyed.
A major event that united many of these activities was
conference in Graz on human rights at the local level. PDHRE
activists from Human Rights Cities in South America, Asia, Africa
and North American who shared their experiences with the Graz
participants. Another example was the decision of the winner of
the human rights prize of the province of Styria to use the prize
money to create a human rights trail along one of the most popular
walking and jogging courses in the proximity of the city. On 30
plaques the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration on Human
Rights are now displayed on existing lampposts. Accordingly,
walkers and joggers using the trail are reminded of each of the
Declaration’s articles as they go by.
Another positive example of the way human rights enter local
consciousness was the declaration of Graz against the death
penalty in 2005. This was in response to several executions in
California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in
Graz, is governor. Protests from civil society and several political
parties in Graz resulted in removal his name from the main sports
stadium in Graz. The
media, political parties
and NGOs often refer
to Graz’s human rights
stance on controversial
debates and the people
of this Human Rights City
could not uphold as a hero
someone who made such

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flagrant use of the death penalty—a direct human rights violation

as defined in Europe.
The human rights city and in particular, the European
Training Center (ETC) through its training programs, has had an
important role in supporting other human rights cities through the
organization of human rights learning seminars and workshops.
ETCsponsored summer schools on human security and human
rights since 2003 to which people from human rights cities in Africa
and Latin America were invited and exchanged experiences with
their Graz counterparts. The possibility of dialogue and exchange
is a powerful tool for unification of people around human rights.
In 2007, the mayor of Graz approved a request initiated by
ETC to lend financial support to the activities of the developing
Human Rights City of Bihać in Bosnia-Herzegovina. ETC in Graz
invited Members of the Bihać steering committee to a human
rights learning seminar sponsored by the municipality of Graz.
This kind of support and solidarity among human rights human
rights cities has the potential to develop even further.
Future Outlook
The elections of the Graz city parliament in January 2008
resulted in a new coalition of the Peoples’ Party (conservative)
with the Green Party. These parties established a coalition
and concluded agreements containing a number of objectives
supportive of the Human Rights City, such as support for the
greater integration of migrants, who make up for some 14 percent
of the population of Graz. These groups face many human
rights-related problems especially relating to housing, education,
and employment. These issues will become a priority and a
specific anti-discrimination unit is to be established in order to
deal with these problems. Migrants are coming to Graz either as
asylum seekers or through regular economic migration. Groups
encountering the most difficulty are from African countries and
Turkey, while most of the other groups have fewer problems.

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Human rights issues are being dealt with by the “Migration

Council,” which brings together the various ethnic migrant groups
and their organizations together with the city of Graz and NGOs.
Together they collaborate on a number of projects in the field of
refugee assistance and integration. Besides acting as an advisory
service, the main focus of these combined organizations is on
non-discrimination, in particular with regard to public housing and
access to social services.
As mentioned previously, in the recent past Graz has gained
a special profile for inter-religious meetings, examples being the
sponsorship of the first foreign meeting of the European imams
and for the world meeting of the Buddhists. Therefore, efforts of
the right wing parties to polarize people around xenophobia and
Islamophobia have been convincingly countered by other political
forces.
In the schools of Graz, an organization called “Youth Against
Violence and Racism,” has become quite active. Young people
throughout the province of Styria are discovering venues to
promote positive social change through human rights.
The success of Graz as a human rights city is due in part to
the support from the elected government to the Human Rights
City and to human rights issues in general, and in part to the
increased public awareness of human rights reinforced by the
creation of institutions like the Human Rights Council. .
2. Bosnia-Herzegovina
Background
The three-year siege of Bihać ended in 1995 several months
before the end of the Bosnian War on November 21, 1995. The war
left many buildings in this historic city destroyed, the infrastructure
greatly damaged and the population displaced and traumatized.
The city, like much of Bosnia, had for centuries supported a
population composed mainly of Muslims, Orthodox, Christians
and some Jews. Today the population of over 100,000 is largely

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Muslim and many newcomers, ethnic Bosniaks, have come from

other parts of the country and Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia.
The war has left the country in a state of transition as it attempts
to readjust its economy, government, police and role in the region
with the goal of entering the European Union perhaps 10 years
off. Bihać, as the center of the Una-Sana Canton is experiencing
the discomfort of fitting into a different reality even as the wounds
of the war and genocide have not yet healed.
In 2006, Iskra Tabakovic , a resident of Bihać, and president
of Novi Put, a local NGO, attended a Human Rights seminar in
Sarajevo organized by ETC from Graz. There she learned about the
human rights cities and the Graz experience. She enthusiastically
embraced the idea and approached Nejra Rakovic, director of
an organization for women’s rights, Glaszene. Together they
organized an intensive workshop in Bihać in August and invited
human rights educators from PDHRE in New York to give the
training as a start for making Bihać a human rights city.
Developing the Human Rights City
The visit from PDHRE facilitators and the intensive workshop
allowed members of the organizations to develop their ideas
of how Bihać could proceed in becoming a human rights city.
The diversity of the organizations represented at the workshop
mirrored many of the major concerns in the city. These included:
women’s organizations, teachers’ union, youth organizations,
hospital workers, people
with disabilities, children’s
rights advocates,
war veterans, police
employees, the Roma
minority, jurists, university
professors and urban
planners. Although the
mayor’s office did not send

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an official representative as had been requested, several

participants worked for the municipality.
The workshop broke up into interest groups to work on a
preliminary human rights mapping of the city. As human rights
were perceived in this community as guarantees of political and
civil rights only, much of the discussion focused on the place and
local significance of economic, social and cultural rights. Groups
began to see that human rights were interconnected and mutually
supportive rather reflecting competing interests. For example
representatives from the Roma community spoke of the way their
people had been traditionally marginalized and denied access to
schools, housing and even public space. This exclusion, in turn,
had an impact on jobs, participation in decision-making and the
inevitable condemnation to a life of poverty. Other participants
expressed their appreciation for having the opportunity to learn
first-hand from Roma people how they see their own lives in
Bihać. Although the Roma have a long history and place in the
town, that history was constructed by others to affirm the negative
aspects of the Roma. If the workshop only served as an opening
in this dialogue it would have been well worth the time and effort.

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Among the other urgent problems in the community openly

discussed in the workshops were violence against women and
children, domestic violence, workplace discrimination, young
people’s access to education and jobs, healthcare, tolerance for
religious beliefs and participation in the political system. Many
people were disabled as a result of the war and, therefore, the
concerns of people with disabilities are prominent. These issues
became the points in the agenda that would be taken up by the
future steering committee.
Throughout the year the Steering Committee met regularly.
However, internal strife threatened to disrupt the progress of
the fledgling organization when one of the original coordinators
left the organization along with a number of participants. Bihać
is a relatively small community so any discord among leaders
easily reverberates throughout civil society organizations in
which they are active. The committee maintained close contact
with the PDHRE office in New York as they worked through their
internal tensions and furthered a human rights learning program
in Bihać.
The Committee held a number of training workshops, one
in Ruzicka, near Bihać where there is a large Roma minority.
The Roma representatives on the Steering Committee strongly
favored this training as a way of improving community relations.
They also launched training sessions in the schools in Ruzicka
and Bihać on minority rights as human rights. Another successful
event was a community forum on religious tolerance. The
committee was anxious to bring up difficult subjects for public
debate because in this way they could frame the discussion in
human rights terms rather than cataloguing the violations. The
group felt that their day-long initiative to celebrate International
Human Rights Day was a breakthrough in building community
awareness. Many young people were attracted to the work of the
steering committee and the idea of a Human Rights City. On the
10th of December they were mobilized on their jobs, in the streets

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and in the schools to distribute information about human rights,

lead impromptu discussions, organize classroom activities that
gave the message that human rights was part of daily life. They
collected numerous signatures adhering to the human rights city
while in the evening guest speakers led a panel discussion on
human rights. On December 10 many local people learned about
the human rights city.
Achievements and Challenges
The organizing committee of the Human Rights City is young
and energetic. Several local organizations have taken a leading
role in sponsoring the movement. They work with limited resources
and make the most of the expertise at hand by enlisting professors
from the university and from as far away as Sarajevo. As far as
the committee is concerned there is no turning back from their
course even though they have been limited by lack of funding.
They have accomplished a great deal by initiating community
forums on local human rights issues and by engaging in difficult

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issues such as religion, discrimination and the human rights of

women and children.
The pace of the committee’s work has been slow because
of the care they are taking to ensure that the group and their
objectives remain truly democratic and that no element is excluded
and no one engages in political partisanship. This latter issue has
been strongly debated in the committee because some members
felt it would be appropriate to support a particular political party or
a candidate for local office.
The Human Rights City movement has not received the
support of the municipality. The group tries to maintain a delicate
balance in order not to appear antagonistic or in competition with
the mayor’s office as they remain open to all political parties. They
are hoping in the future to see stronger collaboration and support
from the municipality.
The Human Rights City of Graz has been very supportive and
in particular ETC, the sponsoring NGO in Graz. Graz has agreed
to sponsor a training workshop in Graz for members of the Bihać
steering committee. The Honorary Consul of Graz to Bihać now
meets frequently with the steering committee and serves as an
informal liaison between the two cities. The mayor of Graz has
invited the Mayor of Bihać to visit Graz at the time of the training.
Everyone involved is working as a volunteer. They use their
free time, vacations and family time to energize the movement. For
this reason the plan to extend human rights learning throughout
the community has not remained consistent. This said, the
committee continues to meet and to promote those activities
that they are able to manage. Support from outside sources and
recognition by the municipality would allow the people to realize
their plan of action designed to make all people in Bihać, including
newcomers and minorities, aware of their human rights and work
to fulfill them.

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C. Human Rights Cities Latin America

1. Argentina
Background
Rosario is the first Human Rights City, established in 1997.
With over a million inhabitants, it is second only to Buenos Aires
in economic and social importance. Located on the Paraná River,
Rosario serves as Argentina’s transportation and industrial center.
Economic and social upheavals have marked the history of the
city as they have the entire country. During the repressive military
dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983 hundreds of Rosario’s
citizens were “disappeared.” From this struggle grew many human
rights organizations claiming respect for civil and political rights.
Some of these original organizations including, Madres de plaza
de Mayo, Abuelas de Plaza de Majo,Asamblea de Derechos
Humanos, and Movimiento Ecuménico de Derechos Humanos
began during the dictatorship and have continued functioning to
this day. The experience of the struggle against the dictatorship
and the use of human rights as an organizing tool and a vehicle
for claiming justice are central to understanding the development
of Rosario as a Human Rights City.
In addition to the terrible moral and physical suffering imposed
by the military dictatorship, the economy was severely damaged.
Subsequent governments allowed the industrial sector to
stagnate and neoliberal economic practices threw the economy
into disarray until the end of the 1990s. Throughout the post-
dictatorship period many factories closed down and thousand of
workers were left unemployed. This fact, along with the constant
migration of very poor people from other provinces, turned the
city into the “capital of unemployment” as it was called in 1995,
when unemployment reached 21 percent. Urban violence was a
common response to the economic crisis throughout Argentina.
Street demonstrations and violence were met by the government

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with repressive practices—a legacy of the dictatorship. Besides

the woeful economic situation and—perhaps even more critical—
the dictatorship had establish a pattern of social relationships that
tore apart the social fabric; governance lacked civil participation,
the absence of transparency was a given, individuality replaced
solidarity and violence permeated all power relations.
The most recent economic crisis came to a head on
December 20, 2001 when the peso, pegged to the dollar, slid to
an unprecedented low point. As a result, the president, Fernando
de la Rúa, was forced from office and economic measures
that corresponded more in favor of national interests were
implemented. Thanks to its own initiative and a more favorable
economic context, Rosario along with the rest of the country has
seen an upturn since 2002.
Over the past decade the unemployment rate has been
considerably decreased. Despite this slow but progressive
recovery, Rosario has about 430,000 people below the poverty
line and 170,000 below the indigent line. This situation has set
the scene for many human rights violations. Internal migration
of people, especially from the impoverished rural areas and the
northern states has given rise to the villa miseria or shanty towns
that have become part of the permanent city landscape. The Qom-
Toba people, an aboriginal group that migrated from the border
region near Paraguay, are especially subject to social exclusion
and violation of their basic human rights.
Human Rights History
With the arrival of democracy in 1983 the Argentinean State
ratified the main human rights treaties and in 1994, with the
constitutional reform, the most important covenants were integrated
to the National Constitution. Nine treaties and two declarations
became part of the Constitution. Argentina was (and still is) the
only country in Latin America that gives human rights covenants
and treaties such a high level of importance and potential for

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implementation. Human rights are protected by the Constitution

through the amparo action, which is designed to protect the
constitutional rights of the citizens and safeguard the integrity of
the constitution by providing constitutional remedies against state
laws that violate the rights protected by the Constitution. Although
the process is quick and very effective, millions of people continue
to ignore this possibility and its tremendous potential for change.
During the 1980s and 1990s, numerous organizations were
created and other social movements appeared, each with a
mission of protecting or claiming human rights, including women’s
rights, the right to sexual diversity, indigenous peoples’ rights,
environmental rights, and housing rights. These are just some of
the movements that broadened the human rights scope, revealing
new terrain and claiming visibility and inclusion.
During and directly following the period of military dictatorship,
the focus was on civil and political human rights. However, civil
society became increasingly aware of the possibility of using the
human rights framework to claim fulfillment of economic, social
and cultural rights, which rights had been eroded by the effect of
neoliberal policies implemented by the dictatorship and not easily
severed.
Public Offices for Human Rights
At the same time, the state began taking measures to guarantee,
protect and promote human rightsthrough the progressive creation
of democratic institutions at the municipal, provincial and national
levels. Some examples include the Office of the Ombudsman, the
Women’s Council, shelters for victims of sexual violence, Human
Rights Secretaries, an Office of Consumers Affairs, and the like.
With a history of opposition to dictatorship and authoritarian
government, the members of human rights and other civil society
organizations needed to develop new skills and strategies
to initiate a dialogue with these new state institutions. Most
membership human rights organizations grew out of opposition

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to the state. In most cases opposition entailed great risks and the
political discourse of the organizations was one of critique and
confrontation. From this perspective, engaging in dialogue with
the state could be seen as treason to progressive positions or to
human rights. Creating new strategies, new ways of thinking and
acting, designing and drafting proposals, initiating legal reforms,
conceiving of plans and ideas for convincing decision-makers,
politicians and parliamentarians to subscribe to new programs
or policies, were a challenge for many social movements in the
transition to democracy.
The city of Rosario and activists in the human rights movement
had to learn a difficult lesson about how to advance human rights
locally, where formal remedies are not always available. The
perception of some municipal officials is that the human rights
system belongs to the international arena, without any direct
connection to local reality. They see human rights as only civil
and political rights and placing obligations only on the national
government. This situation created another challenge: how to

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address these misconceptions and introduce, in all human rights

learning programs, some axial points, such as identifying the
obligations of each sector of society. Indeed, the idea of non-state
obligations proved to be a powerful concept because it had been
incorporated into the national law of Argentina.
The Human Right City of Rosario emerged out of a felt need
for a deeper understanding of the duties and obligations related
to human rights and on the premise that human rights cannot be
exercised if they are not known. There are three major implications
of that premise. The first is that public officials at the municipal
level should know that human rights treaties create obligations
for the state, not only at the national level, but also at provincial
and municipal levels. Moreover, at all these levels, including the
municipal, it is not only the functionaries from the executive branch
who are obliged to fulfill human rights obligations but also those
from the legislative and judicial branches. The second implication
is that civil society, including the private sector (corporations,
enterprises, the media), should be aware of its obligations under
human rights treaties and codes of conduct should be designed
accordingly. The third is that human rights should be known both
by the potential victims of violations and by agents of the state,
mainly the police, the army and other potential violators.
The ways and means of translating those implications into a
strategy to integrate human rights into the national consciousness
had to be set in the particular historical, social and economic context
of Argentina’s recent development. Such was the challenge that
led to the creation of the Human Rights City in Rosario.
Creating the Human Rights City
The Institute for Gender, Law and Development (INSGENAR)
had been working in Rosario since 1994, trying to link the human
rights agenda with the women’s rights agenda. Leaders in the
organization saw the need to strengthen the links between all
human rights with other social movement organizations in order

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to promote a holistic approach to human rights, create a network

of local organizations and increase the impact of the work.
INSGENAR has been affiliated with PDHRE since its creation
when the Latin American organization grew out of the encounter
with PDHRE during the New York preparatory conference for the
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995. Since 1995
INSIGENAR is the headquarters of PDHRE in Latin America.
On July 30, 1997, in a public ceremony INSGENAR invited
governmental and non-governmental organizations to sign a
Declaration in which they committed to a joint initiative that
would make Rosario the first Human Rights City. More than
thirty-five organizations and institutions, including human rights
organizations, indigenous peoples groups, sexual diversity groups,
academic bodies, development associations, and women’s
groups, gathered in the auditorium of the City Hall to sign the
commitment, in the presence of the Mayor of Rosario, Hermes
Binner; the Director of the Women’s Sector, Rosa Acosta; and the
founding director of PDHRE Shulamith Koenig.
Although the committed organizations were among the most
respected and active ones in the city, it took them one year to
move from the first commitment to the organization of the Steering
Committee for the Human Rights City. Out of the original thirty-five
organizations that signed the Act, only thirteen currently belong to
the Steering Committee that has assumed the responsibility of
guiding and implementing the development process. INSGENAR
continues to be the driver of the initiative.
The Steering Committee
Creating the Steering Committee was a delicate affair because
the diversity of interests represented in the Human Rights City
made it necessary for participants to see beyond their own interest
groups and to be willing to work through issues by consensus.
The present Steering Committee of the Human Rights City
consists of governmental and non governmental organizations,

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three academic institutions (two Human Rights Centers at the

Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Political Sciences, and the
Paulo Freire Institute of the Faculty of Law), the Police Academy,
the provincial Human Rights Secretary, the Municipal Human
Rights Secretary, the Office of the Ombudsman, the Qom-Toba
community representatives, the Ecumenical Movement for Human
Rights (MEDH), the Institute for Gender, Law and Development
(INSGENAR), the Rosario Chapter of the Latin American and
Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CLADEM)
and the Women’s Department of the Association of Architects. All
are truly active participants on the Steering Committee.
Currently there are many organizations that would like to
be on the Steering Committee. The Committee and its member
organizations are well respected and being part of a coalition
strengthens the member organizations. Each addition of new
members needs the approval of the entire group in order not to
upset the synergy that has taken so long to establish. The main
tensions are between governmental and non-governmental
organizations for example between the Police and human
rights organizations. Change in representatives to the Steering
Committee presents another challenge because it takes a lot of
time to bring an individual up to speed on the history of the City
and the work of the Committee. Perhaps the most critical aspect
is the blending of personalities.
The Steering Committee meets regularly to debate and
discuss its interventions and activities. While working together to
develop the concept of the Human Rights City, all participants—
and by extension all the organizations - begin to share a common
language and a shared human rights framework, notwithstanding
the plurality of ideas, varied backgrounds and divergence of
views, all of which enriches the way the human rights language
and framework are used.
Common to all is the goal to promote, through human rights
learning, respect for the rights of every inhabitant of the city,

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regardless of age, social and economic situation, ethnic origin,

religion or any other condition. It is a challenge to successfully
enable the groups from different social sectors to debate, reach
a consensus and commit themselves to building the foundation
for a true human rights culture in the daily life of Rosario and to
contribute to a process of cultural change based on the modification
of attitudes. Enacting change in representation and the dynamics
of governance that will reflect the city’s demographics requires
igniting the will of Rosario’s inhabitants, government officials and
organizations.
Although inclusion of new members presents challenges, the
actual membership on the Steering Committee is open and is
growing as new actors are incorporated, always on the basis of
well-considered and productive agreements.
A human rights culture in an urban environment
The Human Rights City promotes human rights in the
urban space by fostering a human rights culture and by training
educators, who in turn spread human rights learning throughout
their communities. The urban space is a microcosm of all the
elements—cultural, historical, social, economic and political—
that exist within the country and also within the world. Conflicts
and tensions are common to the urban landscape. These areas
of conflict and the way that they are resolved become the entry
points for creating a human rights culture because they permit
the dynamic reinterpretation of life and reframing of critical
issues within a human rights framework. The Rosario Steering
Committee organized several debates to discuss urgent problems
that arose within the urban environment, such as whether or not
there should be a designated “red light districts” (zona rosa). In
the southern district of the city transvestites, gays and prostitutes
were present and soliciting, which led to several serious conflicts.
Some residents wanted to rid the area of these groups. Although
Argentina allows prostitution, people were afraid their property

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value would decrease and therefore advocated for the creation

of a zona rosa. The media carried news of the conflict every
day. The strongest opponents to the move were women and
transvestites who argued that the measure was discriminatory.
The issue was brought up in the Steering Committee where,
after much discussion among all members, including police and
religious organizations,the human rights framework was invoked,
in particular, the principle of nondiscrimination. The Committee
produced a document that advocated against displacement and
exclusionary measures. The document was sent to the government
ministers who agreed with the human rights position and the zone
was never created.
The Steering Committee designed a Plan of Action that
includes strategic initiatives in several important sectors. These
programs and action plans are reflect the breadth of concerns of
the constituents’ representation.
Training and capacity building has been an ongoing program
in the Human Rights City. The Committee organizes annually a
series of two-month long seminars for teachers, security forces,
health care workers, magistrates, professionals, children, artists,
the media, and grassroots organizations. These programs, while
still limited, assure that most sectors controlled in some way by
the municipal government have an understanding of human rights
and that the human rights approach has become anchored in the
operations of the city. The programs have become self-sustaining
in many cases. For example, as a result of the initial training
program the Police Academy has now incorporated human rights
as part of their regular curriculum.
The Committee discovered that holding competitions for
primary and secondary school students is an excellent way to
engage their interest and have them claim ownership of human
rights. Young people were asked to recreate the human rights
treaties, rewriting them in their own words; or through creative
expression - painting, sculpture, music, videos, and poetry. So

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far students have expressed in their own way the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights and three treaties, including, CEDAW,
the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Hundreds
of schools promoted the contests in public spaces throughout
the city. The formal education system has a powerful multiplying
effect and therefore figures prominently in the plan of action.

Early on it became apparent to the Steering Committee that

environmental concerns were key to making and maintaining
Rosario as a livable city. Key issues, including, potable water,
drainage, forestation, recycling, establishing kitchen gardens
and reclaiming abandoned public space, became the subject of
another contest. This time neighborhoods teams were asked to
submit plans for transforming the local environment. The winning
team received funding to implement their plan. This contest
promoted communication and cooperation in the community.
It required people to discuss what they meant by a healthy
environment, identify problems in the local community, find

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solutions and finally implement the proposal. In some cases this

was the first time people had organized alliances and established
priorities regarding their needs and identified where they required
government assistance and what they themselves could do. The
contest itself established ties of solidarity among neighbors as
they learned how human rights created lines of communication
between local citizens and their government.
Poverty has long been a cause for exclusion from the
community. Not only are the poor denied material and economic
means, but they are also denied knowledge and connections to
sources of power. Among the poorest in Rosario are the people
living in the indigenous communities. Building citizenship has
meant breaking down these barriers. To this end the Human
Rights City developed a strategy to provide the children and
adolescents from the indigenous communities with the training
and the opportunity to engage policy makers and public officials.
Through interviews, a dialogue was established between the
young boys and girls to discuss their needs with decision makers
and public officials.
Women from slum areas are implementing the practice of
participatory monitoring. For example, they took measures to
monitor Article 12 of the International Covenant of Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) dealing with the right to health.
Through monitoring freedom from torture or cruel, degrading and
inhuman treatment under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), a
team sponsored by the Steering Committee worked with women
in the slum communities and revealed violations of these rights.
Using participatory research methods, they found that the women
who came to the sexual and reproductive health facilities were
subject to serious violations. Three hundred women participated
in writing a human rights report denouncing these abuses, which
was published and disseminated by the media. A member of
the Steering Committee called on the Office of the Ombudsman
to investigate; as a result, the Ombudsman Office ordered the

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Minister of Health to train all health workers in human rights,

non-discrimination and gender equality. Further, the Dean of the
Faculty of Medicine made health and human rights a requirement
in the curriculum, and an Observatory on Gender, Health and
Human Rights was created, which is sustained by two members
of the Steering Committee. Perhaps one of the most significant
lessons learned was that women understood that health services
should treat them with respect and consideration and that proper
healthcare is not charity but their human right.
Forming a Corps of Human Rights Educators
The training of human rights educators is the responsibility
of the Latin American Program for Human Rights Learning in the
Urban Space, which began operating in Rosario in 2004. It brings
together women and men chosen from people who are leaders
in the processes of cultural change in their own communities. Its
first activity was the International Seminar on Human Rights held
in Rosario in July 2004. The participating young women and men
from fourteen countries in the region formed a network of human
rights educators after the seminar. This Program sustains a web
page where information and training materials and documents
are published and activities related to the subject are regularly
announced: http://www.infoderechos.org/.
The Program operates on the principles of universality,
indivisibility and interdependence of human rights and responds
to the urgent need to create a culture based on the knowledge,
enjoyment and respect of the principles and values of human rights,
conceived from a gender perspective. Making discrimination visible
and changing the way people think about it is the prerequisite
to combating it. It considers that basic needs should not be
dependent on charity from the state but they must be conceived
and defined as human rights. People should be transformed from
“beneficiaries” of charity to “holders of rights.” This change should
permeate language, conceptions, policies and programs not only

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of public officials but also members of financial institutions, the

media and the private sector. This is what is meant by creating a
culture of human rights in Rosario and this is the challenge being
assumed by human rights educators.
The Human Right City of Rosario has taken inspiration from the
Portuguese sociologist Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, specifically
his thoughts on nondiscrimination and identity. De Sousa argued
that we have the right to be equal when our differences make us
inferior and we have the right to be different when our equality erases
our character. Hence, the Human Right City of Rosario promotes
equality that reproduces the differences and a difference that does
not produce, breed or reproduce inequalities.
Summing Up the Achievements
Positive results and changes in the Rosario community are
now becoming evident after many years of continuous hard
work. Carrying out the human rights learning programs with the
police has resulted in the diminishing the number of deaths due
to “trigger-happy” people; the incorporation of human rights in

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the permanent curriculum at the Police Academy; the immediate

institutional response to sexual harassment cases, and some
changes in attitudes towards human rights defenders.
The Qom-Toba indigenous community, who prior to human
rights learning, relied on other civil society organizations to
speak for them, is now a member of the Steering Committee and
can directly voice all its concerns about the discrimination this
community suffers as native people who have migrated from the
north of the country.
After some years of calling for an office of human rights within
the state, Rosario now has the Office of Secretary of Human
Rights as a part of the municipal administration.
Hundreds of students, teachers, police agents, health agents
and people in general, have been trained in human rights.

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The percentage of cases of cruel, inhuman and degrading

treatment to women in sexual and reproductive health services
has diminished considerably after installing the Observatory on
Gender, Health and Human Rights as a monitoring tool. No longer
are there cases of torture, such as, medical abortion without
anesthesia.
The main challenges facing the Human Rights City today are
to create security in public spaces and to foster the principle of
nondiscrimination.
The Human Right City of Rosario is more than a program. It
is a shared dream, a hope, a challenge, a deeply-held conviction
and firm commitment. Rosario has become a model for other
Human Rights Cities and in particular in Latin America. Through
replication of the model and, in some instances, through direct
support, Rosario is furthering similar initiatives in Porto Allegre,
Brazil, and in several cities in Chile, Colombia and Bolivia.
2. Brazil
Background
Of all the places where the Human Rights Cities have taken
root, Porto Alegre, in the province of Rio Grande do Sul, would
appear to have the most favorable conditions. With a population
of over four million, it is one of the most economically vibrant and
progressive cities in Brazil. In the 19th century as independence
movements were spreading throughout Latin America, Rio Grande
do Sul, declared itself an independent republican state. Although
their enterprise was defeated
ten years later, the principles of
singularity and independence
are embedded in the region’s
cultural identity.
Built at the confluence of five
rivers, Porto Alegre developed
into a transportation and

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manufacturing hub. Successive waves of European migration,

the first being Portuguese in the 18th century, followed in the 19th
century by Polish, Italian and German, have had a significant
influence on the city. The German migrants, arriving from a rapidly
industrializing Europe, instilled in the workforce an enduring labor
tradition.
The Portuguese were deeply engaged in the African slave
trade. The African slaves they brought to America intermarried with
Amerindians. Their descendents now constitute approximately 17
percent of the local population and are subject to various forms of
discrimination.
The NGO community is very active and has been instrumental
in developing the concept of the World Social Forum (WSF), which
has been hosted four times in Porto Alegre. These organizations
have a long history of human rights advocacy and value human
rights education. Their influence on local government is not
negligible.
The labor ideology has helped define citizen expectations and
government action. The local government has often been cited
as a model of participatory democracy. Participatory municipal
budgets were initiated in Porto Alegre in 1989 as a process by
which people throughout the city meet to discuss and recommend
the allocations for public works and services. Although some
scholars and critics note that nothing compels the government to
implement these recommendations, the model remains, as a work
in progress, has tremendous potential for citizen participation.
Developing the Human Rights City
Introduction of the Human Rights City model to Porto Alegre
occurred as the result of a meeting between the director of Themis,
a local feminist organization and the initiator of the human rights
city of Rosario, Argentina, also parented by a feminist organization
there—INSIGNAR. Witnessing the positive results in Rosario,
Themis leaders took on the task of creating the movement in

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Porto Alegre. The feminist perspective was broadened when the

Steering Committee was created. Today core members include
organizations concerned with access of prisoners to the justice
system, a youth organization, a collective of Black workers, as
well as several individuals, such as, teachers, psychologists, and
religious and labor organizers. At the time of the dedication of
Porto Alegre as a Human Rights City in November of 2004, the
municipality gave it its full support. However, shortly thereafter the
administration and the political majority changed. Along with the
change in government came a decline in interest in and support of
the project. Not a great deal happened the following year.
In 2006, the Steering Committee was reenergized and
organized a series of meetings with the community representative,
activists and representatives of political parties. They determined
that the most critical issues facing the community were racial
and gender discrimination, domestic violence committed against,
women, children and elders, and police violence. The lack of
parliamentary representation of women, Black and Indigenous
people was felt to be a major obstacle to realizing human rights.
Equality and non-discrimination are protected by law but getting
these laws recognized and acted upon by the general public will
take much more in-depth human rights education. For example,
most people accept that newspaper advertisements for work in
hotels and other commercial places list among the requirements
that the “Candidate must have technical skills, be punctual and
have a good appearance…” This last criterion is read by all as
meaning “Blacks need not apply.” The committee felt there
would be no justice until the discriminated groups had their own
parliamentary representatives and this would come about through
solidarity among other NGOs who integrated human rights into
their work.
The Steering Committee held human rights training sessions
and informational meetings in the various communities and
constituencies of the city. The crowning event was a day-long

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learning celebration, the Mostra, held in the central market.

Many of the local human rights organizations participated by
disseminating information that illustrated the ways in which human
rights was an essential part of daily life. Following the human rights
celebration, the Committee held more than twelve information
and learning sessions around the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs). These were successful because people were able to
make the connection between human rights and some of their
own neighborhood problems – water, security, clean air, access to
healthcare and jobs. They also began discussing concrete action
they could take.
Challenges
After the success of the Mostra and MDG meetings, the
Steering Committee decided to sponsor an essay contest on
human rights to engage young people. The city first agreed to
sponsor the event but never came through with funding. The
lack of a municipal partner had been a constant problem ever
since the labor party left municipal office in 2005. The Steering
Committee did not have time to create a strong base outside the
local administration. It had been counting on some form of funding
and allocation of space in which to enlarge Steering Committee
membership and hold events. Participating NGOs began to lose
faith in the Human Rights City program because it did not receive
funds. Most social enterprises offered something more concrete,
such as, feeding children
or teaching people a skill.
Human rights learning
seemed too abstract
and difficult to identify
concrete results that
could be actually seen.
The Steering Committee
had difficulty convincing

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funding sources that changing the way people act and think about
themselves is as important as building a playground because
human rights give people the energy to build that playground and
find their own resources.
In addition, when the director of Themis left office, the new
director was not in favor of continuing to assume the central
sponsorship of the Human Rights City. Without a permanent
space for general administration, a base of operations, and a
meeting space, the director of the Steering Committee had to
spend much of his time on obtaining minimal funds and and
solving logistical problems. As a result the outreach effort, such
as training facilitators and holding community-based human rights
workshops came to a near halt. Although organizational meetings
were held that brought together NGOs, none of the organizations
could spare the people and time that was needed to carry a project
or a campaign through to completion.
The Porto Alegre Human Rights City participated in the World
Conference on Development of Cities held in Porto Alegre in
2008 along with representatives of Human Rights Cities in Chile,
Argentina and the United States. The success of the workshops
and interventions and the renewed interest from city municipalities
throughout Brazil and other Latin American countries gave the
steering committee a real boost. They felt that the program is too
important to lay fallow and so began another round of organizing
meetings, appeals for funding and updating programs. One
lesson stands out: the Human Rights City concept is an important
and labor-intensive effort. It cannot run without the engagement
of influential NGOs and without funding. The municipality is a vital
source of funding in the Porto Alegre because private donors are
not likely to fund the program unless it can be shown that the
municipality is willingness to do so.

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Reaching Out Further in Latin America

The strength of the model established in Rosario and the
respect accorded to that Human Rights City may be seen in
the growing number of requests made by other cities in Latin
America to learn about the program. Cities in Chile, Colombia
and Bolivia have expressed a strong interest in becoming part
of the Human Rights Cities initiative. The only impediment to
further and more rapid expansion is the lack of funds. PDHRE
and the Human Rights Cities have taken care to emphasize that
becoming a Human Rights City means making a considerable
commitment to community organizing, training, preparation of
materials and carrying out a plan of action. This requires building a
dedicated steering committee of volunteers and securing minimal
resources—something not all cities are able to provide.
D. Human Rights Cities in North American
Creating Human Rights Cities in the Northern Hemisphere
of the Americas has been more difficult that in other regions for
several reasons. First, human rights, as a concept and a practical
tool for mobilizing citizens at the local and national levels, does not
resonate as it does elsewhere. In the relatively affluent counties
of Canada and the United States, human rights are viewed as
primarily civil and political rights. Only recently have civil society
organization begun seeing economic, social and cultural needs
in terms of human rights. One long-standing exception is the
way that Native Americans and First Peoples upon receiving little
satisfaction through local government channels took their claims
to human rights formula at the United Nations in New York and
Geneva. Another is the civil rights movement against segregation
in the U.S., which gave prominence to issues of housing, education
and work. Another reason for the seeming lack of interest in
human rights is that the constitutional guarantees of rights and
elaborate opportunities for judicial and administrative enforcement
of rights is not often couched in the human rights language used

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internationally, which tends to be seen as referring to standards

for judging violations of human rights occurring abroad.
1. Canada
History and Background
The Human Rights City in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, is
the first sustained Human Rights City in North America that has
endured. A previous attempt to make Iowa City and Memphis
Human Rights Cities failed because of lack of funds and
leadership.
The fact that Edmonton is a large city of over one million in
the metropolitan area and the capital of Alberta Province offers
as many challenges as it does advantages. Located in an oil-rich
region with a flourishing petrochemical industry and a growing
high tech job market, Edmonton is a focal point for internal and
external migration. The once blighted core neighborhoods of the
inner city are being restored and rings of suburban communities are
expanding as the population grows with new workers and people
seeking every sort of economic and educational opportunity.
Edmonton has a significant population of aboriginal Canadians
and is an immigrant-built city. It is replete with benevolent
organizations and NGOs and has a strong links with many different
parts of the world, both on an individual and institutional levels.
Volunteer participation is among the highest in the developed
world, and there is a great deal of emphasis placed on learning
and education. Edmonton is an educational center, hosting, in
addition to the University of Alberta, seven other post-secondary
institutions.
There is an overarching recognition that Edmonton has
been a populated settlement for at least 12,000 years; the still-
unresolved dynamic between original culture and settler culture
continues to create inequity, as settler culture imposes norms that
arise from a diversity of cultural milieu, while original residents
struggle to flourish as strangers in their own land. Early settlers

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engaged in the systemic deracination of First Nations, removing

land, identity, dignity and the very foundation of sentience by
wrenching children away from their families and brutalizing them
in residential missionary schools. A five-year national Truth and
Reconciliation Commission just has been launched to resolve
the ongoing disparity between original Canadians and settlers.
Canada’s national narrative describes “two founding nations” of
the settler culture, British and French. In the 2006 census, less
than eight percent of Edmontonians identified themselves as pure
British or French; 92 percent of the metro population of 1.1 million
reported other or mixed origins. There is a realization—reflected
in school curricula—that pluralism, inclusion, and the strength of
diverse origins are the defining characteristics of the Province of
Alberta.
Indeed, the immigrant and aboriginal presence, plus the global
outlook, cosmopolitanism and sophistication of the populace, all
make the Human Rights City framework a natural and organic
endeavor.
Developing Edmonton as a Human Rights City
The Human Rights City concept was brought to Edmonton by
Walther Lichem, Austrian Ambassador to Canada and member of
the PDHRE Board of Directors, when he spoke at a human rights
conference in Edmonton in September 2002. There he introduced
the concept to a large audience asking if they wanted to pursue
a Human Rights City. In reply he received a standing ovation.
The following year Lichem, visiting professor at the University of
Alberta, energetically drove the concept forward. Soon thereafter,
in April 2, 2003, the initiative to make Edmonton a Human
Rights City took off, facilitated by the John Humphrey Center for
Peace and Human Rights (JHC). The first step, Phase I, was to
identify areas of concern most keenly felt by the inhabitants of
Edmonton. The issues cited in a feasibility study included poverty
and exclusion experienced by marginalized groups, continued

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use and perception of ethnic and racial stereotypes and the need
for greater understanding and empathy to be exercised by the
population of Edmonton as a whole.
Phase II aimed at developing a process for human rights
learning and action. An Executive Committee was appointed to
guide the process. A series of focus groups were held to tap into
the needs and ideas of citizens as to how the Human Rights City
ought to function. Findings based on these encounters provided the
basis for the action plan. The main suggestions from participants
in the focus groups identified four main areas of need: (i) building
and improving partnerships so that groups and organizations
could enhance communication and cooperation around human
rights issues; (ii) spreading human rights learning throughout the
community and among organizations so that all citizens would
know human rights and would become actively engaged in the
human rights city; (iii) providing the opportunity and the space
for those citizens who are marginalized and often “voiceless”
to have their say in the planning and advocacy role in the HR
City and , finally, (iv) providing physical and virtual space that will
be the Human Rights City center and will testify to Edmonton’s
commitment to the program.
The action plan emphasized the need for continuous research
in Edmonton, including community-based research that would
entail transformative human rights learning (a process of changing
attitudes and behaviors as greater awareness and empathy
developed among inhabitants). Strengthening and building
networks among organizations, groups and neighborhoods would
foster mutual support and solidarity. Lastly, the action plan dealt
with the need for continuous human rights education. As situations
changed in Edmonton, new entry points for learning would be
created. This was seen as the dynamic process of learning and
dialogue.
To complement the outcomes of the focus groups and text-
based research, the Executive Committee posted an on-line

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survey, The Human Rights City Survey, in spring 2006. Community

organizations, the media networks and stakeholder lists marketed
the survey. There was no illusion that this was a statistically
accurate reflection of the opinions of Edmonton’s population but
it provided a good starting point. For one thing, the 190 survey
responses reached out to those not included in the focus groups
and, secondly, people were able to express themselves in a way
that perhaps they could not do publicly.
Confronting the Challenges to Human Rights
Despite the thriving economy in Edmonton and Alberta, the
findings of the initial research and mapping showed that particular
groups were systematically excluded from social and economic
resources available to others in the community. Aboriginal
residents suffer the most prominent discrimination in several
interconnected areas that, by all evidence, constitutes a denial
of their human rights. The people of the First Nation have less
access to good education, jobs, adequate housing, appropriate
medical care, are subject to abuse by police and formal and non-
formal authorities and perceive themselves to be on the lowest
rung of social hierarchies. In addition, aboriginal women and
children suffer from domestic violence three times more than
non-Aboriginals. Many historically Aboriginal people have been
denied their culture and adequate measures of compensation
and restoration have not yet been enacted. One stark example
has been the forced attendance at residential schools, operated
predominantly by religious organizations. Aboriginal children were
sent by force away from their parents and cultural community, often
placed in foster homes and denied knowledge of their language
and customs in the name of social integration (although the
schools were segregated) that made them doubly marginalized.
These schools of the 19th and 20th centuries were disbanded only
in the late 1970s and Aboriginals received the right to vote only
in 1962. One step forward was the symbolic apology pronounced

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by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on June 11, 2008, for the grave
injustice and suffering brought on by the system. The year 2008
also marked the beginning of a five year Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to examine these and other abuses. One survey
respondent, speaking about access to housing, expressed the
legacy of discrimination, racism and bullying in these terms:
Still when applying for housing I get a sense of
something not right. They do not say that you are not
getting the place but I know they are discriminating
still because of my heritage. I get really upset and
feel like giving up because others do not like me
because I am Aboriginal.
Immigrants and visible minorities also suffer from discriminatory
practices. Individuals who arrive with limited education or who are
of Arab or Muslim origins suffer from racial profiling. Those less
educated see themselves as relegated to a permanent underclass
because lack of education leads to the most menial jobs setting
the cycle for poor access to other needs, including the human
rights to housing, decent work, education, food and healthcare.
People of Arab and Muslim identity experience similar denials
of human rights. One noted, “as ethnic profiling takes a stronger
part in our security procedures, so will the effect trickle into
employment decisions and otherwise common social settings.”
Women in immigrant communities felt they were discriminated
based on gender as well as race.
Women, children, the aged, and people with disabilities, as
well as the groups already mentioned, experienced discrimination
based on gender. Women sex workers were of special concern
because they are most often seen as perpetrators rather than
victims and they are marginalized because of the nature of their
work and because they are women.
People with disabilities—mental and physical—felt they were
particularly disadvantaged. The alienating stereotypes that their

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disabilities evoked in general and the assumed and real limitations

of physical and mental capabilities were one set of issues.
The cost of disabilities was a further impediment to well being.
In particular, the survey noted the need for architects and city
planners to integrate the human rights of people with disabilities
into their planning.
Among the other groups that were identified as being
integrated into the action plan were youth and children at risk,
the gay community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and
Queer-LGBTQ), seniors and homeless persons. The survey
also mentioned numerous instances of unnecessary force by the
police services, who treated suspects with verbal and, at times,
physical abuse.
Edmonton has for years been recognized for its dynamic,
engaged population. Dozens of organizations pursue different
aspects of human rights, often separately, seldom collectively, and
often unaware of one another’s efforts. Creating the “basket” of the
human rights initiatives gives these many endeavors a common
space to find one another, know one another, build synergy and
cooperation, partnerships and collaboration, and define and
pursue common goals within the holistic human rights framework.
Extending human rights education to all the stakeholders allows
them to understand that they have been working for the realization
of human rights all along and places their actions and programs in
a larger holistic perspective. The mapping exercises also allowed
the local government and civil society organizations to see which
groups were underrepresented and voiceless. For example,
defining as human rights issues the concerns of groups, such as
sex workers and youth at risk, gave legitimacy to their claims and
moved social action from charity to dignity.
Actions Taken and Progress Made
Because human rights principles are constitutionally and
societally entrenched there is an initial attraction to the violations

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model. Through the Human Rights City, people are now able
to approach these principles differently by looking at specific
issues through a holistic human rights lens that focuses more on
realization than on denunciation or correcting only symptoms.
Homelessness, for instance, is now seen as more a matter of
capacity building and empowerment throughrelevant institutions
than merely building shelters to keep people warm in winter.
Education, job training, access to food, and similar services are
gaining recognition as human rights, and, when these necessities
are treated as human rights, they become the concern of
everyone. Approaching these issues in terms of realizing human
rights engages those most affected in finding solutions, including
at the policy level. The mapping exercises, report on the findings
and recommendations have been disseminated to all the relevant
institutions. More than 100 local organizations were involved in
the exercises, which contributed to the human rights learning of
their leaders.
City government, political parties, and community institutions
continue to be fully engaged in and informed about Human Rights
City activities. They recognize the Human Rights Cityas an
organic project that should not be owned by any one group. The
Human Rights City annual reports are well received and taken
into consideration a part of the planning by these entities.
The Edmonton Human Rights City and the John Humphrey
Center have undertaken a number of activities aimed at enhancing
human rights learning. Two human rights facilitators’ training
programs were held in 2007 and 2008. The second, held in April
2008 brought together practitioners from many diverse agencies
and institutions, public and private, with the understanding that
upon completing the 24 modules of the PDHRE program they
agreed to become trainers within their own organizations. These
seminars grounded community-based facilitators in the holistic
human rights approach. The training seminars represent the
most intensive learning activity of the Human Rights City project.

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The related collaboration with other community organizations

fosters human rights across a broad spectrum of civil society in
Edmonton. These collaborative activities include organizing on 10
December International Human Rights Day events with Aboriginal
organizations, the LGBTQ community, youth at risk and people
with disabilities. Stories from these communities were highlighted
at events marking human rights awareness at the City Art Gallery.
Other events focused on the human rights perspective relating to
racial discrimination and housing rights. An annual Human Rights
City award was launched to honor outstanding contributions to
human rights.
In August 2007 the United Nations Global Youth Assembly
was held in Edmonton. The Human Rights City sponsored events
focused on building a human rights community and Shulamith
Koenig, founder-executive director of PDHRE, gave the keynote
address to youth. The Human Rights City places a great deal
of emphasis on bringing together young people. Many of the
program ideas come from young people, who are steadily taking
ownership of the project.
Cooperation with schools and universities has been an
important part of the outreach and learning strategy. The Human
Rights City promotes distribution of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR) throughout the city schools. It works
with teachers to include human rights in class curricula and
with universities to promote the integration of human rights into
research, at the universities, such as the project with students
at the University of Alberta Community Service Learning Project,
who mapped “Prostitution in Edmonton” as a community issue.
Various activities engaging media and “branding” the Human
Rights Cities project have been undertaken on a regular basis
since 2006, such as interviews with audio, visual and print media.
The Human Rights City sponsored a design competition for design
students at Grant MacEwan College to develop an identity for
The Human Rights City Edmonton Project. The website domain

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http://www.humanrightscity.ca/ is registered and being constantly

developed.
Representatives of the Steering Committee of Edmonton
Human Rights City have been invited to national and international
events at which they presented the work being done in Edmonton.
The outreach has included events in the United States, South
Africa, Austria and China.

The guiding principle behind the action plan is to integrate

human rights consciousness and human rights awareness in all
activities of the city. Rather than create yet another organization,
the members of the Edmonton project and the John Humphrey
Center see their role as fostering the evolution of the way the city
is envisaged and the way people act so that human rights seeps
into every aspect of planning, decision-making and all the vital
concerns of the city.

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Lessons Learned
In the summary of the most recent report filed by the John
Humphrey Center, the authors wrote:
The Human Rights City Edmonton Project is an
ambitious initiative that we have realized takes time
to embed itself into the community. One of the biggest
challenges of the project is the pressure to have fast
outcomes in the community, which may not be to the
benefit of the project or the communities we serve…
the project needs to be understood as something that
is long term…We have learned that to ensure we do
not duplicate or overlap other programs or projects,
or to ensure that all communities are included in the
process, requires time and effort.
The authors go on to identify their most important
accomplishments. The first is having established a core group of
leaders in the Executive Committee and in the Steering Committee,
who understand and believe in the project. Next they cite the
successful training of trainers program that has had an excellent
“ripple effect” in the community. The Youth Leadership Program is
cited for engaging for the first time a group of young people who
will focus on community issues as the basis for understanding
and acting to further human rights. “Ultimately,” they explain, “the
project works to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
a living reality at the community level.”
2. United States
Several previous attempts had been made to establish
human rights cities in the United States. Despite the public will
and support of civil society these were not sustained. Currently
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Atlanta,
Georgia, and Oakland, California, are seriously exploring ways
that they too can join the movement. It was not until the program

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was brought to the District of Columbia (D.C.) that a solid program

could be implanted.
Background
Washington, D.C., is a city of great contrast and disparity. As
the federal governmental center and an international hub it has a
weekday population in excess of one million, of which less than
half are permanent residents are counted. Of those permanently
residing in the District over 50 percent are African-American.
A unique situation and one that greatly disturbs residents is
that they are without representation at the level of the federal
government. Because the area is under direct control of the federal
government, residents are not allowed to elect a senator and have
a non-voting delegate in the Hours of Representatives. In other
words the residents of the District lack a voting representative.
Unemployment is lower than the national average while crime and
violent crime are high, placing Washington 7th among larger US
cities. The public school system is in disarray with an increasing
number of students electing to attend public charter schools that
operate autonomously but are paid for from publicly funded school
vouchers. They are allowed to operate as long as students show
a certain level of achievement. Against this background, PDHRE
– Human Rights Cities Program was offered a challenge by an
international foundation to make Washington, D.C., a human
rights city, starting with youth involvement. In 2007 educators
from PDHRE began meeting with educators, community leaders,
social justice and youth organizations and youth within or outside
the school system.
A Developing Human Rights City
The human rights city program in Washington is still in a
formative stage. Several conditions slowed progress. First, this
was the only time that the program was not requested by a
sponsoring organization or a municipal administration. This meant

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that much preliminary work needed to be done to locate suitable

and willing partners, understand the local context and find the
best entry points for working with the youth population. Second,
working with young people was limited by their availability (most
were in school full-time and many held jobs or other activities
after school). PDHRE did not want the training and learning to
be mainstreamed into the school curriculum in which case the
autonomy of the youth to guide the program would be limited and
it would fall into the lack-luster category of being another add-on
to the curriculum.
Many information forums and outreach programs targeting
various communities of the District were carried out during 2007
with several human rights training programs held as voluntary
after-school programs for students aged 15-18. The program
eventually it gained stability and was able to become anchored
in the community after Jean-Louis Peta Ikamabana, a regional
director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC),

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an international NGO working on peace and justice worldwide,

took charge. AFSC had considerable experience working with
young people and a solid reputation globally. People from the
community, under PDHRE’s auspices, held informal meeting
in schools throughout the District and conducted individual
interviews with potential student participants. Many of the young
people contacted were active in service learning programs since
many schools required or recommended that students become
involved in community action as part of their integrated curriculum.
However, most had not heard of human rights, did not know what
they were or that they were based on universally accepted norms
and standards.
A group of thirty-five young people, all residents from various
neighborhood and schools in the District of Columbia, were
invited to a three-day retreat to discuss human rights education,
youth priorities and program planning. The group was introduced
to the holistic model of human rights in the context of what the
participants considered the most important issues facing young
people. From the various suggestions, they selected three key
issues on which to work, namely, immigration, education and
violence in the streets. They framed these issues in human
rights terms and discussed how human rights, including social,
economic and cultural rights, were interrelated. All participants
had some personal connection with the issues they had chosen.
These themes reflected many of the most pressing concerns that
affected all D.C. residents and many were related to the growing
economic disparity. As elsewhere, those who could afford to do so
send their children to private schools, live in safe neighborhoods
and are not directly concerned by the constraints facing illegal
immigrants. These three themes evolved into the basis for a
plan of action. All those who participated and wished to continue
working on the program became members of the Youth Steering
Committee.

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In subsequent meetings the young people began a program

of dialogue and information with city commissioners for human
rights and education and other local leaders in order to explain
their vision of Washington, D.C. as a Human Rights City and to
learn what actions could be taken to achieve the goal.
Early on in the project it became evident that an adult
committee was needed to support and mentor those on the youth
committee. A meeting of local organizations was held and a
second committee was formed bringing together leaders in some
of the most active social justice, human rights, and university
organizations. They set up a parallel agenda to work with the
students and the community.
Work within the D.C. Public Schools was approved by the
Mayor’s Office, which meant that the Human Rights City initiative
was invited to work in the schools. Integrating human rights
learning into service activities has great potential as a means
of reaching out to young people. There are two advantages to
integrating the program into service learning. First is that it is
voluntary and therefore participants choose to engage based on
their own convictions rather than in response to duties imposed
by the educational system. The second advantage is that service
learning programs are often student-centered and participatory
in design, which coincides with the pedagogy of human rights
learning.
Future Prospects
Creating the vision of a Human Rights City in Washington,
D.C., has broad implications not only for the local community
but also for the entire nation. The fact that young people (and
the accompanying adults) are realizing that human rights
include social, economic and cultural rights is very important in
a country where human rights are perceived as essentially civil
and political. Bringing together young people to discuss their city
and their concerns in human rights terms is fostering cooperation

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and dialogue among people from diverse communities. Through

developing a youth dialogue across communities in the District
and fostering human rights learning, young people and their adult
mentors will redefine their roles as urban residents and citizens.
This approach will provide a strong model for other cities in the
United States.
E. Human Rights Cities around the World
It is worth mentioning that human rights cities were begun in
Nagpur, India, and in Abra Province in the Philippines. Nagpur
had developed into a vital and active community well supported by
the municipality and local NGOs. The focal point of their activities
was centered on land reform, women’s rights and inter-religious
harmony. The human rights activities have continued in Nagpur
through the various organizations and associations although the
city chose to no longer be directly involved in the movement.
Abra Province is located in a mountainous region in
Northwestern Luzon. The population is largely made up of
indigenous people. Action in Abra was directed from Manila with
human rights educators visiting the provincial towns several times
a year. This distance approach to establishing the city never
really succeeded and although some of the training and learning
activities were successful, the program was never rooted in local
tradition and leadership. The fact that people in Abra did not claim
ownership of the Human Rights City was a key factor and one that
provided an important lesson that was taken to heart in planning
subsequent programs.
A Human Rights City is built upon the desire, drive and creative
imagination of its inhabitants. Good intentions from the outside
cannot replace the power of a local initiative.
Requests to participate in the Human Rights City movement
are numerous. The human rights framework provides a powerful
tool that unifies diverse interests under a set of norms that provide
an ethical and legal code. Many of the problems facing cities reach

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far beyond the urban boundaries and cross regional and national
frontiers. People everywhere are aware of the expanded global
implications of issues such as migration, climate change, scarcity
of resources and the way their consequences are felt at a local
level. Human rights are the drivers that enable people to work
together to find solutions to these problems. Instead of building
walls, human rights learning changes attitudes in ways that open
opportunities for the many rather than constraining education
for the few. When people learn about Human Rights Cities and
see the evidence of their success they too want to enjoy the
same possibility. We anticipate that more cities (and countries)
will see the value for societal development of encouraging local
level engagement in human rights-based social change through
Human Rights Cities.

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Chapter 4
The Way Forward

The conditions of life for many of the inhabitants of the cities of

the 21st century are below any acceptable standard based on
the human rights principle of equality in dignity and rights of
everyone. They suffer the pressures of armed conflict, ethnic
cleansing, criminality, corruption, environmental degradation,
unemployment, gender-based discrimination and violence. The
most systematic deprivation falls upon slum dwellers, who suffer
from one or more of the four deprivations characteristic of slums,
namely, lack of improved sanitation, improved water facilities,
durable housing and sufficient living area. In 2005, one or more of
these conditions affected over one third of the urban population in
developing regions, rising to 62 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.39
The extreme poverty and insecurity of the urban dweller call for
urgent action by the international community, which set the goal
of significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum
dwellers by 2020 (Target 11 of the Millennium Development Goals).
UN-HABITAT, along with governments, multilateral and bilateral
institutions for the financing of development, and the private
sector, including non-for-profit and philanthropic organizations,

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are deploying considerable energies and resources to meet these

challenges.
This book argues that directing resources at the problems of
urban life might alleviate suffering in some cases but longer-term
and sustainable solutions require that the underlying patterns of
social injustice be addressed. The Human Rights Cities Program,
by empowering people to know and claim their human rights, seeks
to do just that. It is certainly not the only program based on civic
engagement for societal development but it is showing promise
for addressing the problems besetting cities in the developing and
developed worlds that result from failure to fulfill human rights
obligations. The strategy outlined in the previous chapters is one
of civic empowerment through human rights learning based on
the experience of locally organized Human Rights Cities.
As noted at the outset, the difference between this particular
strategy and other approaches to community empowerment is
the transformative potential of human rights learning. Human
rights learning, as explained in previous chapters, originates in
the knowledge inherent in all human beings of what it means to
have a life free from humiliation. This holistic approach combines
the philosophy and methodologies of critical pedagogy within the
perspective of and reliance on the mobilizing force of the principles
proclaimed for all humanity sixty years ago in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The principles reaffirmed in
various forms by humankind throughout history were periodically
improved as people were able to alter power relations in response
to human suffering. The process of human rights learning is the
basis for these advances in societal development. The process of
human rights learning is instrumental in societal development. It
is the means by which the human rights principles are integrated
into consciousness, moral decision-making, legislation, and
actions of the individual and the community.
Those who have participated in the creation of Human Rights
Cities have acquired a skill set and confidence for questioning

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those power relations that make deprivation of human rights

possible. They use the legal and administrative systems to their
advantage and address problems of urban poverty as participants
in change rather than victims of fatality or recipients of charity. They
develop the ability to analyze problems in terms of deep causes
rather than merely treating symptoms. The idea that social and
economic injustice is “the way the world is” yields to awareness
that people can change their condition by civic engagement for
societal development based on human rights.
We have explained now Human Rights Cities take shape
through a consultative process facilitated by local human rights
activists, often in partnership with local authorities, elected officials
and institutions. The Human Rights Cities also benefit from the
support of international networks, which assists in methodological
and pedagogical matters. Together they help design strategies for
local activities, develop curricula, hold workshops and training-of-

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trainers sessions, conduct research and develop written and visual

educational materials and other media. Outsiders dictate none of
these initiatives, since each community must elect to become a
Human Rights City through the political will of its own inhabitants.
The social and economic change they seek to bring about using
a human rights framework has been described here as societal
development through human rights learning because of its multi-
sector approach and it value for development dynamics and for
relations among members of the community and between them
and the power structures. However, the spread of these urban
spaces of civic empowerment requires that those who facilitate the
process be trained and apprenticed in the existing methodologies
of successful programs, such as that of the Human Rights Cities.
The operating expenses of each City are modest; however, the
scaling up of the strategy and the regional and global levels
requires resources.
The number of people currently benefiting directly from this
strategy numbers in the thousands and indirectly in the hundreds
of thousands, if one considers those in the existing Human Rights
Cities who are affected by policies and resources allocation
revised through the process described in this book. Whatever
the estimate of the number of persons currently benefiting from
the Human Rights Cities Program, it is miniscule compared to
the potential participants in similar programs once the goal of
generalizing this approach has been realized. Not only is it of
direct value to the1.2 billion slum dwellers but it also applies to
all persons whose right to development is not a priority either
in national policy or in international financing of development.
But the movement is growing, a ripple effect is occurring, and
successful practices are having a catalytic effect nationally and
regionally. Evidence of this trend can be found in the numerous
requests from cities that neighbor the current Human Rights Cities
to become Human Rights Cities themselves.

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 Human Rights Cities

The success of current and future Human Rights Cities

cannot be assured without the political space to question unjust
structures through civic engagement. In countries open to such
empowerment by virtue of their democratic institutions and
recognition of human rights in domestic and international law, the
flourishing of Human Rights Cities reinforces the national policy of
sustainable development and should be welcomed and supported
by government institutions, but left free to experiment and
develop, as the examples discussed in Chapter 3 illustrate. Where
autocracy and authoritarian government stifles civic empowerment
it will be difficult to launch and nurture Human Rights Cities. They
will have to emerge through community mobilization in favor of
development that is equitable, sustainable, participatory, inclusive
and human rights-based and part of a non-violent strategy for
social change, one that respects cultural values of the community,
while moving at a sustainable pace toward change. Deeply
rooted corruption, patriarchy, including gender-based violence,
cronyism, incompetence, and discrimination will not be eliminated
by resolutions adopted in New York, Geneva, Nairobi, or Nanjing,
nor by conditions imposed by international financial institutions on
lending or debt rescheduling. It will happen as people learn what
human rights are and act to realize them, beginning at the local
level.
The experience in places like Argentina and Mali, where
people have won hard-fought battles against dictatorship to restore
human rights and create a vibrant civil society, has imbedded the
commitment to sustaining human rights as the moral framework of
societal development. In other societies, especially in developed
countries, the urgency of human rights appears less stark and
the challenge is more that of removing the obstacles to inclusion
and full realization of economic, social and cultural rights. Human
Rights Cities have learned that governments may not be assumed
to ensure that society evolves in the way that is most conducive
to the full realization of human rights; the community must be

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 Human Rights Cities

constantly vigilant and use the levers of government to keep

this vision on track. Human rights learning fosters human rights
awareness by developing the capacity of all people to become
mentors and monitors of human rights.
The famous quotation of Eleanor Roosevelt, pronounced when
the Universal Declaration was adopted in Paris on December 10,
1968, and recited whenever a speaker on the commemoration
of this event is at a loss for words, captures the essence of the
strategy outlined here, perhaps with a significance that she did
not realize at the time:
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In
small places, close to home - so close and so small
that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.
Yet they are the world of the individual person; the
neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he
attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.
Such are the places where every man, woman,
and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity,
equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these
rights have meaning there, they have little meaning
anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to
uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for
progress in the larger world.

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 Human Rights Cities

She probably had in mind her own country and its familiar
factories, farms and offices, but her insight is exactly what the
Human Rights Cities in Rosario, Kati, Musha and all the other
sites are all about as well. Her rhetorical appeal to “citizen action”
is consonant with the concept of civic engagement for societal
development described here for it captures the significance of
change occurring in the smallest units of society, the individual’s
circle of relations, extended to families, communities, institutions,
governments and, in the last analysis, global society.
The limited but promising experience gained so far and
briefly summarized in the preceding pages suggests what could
be gained by encouraging and facilitating the strategy of Human
Rights Cities in the future.

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 Human Rights Cities

NOtes
1
The Responsibility to Protect, Report of the international
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, IDRC, Ottawa,
2001; 2005 World Summit Outcome, par. 138-140, UN Doc. A/
RES/60/1, 24 October 2005.
2
See Cities in A Globalizing World: Global Report on Human
Settlements 2001, UN-HABITAT, New York, p. xxxiii.
3
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/
Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007
Revision, UN Doc. ESA/P/WP/205, February 2008, p. 1.
4
UN-HABITAT, The State of the World’s Cities 2004/2005 –
Globalization and Urban Culture, London: EARTHSCAN, 2004.
5
UN-HABITAT, The State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007 – The
Millennium Development Goals and Urban Sustainability: 20 Years
of Shaping the Habitat Agenda, London: EARTHSCAN, 2006.
6
Id.
7
United Nations, The Millennium Development Goals Report
2007, UN-DESA, New York, June 2007. Available at www.
milleniumcampaign.org.
8
Jared M. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed. New York: Viking Books, 2005.
9
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development
Report 2004. Cultural liberty in today’s diverse world, New York:
UNDP, 2004.
10
UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations, New
York: UNESCO and Columbia University Press, 1949.
11
United Nations, A more secure world: our shared responsibility,
Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,
UN Doc. A/59/565, 29 November 2004; United Nations, Human
Security Now – Protecting and empowering people, Report of the
Commission on Human Security, New York, 2003.
12
UN-HABITAT, Enhancing Urban Safety and Security: Global
Report on Human Settlements 2007, New York: UN-HABITAT, 2007,
p. 80.
13
State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007, UN-HABITAT,
EARTHSCAN, New York, 2006.

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 Human Rights Cities

14
Enhancing Urban Safety and Security: Global Report on Human
Settlements 2007, UN-HABITAT, EARTHSCAN, New York, 2007.
15
UN-HABITAT, Report of the Third Session of the World Urban
Forum. Vancouver, Canada, June 19-23, 2006, available at http://
www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/3406_98924_WUF3-Report.pdf.
16
See Human Development Report 1994, UNDP, New York, 1994,
dealing with the interrelatedness of human development and human
security and Human Development Report 2000, UNDP, New York,
2000, dealing with the key importance of human rights for the
achievement of human development.
17
United Nations, In larger freedom: towards development, security
and human rights for all, Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc.
A/59/2005 of 21 March 2005.
18
UN-HABITAT, International conference on the state of safety
in world cities Monterrey, 1-5 October 2007, Conference
recommendations Monterrey, 5th October 2007, available at http://
www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/5354_51059_State%20of%20
Safety%20Conference%20Recommendations.pdf.
19
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938), Introduction, from
Donald L. Miller (ed.), The Lewis Mumford Reader, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986, pp. 104-107.
20
General Assembly Resolution 55/2. United Nations Millennium
Declaration, 18 September 2000, para. 24.
21
Id., para. 25.
22
UN Doc. A/56/326, 6 September 2001, para. 82.
23
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 49/184, 23
.December 1994. The official duration of the Decade was from 1
January 1995 to 31 December 2004.
24
Id.
25
The Declaration is officially known as the “Declaration on the Right
and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to
Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms.” See General Assembly resolution 53/144
of 9 December 1998.
26
General Assembly Resolution 62/171. International Year of

154
 Human Rights Cities

Human Rights Learning.

27
Noel Entwistle, “Teaching and the Quality of Learning in Higher
Education,” in Noel Entwistle (ed.) Educational Ideas and Practices,
London and New York: Routledge1990, p. 673. See also F. Marton,
D. J. Hounsell, and N.J. Entwistle, The Experience of Learning,
Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1984.
28
David A. Garvin, “Barriers and Gateways to Learning,” in C.
Roland Cristensen, David, A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet, Education
for Judgment. The Artistry of Discussion Leadership, Boston, MA:
Harvard Business School Press, 1991, p. 3.
29
Frank Elbers, Human Rights Education Resourcebook, Human
Rights Education Associates, Cambridge, MA, 2000. Available
online at http://www.hrea.org/pubs/HREresourcebook/resourcebook.
pdf.
30
See, for example, Report of the Secretary-General, Guidelines
for national plans of action for human rights education, UN doc.
A/52/469/Add.1 (20 October 1997).
31
See, for example, WHO, Transforming Health Systems: Gender
and Rights in Reproductive Health. A Training Curriculum for
Health Programme Managers, Geneva: WHO, 2001. WHO/
RHR/01.29.
32
See, in particular, George J. Andreopoulos and Richard Pierre
Claude, Human Rights Education for the Twenty-First Century,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; PDHRE, Human Rights
Learning: A Peoples’ Report, New York: PDHRE, 2006.
33
These goals of HRE were articulated in Richard Claude’s
Methodologies for Human Rights Education. Available at http://www.
pdhre.org/materials/methodologies.html.
34
Id.
35
See supra, note 19.
36
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 28.
37
UNDP, Human Development Report 2007/2008, pp. 232.
38
2001 estimates. Available at http://www.unhabitat.org/categories.
asp?catid=214.

155
 Human Rights Cities

39
Inter-Agency and Expert Group on MDG Indicators, Department
of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat,
Development Goals Report 2008, New York: United Nations, 2008,
p. 43.

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 Human Rights Cities

INDEX
A B
Aboriginal people 109, 128, 129, Bamako. See Mali
131. See also First Peoples Batwa people (pygmies in Rwanda)
See also Indigenous 73, 75
community (ies) Benedek, Wolfgang 20
Abra Province, The Philippines Bihać. See Bosnia-Herzegovina
142 Bolivia 122, 127
Accra. See Ghana Bonaventura de Sousa Santos
action plan 52, 80, 87, 130, 133, 120
136 Bongo. See Ghana
AIDS 24, 25, 65, 66, 69, 73, 75, Bosnia. See Bosnia-Herzegovina
80. See also HIV/AIDS Bosnia-Herzegovina 93, 101, 102
See also orphans Bihać Human Rights City 93,
Alberta 128, 129, 131, 135 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107
University of 128, 129, 135 Ruzicka 105
Alternative Dispute Resolution Brazil 20, 122, 126
Centre (ADR) in Ghana 62 Porto Alegre Human Rights City
American Friends Service 122, 123, 124, 126
Committee (AFSC) in
Washington, D.C. 139 C
Amuzu, Tuinese E. 20 Canada 19, 20, 127, 128, 129
Argentina 10, 20, 51, 52, 53, 108, Edmonton Human Rights City
109, 112, 115, 123, 126, 149 128, 129, 130, 131, 133,
Rosario Human Rights City 10, 134, 135, 136, 137
16, 51, 52, 53, 83, 108, 109, capacity building 29, 87, 116, 134
111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, Chariotti, Susana 10, 20
118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, children 9, 12, 13, 14, 25, 27, 31,
127, 151 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 61, 63,
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Graz, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,
Austria) 100 79, 80, 81, 85, 97, 98, 103,
Atuguba, Raymond 20 105, 107, 116, 118, 124, 125,
Austria 20, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 136 129, 131, 132, 133, 140.
Graz Human Rights City 93, 94, See also Convention on the
95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, Rights of the Child (CRC)
102, 103, 107 See also violence against
children
Chile 122, 126, 127

157
 Human Rights Cities

China 136 105, 132, 133, 135

civic engagement 20, 50, 63, 64, District, The. See Washington, D.C.
83, 146, 147, 149, 151 District of Columbia.
Claude, Richard 44 See Washington, D.C.
Colombia 122, 127
Community Learning Forums 67 E
community radio 67, 72, 83, 86 economic and social development
Consensual Human Rights City 22, 28, 33, 36
(Mali) 84. See also Mali economic development 23, 24, 35,
Convention Against Torture (CAT) 36, 46, 66, 84
Rosario 118 Edmonton. See Canada
Convention on the Elimination of education 11, 12, 14, 20, 24, 25,
All Forms of Discrimination 27, 28, 33, 38, 40, 41, 42,
Against Women (CEDAW) 43, 44, 46, 48, 52, 53, 57,
45, 88, 92, 117. See 58, 61, 62, 63, 66, 70, 75,
also gender equality 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86,
See also women 87, 98, 101, 105, 117, 123,
Convention on the Rights of the 124, 127, 128, 130, 131,
Child (CRC) 45, 88, 92, 117. 132, 133, 140, 141, 143.
See also children See also human right: to
crime, criminality 27, 29, 30, 31, education
32, 33, 35, 36, 57, 65, 138, Eleanor Roosevelt. See Roosevelt,
145 Eleanor
D empowerment 18, 19, 38, 39, 44,
134, 146, 148, 149
D.C.. See Washington, D.C. environmental degradation 46, 145
Das, Satya 20 European Cultural Capital (Graz)
democratic governance. 95
See governance European Training and Research
development. See economic and Centre for Human Rights
social development and Democracy (ETC) Graz
See economic development 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 107
See human development European Union (EU) 93, 95, 99,
See right to development 103
See social development exclusion 18, 27, 29, 32, 33, 35,
See societal development 104, 109, 118, 129
Dewey, John 43 extreme poverty 24, 73, 75, 78,
disabilities 13, 75, 77, 97, 103, 145. See also poverty

158
 Human Rights Cities

See also urban poor urban governance 7, 32, 34, 35

Grant MacEwan College 135
F Graz, Austria. See Austria
First Peoples 127. See H
also Aboriginal people
See also Indigenous HABITAT. See UN-HABITAT
community (ies) Harper, Stephen 132
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. HIV/AIDS 24, 25, 65, 69, 73, 75,
See Roosevelt, Franklin 80
Delano holistic understanding of human
Fraser, Joy 20 rights 19
Freire, Paolo 82, 114 human development 22, 36, 41, 95
human right
G to education 58, 62
gender equality 18, 19, 46, 119. to food 78
See also Convention on to health 58, 69, 70, 87, 118
the Elimination of All Forms to housing 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 46,
of Discrimination Against 48, 58, 98, 101, 102, 104,
Women (CEDAW) 110, 127, 131, 132, 135, 145
See also women to work 131, 132, 134
genocide (Rwanda) 73 human rights
Genocide Memorial Site (Rwanda) economic and social justice 10,
73 11, 49
Ghana 20, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 60, Human Rights Cities Program 7,
61, 64, 66 8, 17, 18, 52, 138, 146, 148
Accra 56 human rights city 15, 60, 63, 67,
Bongo 53, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63 74, 80, 81, 83, 84, 95, 97,
Newtown 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62 98, 101, 102, 103, 106, 123,
Nima and Maamobi 56, 57, 58, 130, 138
60, 61, 62 human rights clinic (Kati) 89
Walewale 56, 60, 61, 62 Human Rights Council (Graz) 98,
globalization 22, 23, 24, 25, 41 99, 102
Global Agenda 19, 23 human rights education 38, 43
governance 7, 14, 22, 26, 28, 30, human rights educators 66, 88,
32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 55, 61, 103, 119, 120, 142
69, 74, 78, 109, 115 human rights framework 8, 9, 10,
democratic governance 34, 35 12, 15, 45, 49, 59, 78, 88,
participatory governance 26, 34 92, 110, 114, 115, 116, 133,

159
 Human Rights Cities

human rights J
human rights framework
(continued) 142, 148 Jews (Graz, Austria) 94
human rights instruments 12 John Humphrey Center for Peace
human rights report card and Human Rights (JHC)
(Korogocho, Kenya) 71 129
Human Rights Walk (Graz, K
Austria) 99, 100
Human Rights Council 98, 99, 102 Kati. See Mali
Human Rights Education Kenya 18, 20, 64, 65, 67, 79
Associates (HREA) 43 Korogocho Human Rights City
human security 11, 22, 29, 30, 35, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,
36, 88, 95, 101 71, 72
Koenig, Shula 7, 9, 10, 82, 95,
I 113, 135
identity 26, 27, 29, 32, 77, 120, Korogocho. See Kenya
122, 129, 132, 135 L
Ikamabana, Jean-Louis Peta 20,
139 Legal Resources Center (LCR),
Indigenous community (ies) 16, Ghana 55, 56, 57, 60, 61,
118, 121. See also Aboriginal 63, 64
people Legal Resources Centre (LRC),
See also First Peoples Ghana 55
See also Native Americans LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Institute for Gender, Law and Transgender and Queer)
Development (INSGENAR), 133, 135
Rosario 112, 113, 114 Lichem, Walther 7, 19, 129
Institut d’Education Populaire
(IEP), Kati 90
M
International Covenant on Mahamar, Mohamed El Moktar 20
Economic, Social and Mali 20, 51, 52, 54, 73, 81, 82, 83,
Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 84, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 149
88, 117, 118 Consensual Human Rights
International Criminal Court 22 Community (CHRC) 83, 85,
International Year of Human Rights 90, 91, 92
Learning 15, 42 Kati 51, 54, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
Islamophobia 102 88, 89, 90, 91, 151
mapping 86

160
 Human Rights Cities

mapping exercise. See mapping people with disabilities.

Musha Human Rights City 73, 74, See disabilities
75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, Piaget, Jean 43
151 plan of action 47, 48, 50, 107, 117,
127, 140
N Porto Alegre. See Brazil
Native Americans 127. See poverty 8, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 24,
also First Peoples 30, 31, 36, 46, 48, 60, 61,
Nazi (Graz, Austria) 94, 96, 100 69, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81,
Newtown. See Ghana 84, 104, 109, 129, 145, 147.
Nyawira, Rose 20, 72 See extreme poverty
See urban poor
O prostitutes 53, 115
Office of Secretary of Human public space 27, 31, 32, 34, 38,
Rights (Rosario, Argentina) 104, 117
121 Q
Ombudsman (Rosario, Argentina)
110, 114, 118 Qom-Toba (in Rosario, Argentina)
orphans 73, 75, 76, 79, 80 109, 114, 121

P R
participatory governance. Radio Koch 67, 72. See
See governance also Korogocho
participatory methodology (ies) 44 Rakovic, Nejra 103
patriarchy 12, 32, 149. See rape 68
also gender Research, Advocacy and Advisory
PDHRE, the Peoples Movement Services (RAAS) in Ghana
for Human Rights Learning 55, 56
9, 10, 11, 15, 19, 42, 43, 45, Rights, Human. See human rights
46, 52, 54, 64, 66, 82, 83, right to development 40, 148
84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, Rogers, Carl 43
97, 100, 103, 105, 113, 127, Roma (Bosnia-Herzegovina) 103,
129, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140 104, 105
peace 22, 28, 29, 34, 40, 72, 90, Roosevelt, Eleanor 150
140 Rosario, Argentina 10, 51, 52, 123
People’s Movement for Human Ruzicka 105
Rights Education in Rwanda Rwanda 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80
(MPEDH/RWANDA) 73

161
 Human Rights Cities

S Commission (Canada) 129,

132
Salzburg 26
Samassekou, Adama 82 U
security 11, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23,
UN-HABITAT 7, 19, 31, 81, 145
27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 40,
UNDP 54, 86
45, 59, 66, 68, 88, 95, 101,
UNESCO 29, 54, 82, 90
116, 122, 125, 132. See
UNICEF 54
also human security
United Nations 8, 9, 13, 14, 22, 24,
sexual violence 78, 80, 110
28, 41, 95, 127, 135
sex workers 132, 133
Secretary-General of 8
slum 17, 18, 24, 25, 64, 81, 118,
United Nations Decade for Human
145, 148. See also urban
Rights Education (1995-
poor
2004) 41
social change 14, 18, 39, 45, 82,
United Nations Global Youth
102, 143, 149
Assembly 135
social development 22, 24, 28, 33,
United States of America 20, 126,
35, 36
127, 136, 137, 138, 142
social exclusion 109
Washington, D.C., Human Rights
social inclusion 18, 19, 96
City 30, 138, 141
societal development 27, 28
Universal Declaration of Human
societal fragmentation 30, 34
Rights (UDHR) 14, 15, 16,
South Africa 136
41, 47, 53, 64, 93, 117, 135,
steering committee 12, 47, 49, 54,
137, 146
57, 85, 86, 98, 105, 113, 114,
urbanization 8, 18, 23, 29, 31, 32
115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121,
urban governance.
124, 125, 126, 136, 137, 140
See governance
sustainable development 22, 36,
urban poor 17, 18, 19
40, 46, 64, 149
urban slum. See slum
T V
Tabakovic, Iskra 103
Vaugeois, Renée 20
Tibaijuka, Anna Kajumulo 7
violence against children 12, 13,
Toba 10, 16, 53, 109, 114, 121
27, 78, 105
training 49, 52, 53, 88, 92, 95, 97,
violence against women and girls
101, 116
53, 68, 69, 70
transformative pedagogy 42, 43
Truth and Reconciliation

162
 Human Rights Cities

W
Walewale. See Ghana
Washington, D.C. 30, 138, 139,
140, 141, 142
Washington, D.C., Human Rights
City 30, 138, 141
water scarcity 70
Whitehead, Alfred North 43
widowhood rites (Ghana, Kenya)
61, 62, 63
women 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 27,
37, 40, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53,
54, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66, 67,
68, 69, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78,
79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 89,
97, 103, 105, 107, 110, 112,
113, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124,
131, 132, 142
women’s rights. See gender
equality
See violence against women
and girls
World Urban Forum 17, 36
Y
Youth Steering Committee
(Washington, D.C.) 140
Z
Zimbabwe 18

163
 Human Rights Cities

About the Authors

Stephen P. Marks is the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of

Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health,
where he directs the Program on Human Rights in Development.
He also teaches human rights in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
at Harvard University. He holds academic degrees from Stanford
University, the Universities of Paris, Strasbourg, Besançon and Nice,
France, as well as the University of Damascus, Syria. He has also
held teaching positions at Columbia University, Princeton University,
the University of Phnom Penh Faculty of Law; Cardozo School of
Law; the New School for Social Research; Rutgers University School
of Law, City University of Hong Kong School of Law and University
of Hong Kong Law School. He spent 12 years in the service of
the United Nations, working for UNESCO in Paris and in various
peacekeeping operations. He is currently chair of the UN High Level
Task Force on the Implementation of the Right to Development. His
latest publications relate to human reproductive cloning, universal
jurisdiction, cultural rights, human rights education, human rights in
development, human rights and bioethics, and the war on terrorism.
He is a PDHRE Board member.

164
 Human Rights Cities

Kathleen Modrowski is Director of Global Studies at the Global

College, Long Island University. She studied in the United States
and France where she received an advanced degree in cultural
anthropology and ethnology of the Arab world. She carried out fieldwork
in Tunisia and France where she focused on sedentarization, circular
migration between North Africa and France and the gendered use of
space. While in France, she studied photography and documentary
film. She was a member of the research unit Geste et Image at the
CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research). Her interest in
visual documentation led her to working with communities in Europe
and North Africa in participatory filmmaking and photography. In 1987
she joined the faculty of Friends World College, a unique academic
program based on an experiential model with a strong social justice
curriculum, where she was a professor of cultural anthropology and
critical pedagogy. Friends World affiliated with Long Island University
in 1991 and subsequently changed its name to the Global College.
As Global Studies Director, she developed field-based learning and
community service curriculums. She is on the PDHRE Board and is
director of its Education Program Committee. Her research includes
work on popular human rights education, the right to health and
traditional medicine and experiential education.

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 Human Rights Cities

ABOUT PDHRE

SHULAMITH KOENIG, FOUNDING PRESIDENT

Dear Reader,
The human rights cities are being developed as an “argument” for
the imperative of learning about human rights as a way of life at the
community level and as relevant to people’s daily lives. Moving from
charity to dignity.
We hope you had an inspiring experience going through the
pages of this book. You may possibly want to develop a human rights
city in your country. We are here to serve. Allow us to tell you who
we are and summarize the vision and practical mission of the human
rights cities:
Our Mission: PDHRE was founded in 1989 as a non-profit,
international service organization with a deep belief in the power
of human rights learning for economic and social transformation.
PDHRE has worked directly and indirectly with its network of affiliates
and partners in over 60 countries around the world to develop and
advance the learning about human rights as way of life. It enables
women and men to re-imagine their lives and discover their own
power to define the destiny of their community. Participating in the
planning of their future, the human rights framework provides them
with the guideline to pursue their hopes. In pursuing its work in the
field, PDHRE is constantly revitalized by actions being taken in the
community to create a space for a meaningful change as a result of
internalizing the praxis of human rights. Assuming social responsibility,
people move away from humiliation to belong in their community in
dignity with others.
 Human Rights Cities

Human Rights Cities: Imagine living in a society where all

citizens have made a pledge to build a community based on equality
and nondiscrimination; —where all women and men are actively
participating in the decisions that affect their daily lives guided by the
human rights framework; where people have a holistic vision of human
rights to overcome fear and impoverishment, a society that provides
human security, access to food, clean water, housing, education,
healthcare and work at livable wages, sharing these resources with all
citizens—not as a gift, but as a realization of human rights. A Human
Rights City is a practical viable model that demonstrates that living in
such a society is possible!
We live in a world where a multitude of organizations work to solve
the enormous problems humanity is facing one project at the time.
PDHRE believing that the holistic, practical human rights framework
if known and internalized by women and men at the community level
holds the promise for meaningful, positive change. For that purpose
PDHRE is facilitating the development of sustainable Human Rights
cities around the world. A Human Rights City is where local groups
and organizations, those attending to a larger range of social and
economic justice issues in the city, join to learn about human rights as
relevant to their daily lives. Forming into a Steering Committee they
develop learning programs throughout the city, encouraging people
to participate in the decision that determine their lives. They develop
critical thinking to examine symptoms vs. causes of many issues such
as lack of clean water, violence against women, poverty, education,
food and employment. These are issues that can be solved if the
decisions made by communities are guided by the human rights
framework.
 Human Rights Cities

On our website http://www.pdhre.org/ you can find A Call

for Justice–Resource Packet: Governments’ Commitments and
Obligations to Human Rights Providing a Human Rights Framework
to Empower the Work of NGOs, and Community Workers: http://www.
pdhre.org/justice.html, a video series and manual about CEDAW:
http://www.pdhre.org/videoseries.html and many more learning
tools.

PDHRE
People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning
526 West 111th St. Suite 4E,
New York, NY 10025, USA
Tel: 1-212-749-3156 Fax 1-212-666-6325
E mail: [email protected]
Award winning Website: www.pdhre.org