A perspective on Human Rights
What are human rights when you do not have a legal status? What happens when you are an illegal immigrant or a refugee from your country of origin?
Presently due to crisis, wars and other difficult situation people have been forced to look for a better future for their families and themselves in other countries. If we are privileged enough to have a place called home, a job, and food on our tables we can consider ourselves to be extremely blessed because while we could be taking all this for granted others would give anything to have it.
Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Humanity House Museum at The Hague and it has been an eye opening experience. I had seen documentaries explaining the difficult situations illegal immigrants or refugees go through while on their journey to the nearest peaceful country, being discovered without legal documentation, and of families being separated due to deportation, but the experience in my visit the Humanity House completely changed my perspective.
The Humanity House “is an initiative from the Dutch Red Cross and is supported by the city of The Hague and the European Commission’s European Fund for Regional Development.”[1] The visit to this museum is not like to a regular museum in which you see walls and uncover history, this is an interactive museum in which you are given an identity and begin your journey. As you begin, you feel like you are peacefully at home and then suddenly confronted with what seems like a local conflict which obliges you to flee abroad. As the journey continues you reach a point in which you are without a “personality” you are no-one without legal documentation and you have to prove each time that you are not a criminal, that you intend no wrong and that your reasons for fleeing your country are because you have been through a life threatening experience. It is life or death, throughout this visit you feel a glimpse of the pain the people endure. The experience makes you acknowledge how those people strive to survive and improve their quality of life but in the process of that achievement (in which not all live to tell) they lose all “Human Rights.”
No one listens to you, you have no voice. You are no one and nobody seems to care if you will wake up the next morning. While your country is in armed conflict, you are fleeing to safety encountering the worst possible scenes you could not even imagine. Then those who finally reach a safe destination they have a hard time entering being considered possible criminals.
I realized how lucky I am to have the opportunity of enjoying freedom of speech, religion, nationality, home, food, education among many others and that once you know that people out there do not, how can you turn a blind eye? How can we continue our lives acknowledging what others go through and not trying to at least do something to make a difference?
This is why today I invite all to think about their blessings and be grateful. “Do not judge a book by its cover” as the popular saying states, with knowledge comes a great amount of responsibility.
So now the question is: What can I do for others?
[1] Official home page, Humanity House. http://www.humanityhouse.org/en/organisation/about-us