Transcript for the Piece Audio version of 60th anniversary of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
THE STATE WE’RE IN Section A
Length 12:29
Broadcast Date: 06 December 2008
**TSWI ID NEW TAG
This is The State We’re In. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
December 10th marks the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Even if you’ve never heard of the document, chances are it affects you every day – it promises you the right to vote, to make a living, to hold opinions – to name just a few.
We start our programme this week with a look at the Universal Declaration – and the difference it’s made in the last 60 years.
Here’s what Eleanor Roosevelt had to say about it in 1948:
DALET duurt: A - Eleanor Roosevelt – cut: 00:21”
FW: “It is a declaration…
LW: all peoples of all nations….”
After the atrocities of World War II, the newly formed United Nations realized there needed to be an international standard for rights of people everywhere.
But what were those rights? A commission was set up to answer that question -- and after 2 years of arduous debate, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Today, every member state of the UN undertakes to protect and promote the rights of its citizens as laid out in the Declaration.
But let’s be honest -- that doesn’t always happen….Zimbabwe, Guantanamo Bay, China, Pakistan, Russia……Watch the news and you see that people’s rights are violated every day, in every corner of the world.
So does that mean the grand ambitions of the Universal Declaration have failed?
Not according to Manfred Nowack at the University of Vienna. He’s a professor of International Human Rights Law and a Special Rapporteur on torture for the United Nations. That means he conducts fact finding missions on human rights around the world and reports back to the UN.
I asked him whether the Universal Declaration has actually made a difference to people’s lives in the 60 years it’s been around.
DALET duurt: A - Nowack UDHR - shortest: 03’19”
FW: “Yes, definitely it has...
LW: …thank you very much.”
Throughout the programme today we’ll be reminding you of some of your rights the Declaration is designed to protect. Here are a couple to start:
DALET duurt: A – Article 12
FW: “Article 12: No one shall be subjected…
LW: …attacks upon his honour and reputation.”
DALET duurt: A – Article 24
FW: “Article 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure…
LW: …working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”
Did you know that you had those rights? If not, you’re not alone. In some places, it’s a major struggle to get people to know that they have rights at all – let alone what those rights are.
Sometimes that information can’t come from political or religious leaders… often it takes a celebrity to make people aware of their rights.
Angélique Kidjo is a Grammy award-winning artist from Benin. She’s also a tireless advocate for children’s rights… particularly in her native West Africa.
She joins me now from London….Hello, Ms Kidjo -- welcome to The State We're In.
DALET duurt: a - Kidjo short – 05’12”
FW: “Hello, thanks for having me..
LW: …You’re very welcome.”
We’ve got even more about the Universal Declaration on our website – including an interview with a Holocaust survivor who’s now a judge at the International Court of Justice. You can find that at T-S-W-I- dot org. That’s T-S-W-I- dot org
A – BUTTON with ID
Still to come. Question: what do you get when you combine cell phones, a long running war, and a call-in radio show in the Congo. Answer: Outrage and results.
DALET: A to B teaser Congo 00:10”
IN: “C’est incroyable…
OUT: …4 years in jail!”
Why is this man so angry? Find out after the break. Stay with us.
THE STATE WE’RE IN Section B
Length 18:30
Broadcast Date: 6 December 2008
This is The State We’re In from Radio Netherlands Worldwide. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
This week is the 60th anniversary of the Universal declaration on human rights. There’s been a lot of change in the past 60 years… the people who drafted the document had no idea there would be email, or websites, or mobile phones.
No surprise then that the Universal declaration of human rights doesn’t list our right to technology. But it’s clear that technology can improve people’s lives and make them more aware of their rights.
Here’s article 19 of the declaration…
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
So let’s begin with an example of technology breaking down barriers to information during a humanitarian crisis.
“Ushahidi” is the name of a website set up during the violence earlier this year in Kenya, following a disputed general election.
Ushahidi means ‘Testimony’ in Swahili and its original aim was to map the violence in the country by getting individuals to send mobile phone text messages describing what was happening in their area. Those messages were then put on to the Ushahidi website.
Let’s have a quick look at the website to give you an idea of how it works.
So, we’re at Ushahidi.com. Click on “Deployments”. Then you see a map of Kenya. To the left are a series of categories – riots, deaths, looting, rape, etc.
I’m going to click on to riots and a whole series of push pins appear on the map. I’m going to press the one marked Nakuru which is a little north of the capital Nairobi. Three links come up. Let’s look at the one that reads ‘More violence in Nakuru’. It says: Location: Manyani Estate, Timboroa. Date: Sunday 27th January 2008, and the time is approximately midnight.
The incident report description reads, and there’s quite a bit of it, so I’ll just read part of it:
17 more people have died in overnight attacks.
6 people were killed when armed youths attacked villages and torched houses.
A church and a pharmacy were burnt during a night whose air was filled with gun shots, war songs and wailing from women and children.
And at the bottom is written : many of the bodies were slashed, while a few had gun shot wounds. All of them were strewn across the besieged town.
Ushahidi has now spread outside of Kenya and has been mapping the violence against immigrants in South Africa and the problems that have once again erupted in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ory Orkallah is the woman who devised the whole thing. She told me how it worked.
Now your system was actually used to map the post election violence at the beginning of the year in Kenya. How did that work?
Well, there were two ways in which you could submit information. You could submit it on online via the website or you could send in, someone donated an sms short code to us, so people could send smss for free to us.
Why were people sending information to you?
There was a sense that some of the balance in the areas was underreported. Or the media was not giving a true sense of how bad the situation was in some areas. There was concern that the government figures were not a reflection of the true figures. At that time there was a ban on any live media reporting. The tv and the newspaper took that to the extreme even not reporting at all or reporting news way after it had happened.
Were the Kenyan authorities aware of what you were doing?
The general sense is that not many people are going to the internet to look for information. So probably they didn’t see as much of a threat. But what we had then was information circulating so via mobile phone for instance so that people would see what was reported and then sms other people or people who had a lot of Kenyans from the Diaspora were using blogs and the website to receive information and then forward it to their relatives in Kenya or in remote areas.
You managed through mobile phones and through smss to spread the information around and most people I assume have a mobile phone in Kenya at this point?
Yes.
So, you got the information out. Did this information help to reduce the violence?
Our goal was to help not directly end the violence or reduce the violence but to get the information circulating so that the people, for instance, if you were an aid organisation or if you’re looking to intervene in some fashion you can get a better sense of what was going on. There was a case where we got a report of someone who was sheltering about eight hundred internally displaced people at his farm in the rift valley. And he had no water no food for them. It was in a pretty isolated area. And I think we helped spread the word out about his situation, the web and via sms.
What ultimately would you like to see that this software has done?
First of all hopefully we can make it easy to track conflict events or to provide an early warning system. Not that that hasn’t been done before. I think what’s different about us is that we were as, you know, most traditional conflict warning systems rely on an organization like the UN or experts or whatever and not so much on information by people who are actually in those areas. And when they filter information back it’s to some other experts to intervene and not people who are living or working, who are local in those areas and so we were adding that element where citizens can submit information and receive information. We hope to give it more context so that of you want to help or if you want to intervene you have a better sense of what’s going on. Obviously, it would be great if we can save lives to the extent that the software is used to provide information about people who were in a dire situation somewhere and that news has not been reported elsewhere and I think finally we found that this, we tried to work with NGOs to get them to share their datas with us and they were very reluctant and there’s this whole culture of hoarding information in to the silos so that no-one knows who is doing what. Just to encourage a bit more openness as far as work that you’re doing.
Why does Ushahidi matter?
A lot of people are very sceptical, especially in the humanitarian field about whether technology can make a difference.
Especially in sub saharan africa where they don’t have access to it?
Absolutely, but we’re able to get up and running with no money, with no meetings, with no infrastructure and if you look at input that went in compared to some of these multi million projects that get started and have the big offices and the big logistics behind them and what have you, I think relative to what we put in, the impact was great.
Sounds to me like you’re proud of what you’ve achieved.
I am. I’m especially proud that it’s an Africa software initiative. Again because you don’t hear, the presumption is that we’re this back water and just consumers of technology and not creators of it. We do have potential and talented people in Africa capable of doing other things, and I think it’s that we’re a different generation. We think faster and move faster. It matters cause it demonstrates that not just African young people but young people over the world have a different attitude and are able to bring a disruptive thinking into how to do things.
Ultimately, did it matter to the people who were being affected by the ethnic fighting in places like Kenya and in South Africa. Did you actually get to help these people?
It did to the extent that the right eyeballs were looking more at the situation and paying more attention to it. Which matters if you compare how quickly the Kenya situation was resolved, I’m not saying it’s because of Ushahidi, versus some of the ongoing wars like in Burundi or the many African countries that are going on for fifteen, twenty years, Somalia for example. I think it, to the extent that you get the right eyeballs and the right attention or you are able to make people sit up and focus for the right reasons. If you visit our blog one of them is featured. Her name is Rachel and she’s a brave young Kenyan woman. She’s doing amazing work as far as just going there and talking to the youth. Using her own initiative. She was able to intervene in situations that were dangerous and calm people down. And what we did was help amplify the work that she was doing and give her attention which ended up resulting in her getting support for money and sort of logistics to do the work that she was doing. So yes, in that case I think that we made a difference.
Jonathan
And that was the originator of Ushahidi Ory Orkalla.
And if you want to have a look yourself or find out more about Ushahidi, just go to our website t-s-w-i.org
IRJ clip 1
(music and introduction to the programme)
Jonathan
This is ‘Interactive radio for Justice’. It’s based in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it works by recording questions from ordinary people who’ve sent in their rights-related questions mostly via the mobile phone texting system. The radio show then records them asking their question, and plays that question to the officials in charge.
I’m joined now by Wanda Hall who is the programme’s director.
Hello Wanda,
1. Wanda, in a moment we’ll hear an actual example, but first, could you tell me how important the mobile phone is for your programme?
2. Can you give an example of how effective the programme has been in the past? (use the example of the raised flag?)
(((there is a problem in Bunia which is the capital city of the Utori region where I work in Congo. There is problem because the under Congolese law when the flag is raised everyone must stop their activity. If you’re driving a car, if you’re on your bicycle or walking down the street you must stop what you’re doing in respect to the flag being raised. Well, the police were using this law as an opportunity to take money from citizens. They were arresting citizens and charging them money for not stopping when the flag was nowhere to be seen. It was so far away from the flag that people didn’t know it was being raised. So, we went to the chief of police, we went to the prosecutor for Utori and these authorities very explicitly explained the law over the radio. That you must be within visual distance of the flag when it’s being raised to be stopped and the police cannot get money from you right away. They write you a ticket and then you are responsible for going to the court house and paying a fine. So, once this was announced on the radio in three different languages, we broadcast each programme three times in Swahili, in French and in Managese and so each programme is programmed nine times. Once this was on the radio people knew their rights and so they weren’t giving the police money when they were stopped and the police stopped abusing the law)).
Jonathan
OK, now let’s listen to one of the questions put by one of your listeners. It’s from Mr. Joël Nguisalé. (zho-elle Un-ga-sa-lay)
IRJ Clip 5 + voiceover
Troops from the FRDC [Congolese government forces] are demanding that civilians transport them or their luggage by bike over very long distances free of charge. Why do their superiors accept this?
Jonathan
And the question was put to two people, firstly to Major Innocence Basangala who’s the president of the military tribunal in the region and then from General André Kinkela
IRG clip 6 (voiceovers)
Basangala: This is unbelievable. It's a violation of people’s rights and it requires severe punishment under the military penal code. Soldiers guilty of committing this crime can be sentenced to four years in jail. Our military discipline is strongly opposed to this type of behaviour. However, I should say that conditions are sometimes difficult. The military's logistics may not be able to transport all the troops. They can requisition vehicles, but then they must reimburse the owner of the vehicle at a later date. So the actions you’re inquiring about are totally reprehensible. Military justice officials are prepared to severely punish any officer or any soldier, regardless of his rank, who is found guilty of this type of behaviour.
Kinkela: These are undisciplined troops, but I will order their commanders to severely punish these soldiers. We have already punished two soldiers who confiscated the bicycles of two civilians to carry their things. Those two soldiers were severely punished.
Jonathan
1. Wanda, so, citizens are being abused by the very troops there to protect them. Do you think your radio programme can really make a difference here?
But was Mr.Nguisalé (Un-ga-sa-lay) happy with the answers he heard? Here’s what he had to say.
IRG Clip 7 (voiceover)
I can say that I'm not satisfied with the answers. Even after asking my question a couple of days ago, we're still seeing government troops in rural areas forcing civilians to transport them by bike or even carry their luggage on their heads. Maybe in the centre of town, soldiers aren’t doing this anymore because they’re afraid. But in the outlying areas, this is still happening, and in fact, even more often than before. This is a big problem for people.
Jonathan
1. Wanda what’s your response to that? (it takes time to see change?).
Well Wanda, it’s not all disappointment. Despite Mr. Nguisalé’s doubts, he does recognize the value of this sort of programme.
IRJ Clip 8 (voiceover)
I hope this program continues to air for a long time to come because it's the only way for powerless people like us in the rural areas to denounce the serious human rights violations that continue to take place in this country. I wonder, for instance, why the national army and the people in charge don't give our soldiers the logistic support they need so they can move around freely on the battlefield or even to provide security. It's because they don't have these means that they wind up taking advantage of peaceful civilians.
Jonathan
Wanda Hall is the programme director of Interactive Radio for Justice. Thank you for joining us today.
And if you’d like to learn more about the programme which operates not only in the DRC but also in the neighbouring Central African Republic, you can just check on our website at T-S-W-I.org.
DALET Button
You’re listening to TSWI with a special program looking at the Universal declaration of human rights – which turns 60 this week. Let’s hear Article 3.
‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person’.
Up until now we’ve been looking at how technology can help large groups of people. We’re now going to hear from a single individual whose life would be very different, almost impossible, without it. For Dutchman Giesbert Nijhuis technology really does give him a sense of liberty and security. Twelve years ago a bus accident left him paralysed from the neck down. He’s now dependent on technology just to do things like open the door.
DALET: Giesbert Clip 1 29”
I first have to drive there. And then move away my control of the chair. And then use the other button to – open the door with an infra red signal. The door stays open for about ten seconds – and it’s pretty cold outside so I hope it closes. It will. In four, three, two, one.
Jonathan
Giesbert is able to do that by just using his cheek. And this system, using only three buttons, gives him 180 different functions which will, for example, turn on lights, open windows and doors. He drives his wheel chair using his chin and this all means that he’s able to live on his own with the help of care workers.
However, there’s one other thing that really makes his life bearable – the computer. He spoke to TSWI’s Chris Chambers about how it’s helped transform his life.
DALET: Giesbert MAIN 4’43”
IN: I’m not sure if I could live here if I didn’t have the computer …
OUT: …I’d rather have my neck fixed.
Jonathan
That was the inspirational Giesbert Nijhuis. He even has his own website and you can find out more about that by going to our website t-s-w-i dot org
B to C teaser
And still to come we speak to a man who’s helped ordinary people in India fight corruption using radio, film and video. And his name is – well, Stalin …
DALET: B to C Teaser Stalin 8”
It’s been funny growing up with that name because I introduce my name as Stalin, human rights activist and they say, yeh, right (laugh) .
Jonathan
If you want to hear more about his work and, of course, why he’s called Stalin, then stay with us.
THE STATE WE’RE IN Section C
Length: 19:00
Broadcast Date: 6 December 2008
You’re listening to a special edition of The State We’re In from RN Worldwide. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
This week, we’re marking the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
DALET C - UHoHR Article 5 + Witness duurt: 5:22
FW: (music) The Universal Declaration….
LW: …you’re very welcome, thank you.
PP - Button
DALET C - duurt: 5:22
FW: (crowd noise) We’re listening to….
LW: …always been that way in Burma.
DALET C - Article 23 fade after .15”
Looking at the current state of the world economy, it seems like the concept of equal pay for equal work is pretty low on the supply chain.
But there are those out there fighting for the rights of poor labourers, take Stalin for example. That’s right, Stalin.
DALET: C - Stalin K clip 1 duurt. 30”
FW: My name really is Stalin…
LW: …like, year right. (laughs)
Meet Stalin K. As he said, he’s a human rights activist and is working in the state of Gujarat in northern India where he’s set up a revolutionary radio programme to fight corruption in the state.
And how is it doing that? – by turning the local people into investigative reporters, who then chase down corrupt politicians with cameras and microphones.
One of their first stories was about the corruption following an earthquake in 2001. Stalin K told Radio Netherlands’ Paddy Maguire about the suspicious banking that tipped them off...
DALET: C - Stalin K SHORTEST 3’28
IN: In one village, one village …
OUT: …I’m very optimistic about that.
And that was the Indian human rights activist Stalin K talking there to Paddy Maguire.
PP DALET Button PP
And finally your letters as read by our editor Dave McGuire. Yo homey!
‘sup!
For the last two weeks, we asked you to go to the Talking Point section of our web site to help us update the UDofHRs. There's nothing in it about internet access, or banking services, or sexual preference. So we asked you.
What should be our new human rights?
And you responded. Sometimes with well thought out ideas, like this one from Renato Corsetti in Italy who asked, why not….
…"Linguistic Human Rights". Everyone has the right to learn and speak his mother tongue and a neutral international language like Esperanto.
Tony Green, in Ipswich, UK doesn’t want the right to worship, but rather…
The right to live WITHOUT religion. For example, a criminal blasphemy law is still on the books. It is quite possible that I could be jailed for making a statement, however factually accurate, that Christians might consider blasphemous.
And David Berridge in Montreal, Canada’s suggestion feels that any new rights would have to…
…deal more with issues of basic survival in this century. Rights to access clean water, pure air, adequate food supply, and shelter, will take precedence over less tangible rights.
The Talking Point question is still up on our website so you can tell us what new rights the world needs. Just go to tswi.org. That’s tswi.org.
And we’re done for today. All that remains is to ask, what’s TSWI this week.
DALET Final Montage duurt: 1:25
The State We’re In is produced this week by, Hermione Gee, Chris Chambers and Eric Beauchemin, with Dheera Sujan and Amy Drozdowska.
Our webmaster is Sid Fordham.
Dave McGuire is our Editor.
Our theme music was composed by Gary Shepard.
Thanks to BFN for the technical assistance.
Jim Russel is our creative advisor.
