Lessons About Rights And Wrongs -- Edmonds Students Explore Injustices In World

EDMONDS - It wasn't only U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York and French President Jacques Chirac in Paris marking the 50th anniversary of a document expressing humanity's "highest aspiration" even as it acknowledges the evil that men do.

It was also Krista Miller, a teenager among many in a school gymnasium in Edmonds, who was thinking about human rights and human suffering 50 years after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"It's not getting better," Miller said. "In other countries, they torture people. A lot of countries."

Miller, 14, learned about that recently, when Madrona School seventh- and eighth-graders began a class on human rights. All 150 did projects comparing rights and abuses in the United States with those in a developing country of their choice.

"I'm out to make not just U.S. citizens but world citizens," said Wendy Ewbank, Miller's social-studies teacher. "I think they need to learn about conditions in other countries if they're going to run the show someday. A lot of people think kids can't handle the tougher stuff. But kids at this age level are so about fairness and justice. So much of the curriculum is so Mickey Mouse, kids appreciate something that really means something."

To honor the anniversary of the Universal Declaration, still the most comprehensive human-rights statement in the world, Ewbank yesterday brought in speakers for a real-world lesson.

Talking about what their organizations do were representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights Education, the Peace Corps and the School of the Americas Watch.

John Selmar, from the ACLU, said the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution because they didn't trust leaders to do what's right.

Another speaker exhorted students to vote out of office members of Congress who don't support the United Nations.

And two women from the School of the Americas Watch, which protests the training of Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning, Ga., suggested students boycott Nike because it has exploited young workers in Third World countries.

All spoke of how important it is for individuals to stand up to human-rights abuses.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 under the guiding hand of Eleanor Roosevelt, Ewbank told the students. Roosevelt took up the cause as the horrors of the Holocaust in World War II became public.

There are 30 articles in the declaration, proclaiming universal rights to life, liberty, equal treatment before the law, and freedom from slavery, servitude, torture, fear and want, among other things. No country fully complies with the declaration or the covenants and treaties that have resulted from it.

The United States, for instance, has angered human-rights groups worldwide because of its refusal to sign a covenant that would ban the execution of juveniles.

"The U.S. is in the world an outcast on this," said Bruce Kochis, of the UW Center for Human Rights Education.

But the students learned that other countries have many more violations: the brutal repression of women and girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists in power; mass killings in Rwanda; "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia; and torture and oppression in China, Cambodia and Myanmar, formerly Burma.

The panelists told the students that while some countries treat their citizens more brutally than others, it's everyone's duty to try to make the world a less cruel, more equitable place.

"What if some kids are bullying another kid at school? Whose fault is that?" asked Josh Fliegel of the Peace Corps. "You could say it's the bullies. Or you could say it's the teachers. Or is it the fault of all the kids in school, who knew what was going on and didn't do anything about it?"