Kids Side By Side

I am most grate­ful to the orga­ni­za­tion called www.YouthforHumanRights.org which is located in Los Ange­les. This morn­ing I received their beau­ti­ful pack­age of infor­ma­tion called Youth For Human Rights; unique tools that bring Human Rights to Life!

I agree, human rights need to be brought into life! For many, human rights is unknown, unclear, or plain irrelevant.

For those who do not know what are our human rights, I will give a brief his­tor­i­cal back­ground and then list a few of the basic human rights listed in the YouthforHumanRights.org book­let to sup­port and acknowl­edge their con­tri­bu­tion to the bet­ter under­stand­ing of human rights, espe­cially children’s human rights.

Although humans have been around for mil­lions of years and human civ­i­liza­tion has seen many great teach­ers  yet it is inter­est­ing to note that the uni­ver­sal recog­ni­tion of human rights is fairly new. The Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights was signed after the hor­ri­ble tragedy of World War II in 1945. A num­ber of vic­to­ri­ous yet hum­bled nations came together and through the orga­ni­za­tion of the United Nations they cre­ated and signed the Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights to pro­tect the basic God given rights of all human beings wher­ever they are.

The honor of ini­ti­at­ing the recog­ni­tion of human rights in his­tory belongs to the Per­sian Emperor, Cyrus the Great. In 539 B.C., after con­quer­ing the city of Baby­lon, he did some­thing quite unex­pected and praise­wor­thy. He freed all slaves to return home. More­over, he declared peo­ple should choose their own reli­gion. The Cyrus Cylin­der, a clay tablet con­tain­ing his state­ment, is the first human rights dec­la­ra­tion in his­tory. As a Per­sian child I remem­ber read­ing about it in school and feel­ing proud. But today I have a much greater appre­ci­a­tion for any one and any gov­ern­ment who truly hon­ors human rights of every one espe­cially children’s human rights. It is tragic for all espe­cially for Ira­ni­ans to wit­ness how the Islamic Repub­lic Regime of Iran has been at the top of the list of the gov­ern­ments who are in vio­la­tion of human rights.

The Baha’i fam­i­lies and in par­tic­u­lar the Baha’i chil­dren and youth of Iran have suf­fered innu­mer­able and irrec­on­cil­able losses as a result of what the Islamic Repub­lic Regime of Iran has con­spired against this peace­ful reli­gious minor­ity for over 30 years. Indeed The Islamic repub­lic Regime has proven itself unwor­thy of the noble and his­toric legacy of Emperor Cyrus the Great evi­denced by the atroc­i­ties they com­mit against those who dif­fer with them in their way of belief.

Today one of the main con­di­tions of being civ­i­lized as a gov­ern­ment and belong­ing to the com­mu­nity of civ­i­lized nations is the accep­tance and inte­gra­tion of the Uni­ver­sal Human Rights into that country’s constitutions.

Today human­ity has to open its eyes to a newer and much more for­ward look­ing charge declared by Baha’u’llah over 160 years ago. our charge is the recog­ni­tion of the prin­ci­ple of the one­ness of human­ity. he taught; Ye are the flow­ers of one gar­den, the cells of one body, the waves of one see. These metaphors aught to teach us about how to treat one another.

Shoghi Effendi the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith has real strong state­ment for those who ignore the divine law of the organic one­ness of all human­ity and the grim con­se­quence of its vio­la­tion. He says: How pathetic are the efforts of those lead­ers of human insti­tu­tions who, in utter dis­re­gard of the spirit of the age, are striv­ing to adjust national processes, suited to the ancient days of self-contained nations, to an age which must either achieve the unity of the world, as adum­brated by Baha’u’llah or per­ish.” World order of Baha’u’llah p. 36

Some of the thirty human rights I like to men­tion are:

1–  The right to live in free­dom and safety;

2–  The right to travel;

3–  The right to belong to a country;

4–  The right to own things and to share them;

5–  The right to believe what you want to believe;

6–  The the right to say what you think

For more infor­ma­tion please visit www.YouthforHumanRights.org

Key­van