About FACE Human Rights
The Challenge The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 sets the global standard for individual, national and international behavior, but we are far from meeting it. As its name suggests, the Universal Declaration is also meant to apply universally, yet while no newscast about human rights abuses would be complete without images of suffering children, children are both disproportionately victimized by human rights abusers and systematically underserved in efforts to improve human rights conditions. While the voices of the adult survivors of war crimes, domestic violence, religious repression, torture and the sex trade are heard regularly in the media, and in national and international fora, children have no voice. They are victims, objects of pity, but not actors to raise their voices, literal or figurative, against the violators of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This invisibility is symptomatic of a far more widespread, deeper and more pernicious indifference to young people in general as actors, not objects, as citizens, not subjects in global society. To become effective citizens, however—to be able to engage issues such as human rights—young people must be able to inform themselves about what is happening and educate themselves about how the system works and how to engage it, since citizenship is about action and cannot be learned passively. Put differently, around the world young people lack the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be intelligently participatory local and global citizens largely because they are not schooled to acquire these essentials. Finally, as young people attempt to educate themselves for their future as global citizens, they find little available that meets their needs and their tastes. Global means the Internet, but for now there is too much—and too little—for them there. There are tens of thousands of sites, but none completely fulfill an essential set of requirements: by and for young people, global in source and scope of content, nonpartisan with expectations of high journalistic standards but fully supportive of meaningful engagement, fully interactive.
The Opportunity If this is the challenge, then the opportunity is obvious: design a global, interactive human rights forum to be operated by and for young people in such a way as to advance not only their engagement in human rights issues, but also their engagement as global citizens.
An international team of students and faculty has seized the opportunity and created FACE Human Rights, an international, interactive human rights forum through which students can inform, educate and engage themselves in this critical issue. It harnesses the power of the Internet to overcome geography and political barriers to create a virtual, global ‘safe space’ in which young people can share their personal experiences in the form of drawings, photographs and testimonials; share information about conditions in their own countries, developing crises and programs by NGOs; educate each other about their rights under international laws and conventions; and engage each other as global citizens by sharing ideas about how to improve the quality of life for people around the world.
FACE Human Rights is edited and managed by an international team of students who work with an international advisory board of academics, journalists and human rights specialists. Advisors, editors and contributors connect via a powerful network in a virtual human rights community, but underpinning FACE Human Rights are concerned human rights teams or ‘nodes’ all over the world. These nodes—some built around an NGO, some around a school, some around a university journalism department, some around a faith-based organization—are the ‘grassroots’ of FACE Human Rights. Our global network includes nodes across the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and the United States. If you’d like to contribute to FACE Human Rights, please read our Editorial Guidelines.
Although virtual, FACE Human Rights has to live somewhere and that place is the Center for Global Security and Democracy (CGSD) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Nodes of FACE Human Rights
A "node" is a key structural unit of FACE Human Rights. Each node is headed by a director, who is in charge of the overall organization and management of the node. There may be multiple editorial positions within a node with appropriate specialization of editors (academic papers, testimonials, poetry, photography and artwork). A three-tier system is used in each Editorial Team: Editors-in-Chief, Chairpersons and Editors. A node may also have education and engagement components, and experts in these areas organize and manage their activity locally and coordinate regional efforts with the heads of the engagement and education groups at other nodes. An outreach department in each node recruits writers, artists, photographers and other contributors to FACE Human Rights and maintains a regional network of contacts. Whether to form a local marketing team and a local technical group in each node and how to manage them depends on the specific character of each particular region and is left to the discretion of the node director. Each node team will enter outreach information in the main database. In each node, submissions approved by the Editor-in-Chiefs will be saved onto the main database as well as posted on the website.
Editorial Guidelines
- All works should be submitted by their authors. If an author is younger than 13, he or she should send a submission through a parent, a guardian or a teacher. Works will be accepted from third parties only with the consent of the author.
- All authors must provide the following information: name, age, place of residence, brief description of the submission, type of issue described, location of the human right issue/violation described, contact information, reference contact. Institutional affiliation of the author is desirable but not necessary.
Submitted works should meet the following criteria:
a) Be related to the issue of human rights (human rights in theory and practice, observance of human rights in different parts of the world, human rights violations, achievements in the area of human rights, etc.).
b) Be original. Plagiarized works will not be published.
c) Be of appropriate length: 2500 words for poems; 20 pages (size 12 font, double-spaced) for academic papers, testimonials and success stories, with endnotes and bibliography not included in the above page count; <....> for graphic files with artwork and photography. In addition, the number of artwork and photography submissions is limited to 25 per author. All written submissions may be accompanied by photographs or artwork (see the guidelines for photography).
d) Be submitted in electronic form. Occasionally, when such form of submission is not possible, hard copies (both written and visual pieces) should be sent by mail. In this case, only printed photographs will be accepted. No film, please. Our postal address is:
Center for Global Security and Democracy
Department of Political Science, Hickman Hall
89 George Street
Rutgers , the State University of New Jersey
New Brunswick , NJ 08901-1411
e) Be appropriate for all audiences in its language and content. We do acknowledge that violence often attends human rights violations, and it may be impossible to depict certain human rights infringements without using harsh language. Yet, we request that you refrain from it–your work will be read and viewed by people younger than yourself.
The Editorial Board will:
- Post your submissions on the site or decline publication based on the merit of the work and appropriateness of its language and content.
- Not return submissions.
- Not share submissions with third parties without the author's permission.
- Have the right to use submitted works for projects related to CGSD and FACE Human Rights, including but not limited to conferences, promotions and advertisements.
NOTE: These guidelines are still in the process of development and are subject to change. |
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