Justine’s First Post from the Oslo Freedom Forum

Monday 7th May 2012 – Oslo

Human Rights activism has become a muddied lake of idealism. On one shore its waves lap against unreported mass crimes, hidden away by repressive regimes that the rest of us want to keep economically sweet.  On another side of the same lake a child, maybe 14, resident of a fully-portered and pillared apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan will file a suit against his parents for abusing his human rights by taking his iPhone away from him at night.

Let’s look at the power of symbolic expressions. The word love used to mean an almost unutterable feeling. Now we use it about iTunes and cookie dough ice cream. The expression human rights used to have a similar impact of awe, framed tightly around the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…’

Now that trips of the tongue like a strap line for a brand of jeans that gives you the best looking butt in town. When did ‘free and equal’ get the Animal Farm treatment and become ‘free and equal as long as you do what we say, think as we think, and jump when we say jump’? And this is in countries that claim to be democracies.
The human condition really struggles with equality. It is the dream, the ideal, the better version of ourselves, and yet most are driven by the need to be either more equal than others, or just better, full stop.

To be in Oslo now, amongst activists who are fighting it out in the dirt, often alone, usually barely supported, and almost always in the face of heavily backed, armed, and funded organisations and regimes, is to be back in the heart of the human rights question, and a long way from the gilded youth with an iPhone issue. The Oslo Freedom Forum (http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/), this gathering of those whose rights have genuinely been abused, has the gift of making everyone present take stock. Just being here, amongst these people, these protectors of child and sex slaves, these voices on behalf of the silenced, those who have been imprisoned, tortured, and beaten, raises the question: what do human rights mean to me, And would I be prepared to fight for them?