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Summary: A video/drama training manual. Produced in collaboration by the International Association for Freedom of Religion and the People's Movement for Human Rights Education.
The present international order does not assure the full realization of human rights. It is clearly evident that many conditions in today’s highly violent, severely unjust world deny the fundamental right to freedom of religion and belief. Millions are denied all their human rights on the basis of the religious or ethnic groups into which they were born. The world order is being rent asunder by the symptoms of a “clash of civilizations,” largely perceived as conflict between and among religions. Thus, the rights enumerated in Articles 1 through 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) because of the failure of states to achieve the international order envisioned in Article 28 in which all people would enjoy all their human rights.
The major conflict of these years, “the war on terrorism” is interpreted by some to be a struggle between Islam and Christendom, a modern version of the Crusades, A medieval rehearsal of the nineteenth and twentieth century worldwide expansion of Western power. The roots of religious conflict within and between nations and regions are old, deep and world-wide. In all world regions religious groups are exhorted to take up arms against those of other faiths on grounds of recent and ancient grievances. Such a religiously manifested conflict forms the background of one of the video dramas that form the core of this human rights learning package.
This learning-action program is a response to these conditions, an attempt to deracinate the ignorance and intolerance in which these devastating conflicts and the wide-spread denial of religious freedom are cultivated. Human rights learning is a response to these and other multiple assaults on human dignity. It is a response informed by a belief that human beings can learn to live constructively with human differences among then differences in religion and belief. Greater understanding of the real and significant human differences and recognition of universal and constant human commonalities, illuminated within a framework of the values and principles of human rights is essential to the realization of freedom of religion and belief. Human rights learning is a major means to the achievement of a social order characterized by religious tolerance, respect for diversity and personal autonomy in matters of faith and conscience within or outside the context of formal religious belief and practice. Such a social order as that aspired to in Article 28 of the UDHR.