Human Rights Day
Human Rights Day is on 10 December
by Claire Law
Suitable for Whole School (Sec)
Aims
To reflect upon the importance of human rights and consider what freedom of thought and belief entails.
Preparation and materials
- You will need the PowerPoint slides that accompany this assembly (Human Rights Day) and the means to display them.
- Have available the YouTube video, ‘NIHRC - Freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ and the means to show it during the assembly. It is 3.16 minutes long (although you only need to show it up to 1.15 minutes) and is available at: https://youtu.be/NsjhqqCubfw
Assembly
- Show Slide 1 and welcome the students to the assembly.
I’d like to ask you some questions. Hopefully, nothing too tricky for this early in the morning! When you arrive at your answer to each question, you can put up your hand if you like, and I’ll invite some of you to share your answers. - Question 1: which football team do you believe will win the Premier League in 2025?
Pause to allow time for thought, and then listen to a range of responses. - Question 2: what’s the best pizza topping in the world?
Pause to allow time for thought, and then listen to a range of responses. - Now for our final question: what’s your favourite colour?
Pause to allow time for thought, and then listen to a range of responses. - We’ve heard a lot of different answers there. Some of us thought that ham and pineapple was the best pizza topping, whereas others told us that margarita was the way forward.
- I wonder how you’d feel if I told you that most of you had the wrong answer. That the correct answer – the ONLY answer - to that question is pepperoni.
How about if I told you that it is forbidden to have a different opinion? What if I said that if you believe that mushrooms are the ideal pizza topping, you will be punished. How might you feel? How might you want to react?
Likewise, how would you feel if I said that you MUST think that Liverpool will win the Premier League? Or that you have no choice other than red as your favourite colour? - Hopefully, you feel that I’d be acting unreasonably if I were to force you to think a certain way, or believe a certain thing. It would be unfair and cruel of me to punish you for having a different thought, opinion or belief.
- Show Slide 2.
Thankfully, many countries around the world recognize that humans have certain rights. Human rights are the fundamental rights and freedoms that belong to every single one of us. These include the right to freedom of thought and belief.
In the UK, I would be infringing your human rights if I tried to force you to think a certain way or believe a certain thing. It’s important that I respect your freedom of thought and belief, just as it is important that you respect other people’s freedom of thought and belief. - Throughout history, there have been many cases of people in power taking advantage of other people. Under their rule, humans have used other humans for their own benefit – seeing them as a resource, rather than as human beings.
Slavery and the terrible events of the Holocaust are examples of humans not being treated as having equal worth and dignity. - Show Slide 3.
After the Second World War, there was an international desire to establish an agreed set of principles that defined what all humans were entitled to.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out 30 articles that stated the human rights that should apply to all people everywhere.
These include the right to a fair trial, the right to life and the right to an education. They also include the right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. - In 1950, the Council of Europe agreed the European Convention on Human Rights, which was based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but has a court: the European Court of Human Rights. This meant that breaches of human rights could be challenged in the legal system.
In 1951, the UK was one of the first states to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights. - Today, although humans still attempt to take advantage of others, there is agreement by all 193 UN member states that humans have rights, and that these rights and freedoms belong to every single one of us.
- To help remind us of these important human rights, the United Nations celebrates Human Rights Day on 10 December every year. This date marks the day when the UN General Assembly accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Time for reflection
To mark Human Rights Day, let’s spend some time thinking about the rights to freedom of thought and freedom of expression.
Show Slide 4.
Here, we can see a summary of Article 18 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Our right to freedom of thought, belief and religion is protected.
- We can change our religion or beliefs at any time.
- We have the right to put our thoughts and beliefs into action.
Let’s watch a short video that helps to unpack this in more detail.
Show the YouTube video, ‘NIHRC - Freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ (you can stop it at 1.15 minutes).
Freedom of thought can be considered life-saving.
Show Slide 5.
Let’s consider the life of this man, Viktor Frankl. When the Second World War broke out, Frankl was a psychiatrist working in Austria. In 1942, he and his family were deported to Nazi concentration camps.
While Frankl was enduring the terrible conditions there, where so much was taken away from him, he recognized that what the Nazis couldn’t take away from him was his thoughts about the situation and the attitude that he adopted.
Frankl realized that he could use his thoughts to focus on things that brought some hope in an otherwise hopeless situation. He could think about people he loved; he could think about ways to help other prisoners; he could think about the meaning and purpose of his own life. These were things that the concentration camps could not force out of Frankl.
In sharing this attitude with other prisoners, Frankl helped countless people who felt hopeless in the darkest of circumstances.
So, let’s consider the practice of freedom of thought, using Frankl as our guide. Although having the freedom to have our own opinion about pizza toppings is important, let’s exercise our freedom of thought and belief about some more complex issues.
We are going to consider three questions. After each one, we will pause to allow ourselves the freedom to think our own thoughts in response.
First, who are the people in your life who matter to you? Who are the people you love?
Pause to allow time for thought.
Second, how do you think you can help other people in your life? Do you want to? If you do, what do you believe is a helpful way to go about doing this?
Pause to allow time for thought.
And now perhaps the most challenging of these questions: what do you think and believe is the purpose of your life?
Pause to allow time for thought.
That last question isn’t easy to answer and is likely to require lots of thought. Let’s use our freedom of thought to spend time over the next few days, weeks, months and even years to reflect on our own thoughts and beliefs about the purpose of our lives.
Prayer
Loving God,
Humans are all very different.
We have different brains, and we think and believe different things.
Help us to remember that we’ve been created equal.
Help us to respect others’ beliefs and freedom of thought.
Help us to use our own brains to reflect on what we think and believe
So that we can exercise our own human right to freedom of thought and belief.
Amen.
