Today marks the 65th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The Declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10,1948, and this day has since been commemorated worldwide as Human Rights Day.
This past weekend WWAV staff attended the US Human Rights Network’s national conference in Atlanta (http://www.ushrnetwork.org/), where human rights and social justice activists and advocates from across the nation came together to work to strengthen a domestic human rights agenda and culture here in the U.S. and to demand that the United States government fulfill its human rights obligations in the U.S. At the conference, WWAV staff members were able to make connections with other human rights workers from across the country and share our community’s stories.
WWAV continues to celebrate the anniversary by calling for human rights for sex workers, drug users, and low-income communities of color here and across the world. We also call for the dismantling of the War on Drugs and for economic justice and equitable investment in our communities.
Bringing Human Rights Home
The language of “human rights” is not one often used in government and policy circles inside of the United States, and people have often talked about human rights as if they were only relevant to abuses in other countries. But the idea of “human rights” is a fundamental idea we embrace here at Women With a Vision. We see human rights as a concept that not only frames the work we do, but as one that is central to elevating the voices of our communities.
The idea that all individuals have fundamental rights rooted in the concept of human dignity is one that has been important for many marginalized and disenfranchised people’s movements across the globe, and it’s important to our own theory of social change here at WWAV. As a grassroots organization working with New Orleans’ most marginalized communities, many of whom are engaged in street-based economies, much of our work is situated in acknowledging the day-to-day lives and human dignity of the people we work with.
Women With a Vision uses a human rights framework in how we approach the issues we center our work around because it enables us to explore how structural factors like poverty and food insecurity increase our community’s vulnerability. We are able to show how laws and policies can stigmatize women in our society and disconnect them from the city’s service providers, pushing them farther to the margins. We can then work to address these barriers to access and health through public education and advocacy campaigns that challenge attitudes, laws, and policies that negatively impact women and communities of color within Louisiana and elsewhere.
WWAV envisions a world in which there is no war against women and women’s bodies, in which women have spaces to come together to tell their stories, in which women empower themselves to make decisions about their own bodies and lives, and in which women have the support they need to realize their hopes and dreams. We see the fight for marginalized women’s lives as a human rights fight.
Embracing the framework of human rights is vital for us here in the United States. This October the United States saw a government shutdown that left poor women, infants, and children with slashed benefits, and last month our communities saw a massive reduction in SNAP (food stamp) benefits for more than 47 million lower-income people. Here in Louisiana, our governor is refusing a Medicaid expansion that would provide health insurance for nearly half a million poor people in the state. The slashing of public programs and social protections has increased on both the federal and state levels. We have witnessed this intimately in New Orleans, where post-Katrina the destruction of our city’s public and social welfare net has left our communities devastated, and cut off from social protections for basic human needs.
For this reason, on the occasion of International Human Rights Day, WWAV is calling on both our state and federal government to recognize that every person has fundamental human rights, inclusive of economic and social rights that should allow them to be free from structural inequalities that strip away human dignity — such inadequate health care, widespread hunger, poverty, homelessness, low wages, and economic insecurity.  We are asking for our lawmakers to recognize our communities’ fundamental needs and human dignity, and to comply with their obligations under international human rights treaties. Moreover, WWAV stands in solidarity with human rights defenders speaking out today against abuse, exclusion, oppression, economic injustice, and violence, both here in the United States and across the globe.
WWAV believes that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words ring as true today as they did nearly four decades ago: “We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society…We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power…this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together…you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others…the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” – MLK Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967