The late breakthrough of human rights educaton

Abstract

Human Rights as they are formulated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 have become a moral lingua franca in the words of the Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff. We have also witnessed a so-called Human Rights Revolution in the post war period with more declarations and conventions concerning vulnerable groups such as children, women, indigenous populations and disabled people. Stronger mechanisms for implementations such as Human Rights Courts for example the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the International Criminal Court in the Hague have been introduced. In spite of this “human rights revolution”, human rights education – both at school and university level, has lagged behind. It is only in the later decades that serious attempts have been made to introduce human rights in curricula and in various subjects in the schools in several countries around the world. The same general phenomenon applies to many universities. This article analyzes human rights education from a global perspective and presents an explanation why the processes of formulating and implementing such an education have been so slow. A further question that will be addressed is how a human rights education can be defined and practiced - especially at various levels in schools.