Human Rights Part 1

A colleague of mine recently engaged me in a debate about the rights of a minority group in this country and triggered many thoughts, some of which I wish to share today.

You see, I hear of the rights of so many groups of people, humans, children, women, men and even animal rights. But what are the most important rights? I the think the collective rights of humans are the most important rights. Those rights need to be protected above the rights of anything else. When we say the rights of children, have we firstly noticed that in a way the rights that they should have access to as humans are being infringed upon or are we trying to close them out of the human bracket and make them simply children? When we think of the women, are we doing that to them, are we enforcing their rights as humans or are we just boxing them out of the human bracket. You see, I believe that if we keep segmenting the human race, we shall have so many minority groups and each will stand to fight for their rights much to the destruction of those rights that we are all entitled to as humans.

But it may seem impossible to remove this segmentation. The more we fight for or against the rights of these minority groups, the more we break the rights that we share as humans. To protect the rights of those small groups, we many times find ourselves sacrificing the general human rights that we once fought so hard to build. Today we all stand threatened, threatened by the protection of the minority and the majority. For we can’t do either without violating the rights of the majority. We are firstly human, and those rights that apply to many of us should be firstly upheld and protected without offending ourselves collectively as humans.

So when we stand to say wives should not be beaten by their husbands, the reason should be that they are human and not that they are wives. Yes this will call for all of us to stand.

So what was the discussion that I was engaged in? It was on the subject of homosexuality in Uganda. Not just homosexuality, but homosexuality in this country. So that’s why I say we should firstly defend the human rights against the rights of any minority or majority group, but in defending those rights we should not offend ourselves. Ourselves as the people we are, in this case, we are Africans and majorities are Christians. We need to stand for those things by which we measure right and wrong. Those identities that have defined the course of our culture and our very lives. Those are the cultures by which we are human and by which we are able to defend the rights of us all.

And because as humans we have the right to express ourselves, all camps should front their opinions, and they should be passionate about their views, but in doing so their subsequent actions should not be in violation of our rights and our nature.
To be continues.