GUYANA today joins the rest of the world in observance of Human Rights Day under the theme: ‘Youth Standing Up for Human Rights’. The United Nations, in explaining the theme, said after a year marked by the 30th Anniversary celebrations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which culminated on 20 November, 2019, their plan is to capitalise on the current momentum, and spotlight the leadership role of youth in collective movements as a source of inspiration for a better future. It said the aim is to celebrate the potential of youth as constructive agents of change, amplify their voices, and engage a broad range of global audiences in the promotion and protection of rights.

According to the UN, youth can play a crucial role in positive change. Young people have always been major drivers of political, economic and social transformation. They are at the forefront of grassroots mobilisations for positive change, and bring fresh ideas and solutions for a better world. Empowering youth to better know and claim their rights will generate benefits globally. Young people are often marginalized, and encounter difficulties in accessing and enjoying their rights because of their age. Upholding their rights, and empowering them to better know and claim them will generate benefits globally.

Here in Guyana, we pride ourselves on our plurality. Our history, our Constitution, our culture could not reflect greater plurality for a people of less than a million, at the risk of falling into the sea so closely do we cling to the coast. In a plural society, we accept and celebrate diversity, rule by majority, and protect minorities. To do so, we default to the ‘commons’: Common principles, commonsense, a common conscience, common concerns and common courtesies. Human rights are arguably the most common principles of a plural society.

In the face of different, often divergent, sometimes opposing views on everything that matters and much that does not, human rights principles ground us. They remind us of the most fundamental ‘common’: Our humanity. Scientists tell us that genetically, human beings are somewhere between 99.0% and 99.9% identical.

This scientific assertion is no surprise to anyone who has spent some time with a ‘stranger’. How quickly we discover that we have the same hopes and dreams, the same fears and frustrations. We basically are born, grow up, grow old and die, and along the way we take the same materials and create myriad recipes and styles and melodies. Unfortunately, we also make war to make peace, often because we are not content to dream our own dreams, but wish to dictate to others. And while we revel in the variety of flowers, attempt to protect ‘our’ bio-diversity, and cherish tourism as a past-time and a source of income, we are scared, if not resentful, of the ‘other’. The result of such fears and resentments is the violation of the very rights each of us holds so dear, and the ensuing quotidian deprivations, discrimination and discord which we seem to have accepted as a matter of course.

The idea and ideal of our collective pursuit of human rights challenge our civil, political, economic and social status quo. Pursuit of human rights suggests and asserts that as a human race, we can and must do ‘better’. That our fear and resentment of other ways of being are not merely irrational, but harmful to ourselves in the long-run, and that finding mutually tenable ways of expressing and addressing such fear and resentment, even transforming these into acceptance and respect, is likely to yield individual and collective benefits far beyond what we currently enjoy. Acceptance and respect for the ‘other’ must never, however, be misconstrued as an invitation to ‘say what I want, do as I please’. The three fundamentals of any viable plural society: The rule of law, peace and security, and decent work are born of and engender respect for human rights.

So, what are human rights? Simply put, they are civil, political, economic, social, cultural and group entitlements each of us holds because we are human, regardless of geography or demographic markers. Because these rights are indivisible and interdependent, their realisation is interrelated. But perhaps the most fascinating and enduring attribute of human rights is that at one and the same time, each of us is always both a rights-holder and a duty-bearer. For states are made up of people, and government, in viable states, are for, by and of the people. In the pursuit of my rights, therefore, I must respect the rights of the ‘other’.