Human rights standards, frameworks, and discourses are always changing. It is critical that they adapt in order to respond to new and emerging concerns and dangers, as well as to confront entrenched but sometimes invisible power, discrimination, and privilege. This progress may be seen in how human rights norms and processes are being utilized and created to promote and solve challenges such as climate justice, reproductive justice, systemic racism, vaccination equality, and other disparities.
The importance and legitimacy of this evolution, as well as the role and responsibility of the human rights movement in this regard, are enshrined in the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, article 7 of which protects the “right to develop and discuss new human rights ideas and principles and to advocate for their acceptance.” It is reflected in developments such as the Human Rights Council’s recent recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, for which advocacy will ensure that, over time, that right becomes as widely accepted and understood as rights such as freedom of expression or a fair trial.
For far too long, straight white males from the Global North have dominated and disproportionately defined human rights discourse. It mirrored their preferences and privilege. Many in the Global South, as well as those vulnerable to different types of discrimination or persecution, have had their skills, experience, objectives, and viewpoints insufficiently incorporated. This is predictable considering the colonial legacies associated with the formation of international multilateral systems, from which UN human rights instruments sprang.
WCHR, along with many of our regional and national level partners, is dedicated to contributing to a decolonized human rights movement and human rights discourse – a process vital to its relevance and validity.
The work, struggles, and realities of Global South, feminist, and queer human rights defenders and activists over decades must be acknowledged and reflected in human rights discourse and priorities, including at the United Nations Human Rights Council and other UN human rights fora in Geneva and New York. TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) and other movements are also helping to bring about this transition.
WCHR works in solidarity with these defenders both directly and through networks to which we belong. We are dedicated to facilitating them access and involvement at the UN, so that they may speak with their own voices, offer their own knowledge, communicate their own experiences and demands, and form an international human rights discourse that is both effective and relevant to them.