Building a global human rights education research community

Human rights, research, community, non violence,

In this edition of HRER, we highlight new efforts to develop a sustainable community of global human rights education research. Human rights education (HRE) developed in many forms as a field of practice in the second half of the twentieth century, promoted by non-governmental organisations, various UN initiatives and other intergovernmental organisations, such as the Council of Europe. The first purpose of HRE was to promote human rights as a ‘common language of humanity’, as expressed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (UN, 1998). The UN SecretaryGeneral’s address, made nearly 50 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1948), celebrated the lives of human rights leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King, Jnr., for whom a guiding principle of struggle was nonviolence