Today is Human Rights Day! The day commemorates the date in 1948 when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today, the declaration is available in 360 languages, with new translations still being added.

This year’s theme for Human Rights Day is “My Voice Counts.” The United Nations has been hosting a series of Google+ hangouts since November 22^nd, giving the public a chance to engage with senior UN officials and leading experts on the rights of minorities, persons with disabilities, to discuss the impact of business on human rights, and beyond.

Although there have been great advancements in gender and race equality since 1948, human rights violations still happen every day all around the world. According to the Amnesty International annual report, in 2006, 20,000 people were on death row. 69 countries still use the death penalty. Similarly, in 2006, 1 in 3 women had been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused. Every 5 seconds a child still dies from hunger-related causes. In Bangladesh, India and Nepal nearly half of all children under 5 suffer from malnutrition. Worldwide, 77 million children do not go to school; 781 million adults cannot read or write, of whom two-thirds are women. This is only a small list of example areas where human rights are not even remotely met.

So, what can you do to help human rights? Today is the last day the UN hosts a Google+ hangout with human rights experts. Join the discussion this afternoon, or browse the Amnesty International website for appeals for action that you care about.

Happy Human Rights Day!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2012 at 10:30 am and is filed under about cross-culture, cross-cultural communication, cross-cultural differences, cultural diversity, cultural intelligence, days of significance, General . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.