human rights

Stunning, to travel to the city where I had lived and had protested the Bush/Cheney ascension to power -- but instead to witness the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

The 8-year depression seemed to lift from the people of DC.  Around Union station and up to the Mall, makeshift stalls clustered in clearings hawking Obama t-shirts, First Family bags, a huge painting of Obama and Michelle as divine Egyptian royalty.  Friends who live there were hosting giant slumber parties of out of town guests.  Troops of kids from DC schools held hands and took each other’s photos, their teachers gleeful.  Chatty Obama-enthusiast taxi drivers.

The city is finally eager to be home to our Nation’s elected leader and the entire community of appointees, staffers and supporters who transform the restaurants, the schools, the fashions, the streets, the fabric and rhythm of the city by their doings.  The people of our Nation’s capital also suffer one of the highest HIV rates in this country, on par with worst epidemics in Africa.

Two million people were on the Mall, according to official estimates.   We walked for two hours through a tunnel and past the Tidal basin.  Three young women walked together with elbows linked, Kenyon flags flapping off their coat shoulders like superhero capes.  AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women in America in their age group.  In their home country of Kenya, HIV rates for young women ages 15 to 25 are 5 times those of their male counterparts. 
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Today, Wednesday, December 10, marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Last Saturday, at the invitation of ThirdRoot Community Health Center in Brooklyn, Hadiyah Charles from the HIV Law Project, Center for Women and HIV Advocacy and I facilitated a workshop for a small group of social justice minded health workers and advocates. 

We presented an outline of a tree on a large sheet of a paper taped to the spring green studio wall.  Then from reclined positions on yoga bolsters, the group mapped out how HIV and AIDS looks in this country and in our lives as words among the leaves of the tree.  Among a tangle of roots, we charted the inequities and mistaken values that drive the epidemic, such as racial injustice, gender inequity, homophobia and transphobia.  In the trunk, we listed the institutions that carry these social injustices into our lives. 

We went on to map how and where every one’s work intervenes in the AIDS crisis, and where our work comes together.  Specifically, we showed how CHAMP works to revision the roots and demand that institutions instead carry principles that empower and sustain us into our lives.  As we crossed out "gender inequity" for "gender justice," we added human rights to the root system.

A human rights analysis leads us to governments' many doors to make demands.   The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers a set of principles on which any government should found its work, positioning the state as a mechanism to have our basic needs met.   Human rights promise that means all of us and all of our needs.

The violation of human rights leads to HIV vulnerability, and human rights also provide a framework for working our way out of the AIDS crisis, perhaps foremost through the right to the highest attainable standard of health.

Let’s hold our government officials accountable for delivering our human right to health, including our mental and sexual health.  We each have this right regardless of our income or immigration status, our criminal record or sexual practices.  Rights, however, are only meaningful when we demand them and then realize them in our lives and communities.

Nancy Ordover reminded CHAMPsters that the drafters of the UDHR specifically noted that it should be disseminated and, in particular, should be read in schools and other educational settings. 

There are many legitimate criticisms of the United Nations and even of how this document came to be.  People worldwide are still working to make the idea of human rights meaningful for women, young people, and any of us who live in the intersections of oppressions in our societies.  The document itself, however, provides a guiding principles for humane states accountable to the people they serve.