英国消费者权利coursework范文(2)

The impact of globalization and the conduct of transnational actors and activities of transnational corporations, intergovernmental financial institutions, multilateral development and trade agencies, the communications industry, and the numerous other institutions and networks of trade, aid, investment and operations of the international economy are undeniably felt in the human rights field. For a long time, the conduct of individual states and governments has been the focus of assessments of human rights performance, without questioning human rights behaviour of transnational corporations. Given the increasing dominance of giant corporations in the global political economy (the 500 largest of which control 70% of world trade.), there is a need for transnational conduct to be equally subject to accountability and responsibility in upholding or violating human rights.

Human rights education should create opportunities to raise critical questions on the global and national role of multinational corporations and agencies and international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. For example, when the strategy of structural adjustments to deal with the debt problem of South nations creates more marginalization and injustices for poor majorities, transnational actors should be held responsible for human rights violations. If imposition by the IMF or the World Bank (UN institutions) of structural adjustment includes educational reforms requiring reduction of basic education that prevents the state from complying with its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other human rights instruments to provide free primary education, then those institutions are acting contrary to the UN's human rights standards. Such cases are of immediate relevance to human rights education, as the conduct of the governments and UN agencies concerned would defeat the purpose of the General Assembly resolutions concerning the UN Decade for Human Rights Education. Thus, an element of the pedagogy for human rights education is a critical analysis of the direct and indirect participation of UN and other international agencies and transnational corporations in upholding or violating human rights, drawing insights from the experiences of social movements. When aid and development agencies and the transnational corporations engage in development programmes that undermine the rights of individuals and groups, they should be held answerable and the High Commissioner for Human Rights should monitor their practices and impacts on the realization of the objectives of the Decade.

The right to economic self-determination, as well as economic, and social and cultural rights, like education, health, food and housing, are being rapidly undermined through structural adjustment programmes imposed on the countries of the South and former Communist Party countries by the Bretton Woods institutions. A historically unparalleled conglomerate of interlocking structures of power, comprising transnational corporations, G-7 governments, and international institutions of finance, development and trade, have imposed conditions on economic and social development in the South that lead to massive violations of human rights, exploitation of workers, appropriation and degradation of land and other natural resources, and alienation of citizens from political processes. The result is political and economic control by a small number of financial, trade, technological and intellectual property monopolies and disregard for the right of all individuals and peoples to participatory, human-centred development. As educators, we believe the understanding of these processes and the importance of human rights accountability of all institutions and individuals responsible for globalization are an important part of human rights education.

Denial of economic self-determination and the perpetuation of domination and oppression of women are two other obstacles to human rights that affect thinking about a pedagogy for human rights education. The obstacles in themselves are violations of human rights as well as create conditions for the violation of human rights. Human rights education should serve to expose such obstacles and forces that underlie them, to capacitate the struggle for the full realization of human rights and to denounce impunity of perpetrators of abuses.

Peoples' aspirations for economic justice are part of the struggle for their right "to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development," in accordance with Article 1 of the two International Covenants on Human Rights. Economic self-determination is abused by national security and other forces and co-opted and militarized by military-industrial complexes, often resulting in armed conflicts, in which massive violations of human rights occur with impunity. Another critical dimension of self-determination for human rights education is the struggle of indigenous peoples to develop in accordance with their own values and priorities. The right to self-organization, therefore, is an important part of the right to self-determination. Human rights education should create space for collective assertion of rights struggles at the same time as it crystallizes experiences of peoples struggle in education. Democratization and democratic struggles of the oppressed peoples are co-opted by and distorted by governments of the South and East Central Europe that blindly adhere to the market economy model of development, thus perverting the economic self-determination of their peoples.

The oldest obstacle to all human rights is the patriarchical structuring of the world. Patriarchy perpetuates hierarchical and authoritarian power forces in all kinds of dominations and oppressions. Realization of genuine equality for women and girls and elimination of discrimination and violation of women's human rights will open up new routes towards emancipation and liberation of all individuals and social groups.

State apparatuses, including local non-participatory state structures, are often and correctly identified as significant sources of human rights violations. Conditions for human rights
deprivation are also created by non-democratic practices in civil society, including of politicization and militarization of ethnic relationships, which provide conditions for the violation of basic human rights.

We further recognize that the dominant economic and social forces within the civil society are frequently involved in violations of human rights, particularly in relation to women's and children's rights as well as rights of the exploited people with respect to land, forest, water and employment. Such violations in the name of development are carried out, more often than not, with the direct or indirect support of the state apparatus, including its anti-poor judicial system. Such a situation prevails widely not only in the Third World but also in the industrialized West.

Human rights education, as critical thinking, moral reflection, and meaningful experiences, which contribute to an understanding of power-relations and power-structures, is both a tool for and the process of the struggle for social change and for the implementation of human rights. By enabling learners to examine discourse and power structures critically and creatively, human rights education opens a dynamic and evolving space which can accommodate diverse and changing communities and contexts without, though, imposing a specific mode of action on them. Thus human rights education and the struggle for social change are in a constant dialectical relationship along the path to empowerment and justice. However, this dialectics does not imply and in fact would be self-defeating if it resulted in denial or disregard of the indivisibility, inalienability and universality of human rights, or the failure of states to fulfill their obligations under international human rights law.

Human rights education, by helping learners understand the structure of injustice, enables survival, struggle, and change through a plethora of political, cultural, economic and social modes of responding to situations of denial of human rights. Human rights education facilitates, through laying bare the sources and the limitations of the power forces and energizing personal commitment and social responsibility, alternative representations of cultural products, the writing of non-existent histories and cultures and the re-writing of suppressed ones, alternative political arrangements and organizations, financial substitutions and alternative social arrangements which enable survival under oppression, challenges to abusive power, and the dissemination of education as struggle and struggle as education.

Pedagogy refers to a planned learning process through which learners develop cognatively, experientially and affectively in response to interaction with facilitators of learning. Such planned interaction between learning facilitators and learners must pursue an explicit purpose, which in the case of human rights education, is awareness of and capacity to act to further human rights aspirations.

Human rights norms themselves, in particular the Universal Declaration, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Vienna Declaration and Plan of Action, define the objective of all education as the full development of the human personality and potential. This objective can best be attained by enabling learners creatively and analytically to construct knowledge and be able to deconstruct fallacious or distorted knowledge concerning their own situation in society and history and reconstructing that knowledge by using critical, reflective, and moral faculties which it is the facilitator's task to assist them in acquiring. Education thus understood is a life-long process in which individuals become at different times and to differing degrees both facilitators of learning and learners. It is, therefore, essential, although frequently neglected, that the learning process respect the historical, social, psychological, ethnic, gender, linguistic and other contexts of the learners