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About PDHRE

Founded in 1988, the People's Decade of Human Rights Education (PDHRE-International) is a non-profit, international service organization that works directly and indirectly with its network of affiliates — primarily women's and social justice organizations — to develop and advance pedagogies for human rights education relevant to people's daily lives in the context of their struggles for social and economic justice and democracy. PDHRE's members include experienced educators, human rights experts, United Nations officials, and world renowned advocates and activists who collaborate to conceive, initiate, facilitate, and service projects on education in human rights for social and economic transformation. The organization is dedicated to publishing and disseminating demand-driven human rights training manuals and teaching materials, and otherwise servicing grassroots and community groups engaged in a creative, contextualized process of human rights learning, reflection, and action. PDHRE views human rights as a value system capable of strengthening democratic communities and nations through its emphasis on accountability, reciprocity, and people's equal and informed participation in the decisions that affect their lives. PDHRE was pivotal in lobbying the United Nations to found a Decade for Human Rights Education and in drafting and lobbying for various resolutions by the World Conference on Human Rights, the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Treaty Bodies, and the Fourth World Conference on Women.

Yet, every one of the horrors and threats confronting humanity today could be fought on the grounds of its being in violation of the human rights declared in the Universal Declaration of 1948. The rights set down in this and other international covenants, declarations, and conventions create a space from which a multitude of struggles to improve the welfare of individuals and communities around the world can spring.

We therefore seek to provide a framework for serious global debate among groups working for social and economic justice, and their constituencies, who may not yet have identified their experiences and goals with the rights stated in international human rights documents and the enunciations of the major UN-sponsored world conferences. We also seek to engage human rights-identified organizations in the just and balanced promotion of economic, social, and cultural rights along with civil and political rights.

PDHRE derives its mandate to promote human rights education from an underlying conception of human rights in society reflected in the following ten points:

1. Contemporary enunciations of human rights standards echo people's struggles. Diverse human rights movements are flourishing worldwide and the moral heroism of victims indicates future paths of struggle.
2. The right of individuals, groups, associations, and nations to education in human rights is an individual and collective human right.
3. Human rights education aims to achieve universal commitment to the dignity and worth of each human person. It should be a collective endeavor of all individuals and agencies; it should be participatory and an exemplary practice of the virtues it proselytizes for others.
4. The evils that have plagued humankind from time immemorial persist, among which are injustice, exploitation, patriarchy, impoverishment, tyranny, civil strife, genocide, catastrophic state failures, and calamitous abuses of power. Their persistence produces humiliation and despair, but it also spurs action for change, and human rights education can help to define this social transformation.
5. Human rights education has to reinforce the human right to peace, which includes the right to a denuclearized earth, immunity from all weapons of mass destruction and the armament process, and the rights of all to benefit from peaceful uses of science and technology.
6. Genocidal practices are the most massive form of human rights violations, and every human being should be empowered through human rights education to delegitimate, expose, and undermine the very possibility of the emergence of such practices everywhere.
7. Women's rights are now recognized as human rights. Human rights education must empower struggle against all forms of patriarchy everywhere and accelerate the full accomplishment of a world based on respect for the dignity of all women.
8. Dignity of labor is an ineluctable aspect of human interdependence, social cooperation, and just development. Human rights education must aim to promote conditions which foster respect for the inherent dignity of human labor and the rights of workers.
9. The mission and the mandate of human rights education extends to the creation and development of cultures of rights wherein the basic material and non-material needs of all human beings are met and all victims of historic discrimination, including indigenous peoples, excluded peoples, and ethnic minorities stand redressed.
10. The Decade for Human Rights Education is intended as a decade of people working together to build stronger solidarities in struggle whose collective conscience is transformed by the message of dignity and equal worth of every individual person. The dedication of nation-states and the United Nations system to human rights education is a first step. But each individual human being has a stake in human rights education as an empowering and inspirational strategy for the pursuit of an improved common future.

Day after day human rights are given new life by the experiences and efforts of communities to recognize and claim their right to live in dignity and security. Law, which is born of struggle, opens spaces for creative social action, and we must be careful not to underestimate its importance.

Behind the thicket of human rights norms and standards and procedures there lies the recognition of our shared dignity as a human being and of the things that endanger this dignity. The body of law organized around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically deals with the unnegotiable conditions of being fully human. As long as a single human being is unable to express the highest potential of what it means to be human, all of our human rights are imperiled.

Human rights education is a way of clearing and preparing the ground for reclaiming and securing our right to be human. It is learning about justice and empowering people in the process. It is a social and human development strategy that enables women, men, and children to become agents of social change. It can produce the blend of ethical thinking and action needed to cultivate public policies based on human rights and opens the possibility of creating a human rights culture for the 21st century.

Our ultimate goal is to show through shared learning and dialogue why the space created by human rights norms and standards should not be negated. Rather the space opened by human rights law can be used to engender social, economic, and political changes at the local, national, and international level that serve to reclaim and secure the most comprehensive and fundamental of human rights -- the right to be human.

PDHRE Board

Elected Presidium

Susana Chiarotti
President of CLADEM, a Latin American 17 country women's network- Argentina

Virginia B. Dandan
Chairperson, United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Philippines.

Peter Leuprecht
Elected President, Austria/Canada
Dean Faculty of Law, McGill University, Canada; formerly Director of human rights and Deputy to SG, Council of Europe. UN Rapporteur on Cambodia. 

Adama Samassekou
Former Minister of Basic Education, Republic of Mali, President PDHRE/ Africa, President of Preparatory Committee for the UN World Summit on the Information Society, Mali.

Executive Committee

Kamal Hossain
Elected Vice President, Bangladesh
Lawyer, Former Foreign Minister of Bangladesh. Rapporteur on Pakistan.

Betty Reardon
Vice President
Founding Member. Prof. of Peace & HR Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Stephen Marks
Elected Secretary
François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health. Formerly Prof. of HR Int'l. Law and UN Studies, Columbia Univ.  and Human Rights Division UNESCO.

Daniel Solomon
Elected Treasurer, USA.
Founding Member. Lawyer- Labor law expert and donor.

Board Members

Upendra Baxi
Philosopher of Law and writer. Prof. of Law, Warwick University, Formerly Vice Chancellor Delhi University, India/UK.

Wolfgang Benedek
Professor, Director ETC, European Training Center for Human Rights and Democracy, Graz, Austria, Partner of PDHRE Europe

Fantu Cheru
Professor of African and Development Studies. American University, Washington DC. UN Rapporteur on Structural Adjustments and Debt, Ethiopia/USA.

Ivanka Corti
Former Chair of CEDAW and currently member of CEDAW, Italy

Satya Das
Author and human rights advocate, public policy consultant, Canada.

Cees Flinterman
Professor of International Human Rights, International Law, Netherlands.

Richard Goldstone
Justice, Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Iva Kaufman
A founding member of PDHRE, Media Consultant- New York

Miloon Kothari
Habitat International Coalition, Chair of the Committee on eviction & housing, UN Rapporteur on Housing, India.

Catherine Lalumière
Member of the European Parliament, former Secretary General of the Council of Europe, France.

Walter Lichem
Director, UN Office of the Foreign Ministry of Austria, Former Ambassador of Austria to Canada, Formerly of UNDP, Austria.

Orly Lubin
Associate Professor, Chair of the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature, Chair of MSJW Women Study Forum, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Kathleen Modrowski
Professor, Social Anthropologist, Long Island University, NY, USA.

Jean-Louis Roy
President Right and Democracy, International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal, Canada.

Arjan Sengupta
Professor of International Economic Organization, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (India) and Independent Rapporteur) on the Right to Development, UN Human Rights Commission, India.

Danilo Turk
Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations for Political affairs. Former Ambassador of Slovenia to the UN. Law Professor, Slovenia.

Burns H. Weston
Bessie Dutton Murray Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Director, The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, USA

Advisor

Elsa Stamatopoulou
Director, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Office, New York, Greece/USA.

Shulamith Koenig
Founder, Executive Director, Israel/USA.

YUVA, based in Mumbai and Nagpur, India, is dedicated to educating and empowering street children and developing advocacy and policy on the issue of child labour. Over the years it has worked with more then 40,00 children, training youth to develop self-help educational programs, support groups, and hotlines on issues of heath and child labour. It also conducts training for marginalized groups such as the Dalit people in slum areas, focusing on systemic change towards poverty alleviation with a special focus on women’s issues in these communities.

PDHRE-Africa. This Regional Office, was newly established in Bamako, Mali, on June 22, 2000, for the purpose of promoting Human Rights Education, in particular through the creation of the Institut Africain d' Apprentissage de l' Education aux Droits Humains /African Learning Institute for Human Rights Education (INAFAEDH/ALIHRE)

Leadership of the team includes several members who participated actively in the creation of the national initiative. Its goal is the promotion of HRE using the "PDHRE approach", and taking into account Malian and African realities and positive values, in particular the values of solidarity, sharing and consensus.

Mr. Adama Samassekou, former Minister of Basic Education, is the President of PDHRE/DPEDH-Mali and assumes the responsibility of establishing the National Institute for the INAFAEDH/ALIHRE.

The leadership of the organization includes several of the original participants in the creation of the national initiative.  Mr. Adama Samassekou, until recently Minister of Basic Education, has been named director of PDHRE Mali and will be responsible for establishing ALIHRE.

Contact Person: Adama Samassekou
PDHRE Mali/ Africa
BP E 214, Bamako, Mali
Tel/Fax: (223) 23 16 63
Mobile: (223) 77 48 70
Email: samass_pdhre@hotmail.com

PDHRE- Europe.  In partnership with ETC European Training and Research Centre for Human Rights and Democracy

Contact Person: Prof. Wolfgang Benedeck
Schubertstrasse 29,
A-8010 Graz, Austria.
tel.: 0043 316 380 3419, fax: 0043 316 380 9455
e-mail: gerd.oberleitner@kfunigraz.ac.at 

Contact Person: Virginia B. Dandan
15 A Bautista, U.P. Campus
University of Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City 1101
Philippines
Tel: (632) 434-6981 (work) Tel: (632) 926-1110 (home)
Fax: (632) 434-7981
Email: vbdsline@vasia.com

For more information, please contact PDHRE:

The People's Movement for Human Rights Learning (PDHRE) / NY Office
526 West 111th St. Suite 4E,
New York, NY 10025, USA
Tel: 1-212-749-3156 * Fax 1-212-666-6325
e-mail: pdhre@igc.org