Human Rights
When reflecting on human rights, you might think of several rights, such as freedom of expression, the right to live a fulfilling life, and the right to easily access work / educational resources. Human rights aren’t limited to these components but I found these to be the most important from a general standpoint. Other human rights including the right to privacy, vote, and plenty more dive into what we as people desire and need as opposed to how we want to be treated and viewed by the public. These rights should be common sense for everyone but unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
Human rights get violated every single minute of the day. It may not seem like it from the surface but think about all the emails/notifications you might’ve gotten from your workplace, university, or device that warn you about the dangers that might surround you (aka human rights getting violated). The most common human right that gets violated the most would be the right to privacy as sexual and gender-based violence remains rampant in numerous societies, often exacerbated by cultural norms that perpetuate inequality. These human rights issues not only undermine individual dignity but also hinder societal progress and cohesion.
To free ourselves from the paranoia about human rights getting violated by a good chunk of our population let’s try to learn and understand these rights while informing those around us. Having taken an ethics class in my previous semester, I was able to engage and interact with these rights and practice using my moral compass to determine if violating a human right for my own selfish needs was necessary whether it was for personal or business reasons and ever since then I’ve encouraged others to do the same. Overall, the topic of what human rights are and how they get violated barely gets talked about which is why I thought to bring this topic up.
Valentina Carraro’s The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on violations of the right to integrity of the person article tapped into this issue a bit discussing how human rights were heavily violated curing COVID. She stated that “Lockdown measures adopted by governments to manage the pandemic often resulted in increased levels of domestic violence against women and girls, leading UN Women to coin a new term—‘shadow pandemic’—to refer to the severe intensification of all forms of gender-based violence that occurred during the pandemic (Felten’s article in this collection takes a deeper look into effectively recognizing and mitigating the same). Moreover, there were numerous racially motivated attacks perpetrated in Western countries against persons of Asian origin or descent, due to prejudice arising from the Chinese origin of the virus (Amon and Wurth 2020).” This goes to show you how anyone you know can quickly turn around to violate someone else’s human rights simply for their entertainment. It’s important to take this issue more seriously because of cases like this.
