Panel for International Human Rights Day
On December 9, on the occasion of International Human Rights Day (December 10), the UNESCO Regional Office in Quito and Representation for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, and the Technical University "Luis Vargas Torres" of Esmeraldas held a panel entitled: "Human Rights: crisis, inequalities and necropolitics", dedicated to the state of human rights in Latin America.
The panel was moderated by Professor Hiram Hernandez Castro, from the Technical University "Luis Vargas Torres" of Esmeraldas. In his opening statement, he acknowledged that human rights activists "have never had it easy" in the region. At the same time, he wondered about the current challenges in the face of the strength of anti-rights, punitive and anti-egalitarian discourses. He commented: "human rights and its activists live critical times there where necropolitics is becoming the description of the "nuda vida" of those that Eduardo Galeano called ՙlos nadies՚ (the nobodies)."
For her part, María Julia Bertomeu -Ph.D. in philosophy and senior researcher at CONICET- alluded to Karl Marx: "he thought that the rights of men were only the rights of bourgeois civil society, bourgeois society had managed to turn... the supposed political emancipation into a mere means whose purpose was to entrench life in capitalist civil society..." to expose the impotence of the declarations on human rights with respect to the rights to health of the most vulnerable populations. This had become evident during the pandemic and the vaccination process against COVID-19.
Next, Arturo Grueso Bonilla - board member of the Universidad de la Tierra y la Memoria Orlando Fals Borda of Colombia and activist of the Soy Porque Somos movement - spoke about the worsening crises of the black community in Colombia and urged international organizations to look at Colombia. "We are with `Colombia world power for life,' but when you look, you are watching a tango dance, one step forward, two steps back."
Also speaking from Colombia was Natalia Mosquera, who is a social worker and director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Community Innovation Lab program. Mosquera referenced the history of violence in Colombia and stressed that violence, economy, and environment were pillars of a necessary and urgent democratizing turn.
Finally, Pablo de la Vega - journalist, lawyer, and human rights defender in Ecuador - highlighted with alarming statistics the deficit in the protection of human rights defenders, aggravated by governmental and powerful sectors' intolerance towards political and legal work in this field. For this reason, the coordinator of the Human Rights Documentation Center "Segundo Montes Mozo" also stated: "human rights defenders not only face death, but also stigmatization and threats on a daily basis".
On December 10, a year-long campaign began with the aim of promoting the universality of the rights and work of activists associated with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2023.