Conference Seeks to Advance Rights Among Marginalized Groups

Caleb Orozco

The conference saw the participation of representatives from various sectors—including social, environment and health—and is part of a larger public education strategy to get citizens to think about the issues in their communities and to understand that human rights are everyone’s business. According to Orozco, the conference hopes to advance rights among marginalized groups.

Caleb Orozco, Executive Director, UNIBAM

“The litigation work and the public education work that we are doing is providing the framework for us to understand that rights matter not just to the marginalized, but rights matter for everybody. When you allow a group to be mistreated and you don’t belong to that group, it means then that you set a precedent or practice for your rights as a person not affected by that group’s issue to then be eroded when your issues are challenged. We are individually and collectively responsible for addressing the issues of equity and equality whether we like it or not because at the end of the day, it is our personal security and our personal liberty that is affected. We have realized that the state is challenged by the political value of rights investments for its citizens; that’s one. The second thing that we understand is the challenge of getting various sectors together and coming up with an understanding to create mechanisms that support your citizens. For UNIBAM, it cannot be done by ourselves, so it requires the civil society, state partnership to get that understanding going. But it doesn’t work if the state is prioritizing a hundred other things except rights investment mechanisms. It doesn’t help if the state has a two-billion dollar debt and it is challenged to even do a simple feasibility study. It doesn’t work if we are not talking to each other about what concerns citizens and how we improve quality of life. it just doesn’t work.”
The conference was supported by the Canadian Fund for Local Initiatives.