دعت مبادرة الامم المتحدة العالمية لمكافحة الاتجار بالبشر الهيئات الاهلية والمدنية التي لا تبغى الربح والتي تعمل في كافة انحاء العالم، لتقديم عروض مشاريع للحصول على تمويل من برنامج المنح الصغيرة الخاص بالمبادرة.
Some time ago, a King in England signed a piece of paper establishing certain rights of men. King John signed the Magna Carta in part because he was afraid he'd be overthrown by revolting barons who were angry at the monarch's abuse of power. By no means did the document care about the rights of ordinary people - it was meant to protect the wealthy barons' properties. Yet the rights of the rich it protected gradually evolved into universal rights in the nearly 800 years that have passed since it was drafted.
Three hundred years after John put his signature on the Magna Carta, the Twelve Articles of the Black Forest were drafted in Germany by peasants who demanded certain rights as Christians. The articles are considered by many to be the first record of human rights in the world. That is not to say that human rights issues were not being debated and implemented in other parts of the world. Akbar the Great, the Mughal Emperor, established religious rights for all during his reign in the same century. The British Bill of Rights was drafted in the late seventeenth century. The United States of America was founded on the principle of universal human rights:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - United States Declaration of Independence, 1776
We have come a long way since we lived in caves, ate raw meat, and died by the age of thirty, haven't we? Yet, everywhere we look we see human rights violations, from Aun Sun Sui Kyi's house arrest in Burma to the Iranian regime's crackdown on student protests in Iran to the United States' detention without trial of prisoners in Gitmo to the apartheid in Israel to terrorists blowing up lives in the name of religion to Uganda proposing the death penalty for homosexuals to migrant worker abuse in Lebanon to the Swiss banning of minarets...Sometimes it makes our heads spin, makes us feel like there is no hope, that we should give up, that humanity is so corrupted by its own selfish impulses there will never be any solution to our global problems. Media bombards us every day with new stories about injustice, new terrors to be wary of, new deaths that have come at the hands of psychos. It's easy to dwell on the atrocities that take place on this planet. It's easy to succumb to the forces of disillusionment and despair. It's easy to let ourselves drown in the seas of human suffering, to let our hearts burn in the fires of hatred and ignorance, to let our minds be swallowed by the psychology of victimhood.
Hope is hard.
Hope is what keeps the world spinning. All of the progress we've made throughout human history hasn't been made by those who wallow in the pits of despair but by those cognizant of the future, by those who can imagine a planet where people are equal, where people have enough food to eat and clean water to drink and clean air to breathe, where people aren't killing each other in the name of their own version of a Creator. Human rights martyrs like Martin Luther King, Jr. did not dwell on suffering but envisioned a world like this.
"...when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
The dream of Dr. King has made progress in the 36 year since he spoke to a million people in front of the memorial to President Lincoln, another martyr who died for the cause of human rights. Yet, we still have so far to go. Sometimes it may seem like we're going backwards or that those who profess a faith in the rights of humanity are hypocrites because they violate human rights. Such is the criticism of President Obama, who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize today.
Those who pursue human rights are not perfect. We tend to view our martyrs as perfect and forget their flaws. We put people like Gandhi on pedestals and forget he had an army of critics. Lincoln himself was something of a racist, but he always believed slavery was wrong and that all men should never be deprived of life, liberty, and property. His work for the cause of Emancipation and the bloody civil war that entailed exposed him to African-Americans and his views on race began to change. It was a speech in which he supported the right for blacks to vote that so incensed John Wilkes Booth, he murdered him two days later.
You have to remember, humanity is still evolving. People's attitudes evolve. There will never be an End to History so long as homo sapiens sapiens roams the planet. We have not reached a point in our history where we are capable of ending our problems as quickly as it takes us to tweet them. Just the fact that we as a species generally recognize something called "Human Rights" is wondrous, something to be marveled at and revered. Sure, many times the path that we think leads to progress turns out to be covered with thorns or full of poisonous snakes and hungry beasts. Sometimes we have to turn around and start over. Sometimes we get so lost that it seems like we will never reach our destination, Dr. Kings dream. But we're gonna get there some day. Just look at how far we've already come.
While human rights heroes like King, Lincoln, and Gandhi have become immortal, we can't forget all of the others who work for human rights without recognition. Today we should remember them, remember all of the civil society organizations across the world that fight for human rights, those who give speeches, who hold conferences, who write the reports demanded by a grantmaking organization, who tweet and blog about human rights, who create awareness about issues. They might not do the glorious work, but they are just as important to progress.
A recent series of tragic suicides has prompted rare and vital coverage of the plight of domestic workers in Lebanon. The Zico House in Hamra, regular host to the only legally recognized gay rights organization in the Middle East, held a panel discussion on domestic workers and also facilitated a vigil to commemorate the victims of suicide, domestic and sexual abuse. The event was sponsored by Taste Culture.
Among the panelists were several domestic workers from a variety of nations including the Philippines, Sudan, and Ethiopia. These women described the duplicitous agencies that worked in their home countries to recruit women to travel overseas and become domestic workers. Despite the diversity of backgrounds, all the women described a similar process wherein the pay and ease of their labor abroad were greatly exaggerated. Once domestic workers arrive in Lebanon, they are usually deprived of their passports, and as a result have no recourse when their employers withhold pay or time off. Compounding this problem is the fact that many of the home nations of the domestic workers do not have full-fledged embassies in Lebanon that could provide passport services or facilitate legal representation. Withholding passports is illegal in Lebanon, but it is widely known that this law is not enforced, and the police in Lebanon are notorious for siding with Lebanese families over their foreign employees.
Besides the laws that aren’t even enforced, domestic workers have incredibly little legal protection. Migrant workers are not guaranteed the rights to minimum wage and regular leave that are provided to all Lebanese citizens under article six of the Lebanese Labor Law. Depressingly, little pay for endless work is perhaps the best-case scenario for a migrant worker in Lebanon, as physical and sexual abuse are also prevalent.
A community organizer, who also spoke as a part of the panel, explained that he had turned his home into a safe house for domestic workers who were attempting to escape abuse and had nowhere to go. There was also a panelist representing Human Rights Watch, who mentioned that the labor secretary of Lebanon has not responded to over 50 letters sent by Human Rights Watch.
It is vital that this rare moment of exposure to practices akin to modern-day slavery not be an aberration. Here are two more important pieces on migrant workers in the Middle East.
More information is at Taste Kulcha. Also, while you're there, sign the petition "Promises not Politics: Ministry of Labour Must Protect Migrant Workers in Lebanon." And don't forget to follow @simby on Twitter!
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Imagine what 26-year-old Zeditu Kebede Matente thought when she traveled from her homeland of Ethopia to Lebanon in search of a better life. If you have any sense of empathy, you can probably feel the hope that she most likely felt as she packed her things. A future could have been in her sights, one in which she did not have to face the tragedy of poverty that she may have faced in her own country.
Alas, there was no future for Zeditu. She hung herself last month.
Just a sample of names, so many more names. Real people. Too many.
Where is the Lebanese civil society activism regarding this tragic issue? It seems that journalists are driving the awareness campaign, as they are a great part of civil society. Aljazeera, LA Times, Guardian, and Lebanon's own Daily Star have covered this issue recently. International NGO's like Human Rights Watch and Migrant Rights have called attention to the matter.
A Lebanese blogger is writing about this issue at Ethiopian Suicides. (We have added this to our blogroll in the sidebar.) I highly recommend a trip over there.
If you know of an organization in Lebanon that is working towards ending this horrific treatment of human beings, please let us know. Safadi Foundation USA is looking to raise the profile of these NGOs and to raise awareness about the plight of these women in an effort to stop the abuse.
Isn't it time that Lebanon takes a stand against slavery within its borders?
UPDATE: Today, Anget R. from Madagascar took her life. She was 20 years old.
