Rights are vital for young generations

I started thinking about this question after attending the town hall meeting organized on May 24 in honor of Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, during his visit to Nepal.

Callamard covered a wide spectrum of issues while answering questions from both the moderator, journalist Dil Bhusan Pathak and from the audience. It was an interesting talk as the Amnesty chief was able to link the inevitable focus on some of the most pressing human rights issues of Nepal with what’s going on globally.

One of the key takeaways was the role of youths. Perhaps encouraged by a large presence of young people in the hall, Callamard underscored the importance of youths playing a leading role to uphold and strengthen human rights.

At the same time, I do wonder if most of the young people do care about them. While I have been working and collaborating with a number of astounding young people who are eager and determined to change the status quo for better, I am not entirely convinced that a vast majority of them really feel that they have a stake in the debate.

Surely there are many pressing issues, of more tangible and practical nature that young people have to think about, especially if they come from vulnerable, and low-income families. Those who struggle the most have to think about more essential things like surviving gruesome urban centers that do offer almost endless opportunities for the better-off but can be nightmares for those who have no privileges nor status.

But what about those young people from middle-class families that do not live a life of luxuries but at the same time are doing quite ok? I believe that involving and engaging this vast “middle” that, according to many statistics, is dwindling because of out-migration to far places like Australia and Canada, is paramount.

Climate change has been so devastating that it has finally become an issue that can grab their attention. And after all, climate activism is a great way of upholding and seeking respect for human rights but what about other issues?

What about caste discrimination about which Amnesty International recently launched a report specifically focused on the deprivations and humiliations that citizens from the Dalit community have to face? What about other issues like freedom of expression, the fight against abuses committed by the state and other powerful entities?

I feel that many youths in Nepal are feeling a bit complacent about what’s going on. Perhaps it is fair enough. After all, as I have already highlighted, it is difficult to think about human rights when there are other issues to deal with. Others, perhaps, are just maximizing their shot at being successful. Amid problems and issues concerning the nation, there are a good number of young people who just try to make it big.

Fair enough, I would say.

Callamard, during her talk, spoke widely about the risks of a breakdown of the international, rules-based order. “If a neighboring country adopts a law against freedoms, there are high risks that such laws will be exported” she told the audience.

Somehow, Nepal has been shielded, insulated from many issues affecting the planet. The country fully internalized that there was a war raging in Ukraine, only when some of its youths were discovered to fight and die in the invading Russian Army.

These days, there has been an uproar about press freedom because the chairman of the biggest private publishing and TV house was jailed. But how much are the youths invested on this issue? With reading habits dropping abysmally, too few of them really know what’s going on. So, the fundamental question is not just asking if young people do care about human rights.

The right question is: How can young people be engaged and recommit to civic and public affairs? Not only those who can afford it in virtue of their family related privileges or those, the active minority, who have some sort of special interest to work at the service of the public good.

We need to engage and involve the silent middle. Schools, both public and private, should play a much bigger role. Resources to enable new programs about civic education and human rights are not a real problem. If alternative Fridays can be conceived, designed and implemented to offer students a more practical type of education, why not also think about “Civic” Thursdays? I am sure that local youth clubs, NGOs could do a lot in this area even with very scarce resources.

A challenge is to make civic education, not the one being already taught, I would say quite ineffectively, much more appealing and interesting. An idea: The major metropolitan governments of the country could launch a competition for schools and not-for-profit organizations and youth groups that, partnering together, would come up with innovative ways to do civic engagement.

We do not only have to find better ways to teach it but also create innovative learning pathways to make students experience and practice it. With civic engagement, I do mean focusing on issues like human rights, education for sustainable development and climate action and public policies as well. If you reflect on it, we need to embed the local curricula, formal and informal, in the classrooms and outside of them, with tons of ethical leadership.

Students, especially those less engaged and less prone to active actions, must be challenged in a positive way because they must understand that they also have a role to play, they have some stakes in the discussion.

Callamard highlighted that youths must get organized and protest but they must do it in a smart way, rather than risking their lives. She is right but I do not think we are nearly close enough to have a majority of youths even ready to play their part in the society.

Good governance is for them the most unappealing and boring thing that they can even conceptualize and imagine. They don’t really have a clue about it, why should they have it considering the state of national politics? Good governance is essential if Nepal wants to reach a higher league of nations.

But such type of governance does not happen just through top-down approaches. Real good governance means inclusive governance where citizens have a voice and agency. In practice, they are not just electing their representatives but they are part of the decision-making. Unfortunately, such a vision is still far, it is still a chimera.

Only by providing cutting-edge curricula and practical opportunities through service and volunteering experiences that elicit their enthusiasm, the vast majority of young people can commit and make the difference and bring that vision on the ground. Human rights do matter because without them Nepal would be a much worse place to live in.

They matter because they are the foundations of the nation’s democracy that, while imperfect, is still the bright and shining story. Youths can stand up and do their best to even improve the state of national affairs but they need some guidance. “Hope is something that we must all build”,  Callamard said in her final remarks. Yes, youths should be the nation’s “Hope Builders” whose contributions are simply indispensable. Can we help them?

The author is the co-founder of ENGAGE and of The Good Leadership