Long Live Human Rights Learning

The founding president of People’s Decade for Human Rights Education believed that only a rights frame work can encourage disciplined and socially responsible development through investment and trade

- Upendra Baxi

SHULAMITH Koenig— who since 1988 was the founding president of PDHRE, a movement for Human Rights Learning (formerly known as People’s Decade for Human Rights Education)—has moved into infinity, but hers was a life lived exceptionally well.

She has left the world which she reshaped with the quest of human rights to have human rights education and learning. As we well know, one may be educated but never learn to care for hap fewer other; and formal education about human rights may still leave wholly behind rightless human beings and disadvantaged people.

For Shulamith, human rights learning was ethics of care and not just an ethic of legal rights. She leaves behind many difficult legacies, including one (were to invert the phrase of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault) the documents of today become monuments of tomorrow.

Shulamith was awarded the 2003 UN Prize in the field of human rights — an award given to five people every five years since 1966 and counts among them Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roose velt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jimmy Carter.