Ecuadoran Partners in the Vanguard (and the Circus!)

On Thursday, August 26, UUSC Interim President Bill Schulz filed the following blog post from Ecuador, where he is learning more about the innovative work of our partners there in engaging youth and spreading the word — and responsibility — of human rights.

I'll bet you've never heard of a human-rights circus (though the struggle for human rights sometimes feels like a circus!); I never had. But that is exactly what one of UUSC's colleague organizations in Quito, Ecuador, has created: a summer circus with clowns and acrobats entertaining children in a big top but focused on the theme of protecting rights. Patricia Jones, manger of UUSC's Environmental Justice Program, and I visited the circus yesterday morning and then engaged in a dialogue with the kids about how to stand up for your rights when everyone from gangs to governments are trying to deprive you of them.

The circus is just one of the creative ways Ecuadoran human-rights organizations are engaging young people in the rights struggle. Indeed, we met a very articulate 11-year-old who had testified to the Constituent Assembly — the body that created the new constitution — about the importance of including youth rights in that document. Something like 11 of the 40 elements the youth proposed were eventually adopted.

And here's another novel idea: the new constitution includes the notion that everyone is responsible for seeing that everyone else's rights are protected. If a teacher, for example, notices that a child appears sick, it is not the teacher's job to provide medicine, of course, but it is the teacher's responsibility to see that the child's right to health care is respected and that the child receives the treatment she or he needs. Imagine if we all had legal responsibility for doing what we could to see that human-rights obligations were met by the state! 

Human rights have always been an evolving concept. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was first adopted in 1948, no one imagined, for example, that its provisions applied to gay and lesbian people. Today the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are quite clearly a part of the human-rights regimen. But progressive evolution always requires that someone take the first step. In so many of the ways I've been detailing, Ecuadorans are leading us on our way — and UUSC's partners are in the vanguard.

Next stop: Peru!