From school education to buying a house, protecting human rights is an issue that touches everyone and is something that everyone can help to improve, even though most people may not realize it, said lecturers at a human rights workshop organized by the Deng Liberty Foundation yesterday.
“Protecting human rights is an idea that often becomes only a slogan,” the foundation’s chairman Kenneth Chiu (邱晃泉) told teachers and students who attended the workshop.
“The government’s role is to respect, to protect and to help realize human rights protection,” Chiu said. “However, I regret to say that our government only talks the talk, but never walks the walk.”
He cited skyrocketing real estate prices as an example.
“The government should protect the people’s right to have shelter, but the fact is that a lot of people cannot afford to buy a house nowadays,” Chiu said. “If they cannot even find a place to live, how do they live with dignity?”
He said that, some apartments may have cost millions of NT dollars decades ago, but now the price has jumped to tens of -millions of NT dollars.
“Some people are getting rich, but not because they worked for it, while others cannot even afford to buy a house — this is the same as the rich robbing from the poor,” he said.
On the other hand, Humanistic Education Foundation (HEF) executive director Joanna Feng (馮喬蘭) said that everyone could help improve rights if they stay alert and active.
HEF has handled many cases in which students are physically or even sexually abused by teachers, in some cases for a long time.
“Looking into these cases, I found it quite apparent that someone — other teachers or school officials — must have known about the abuse, and they could have stopped it if they intervened, but they didn’t,” Feng said.
“Obviously when you see people beating kids or tying up kids, you would probably call the police, wouldn’t you? But somehow, people think it’s ‘normal’ when they see it on campus,” she said.
In Torng-jiuan (殷童娟), a junior high school teacher who attended the workshop, said she had learned a lot about human rights and may write a human rights education curriculum after attending the workshop.
“I’ve always been interested in human rights issues, but found it difficult to read all those documents. But today, I understand more about these abstract ideas as I saw concrete examples and heard real stories,” she said.
In said that she may write a human rights education curriculum after attending the workshop.
The workshop is part of a human rights education curriculum contest that the foundation organizes to encourage teachers to take their students out of class to visit places relevant to Taiwan’s human rights history.
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