human rights icon

Hi there, and first of all, thank you all for participating in Fanpop's Human Rights Awareness Month. HRAM was declared back in November of this year and requested that everyone who participates link for the month of December to help spread Human Rights Awareness.

In addition to icon changes, I have created the Human Rights Advent Calendar, which will be in the form of this soapbox. Every day, throughout the month of December, I will add holiday themed Human Rights content to this spot and link to it in this article. In addition to that, I will also release one Human Rights Fact and one Human...

Listening to the Instant Karma CD, I started thinking about Darfur and how there were all kinds of Sudanese refugees all over Egypt, having been expelled from their country or left it willingly for a variety of different reasons. I remember, a friend of mine went down to help them learn English every weekend as one of her many community service projects. And then that reminded me of going down to Mokattam to see the orphanage.

Mokattam, colloquially called “Garbage City” by everyone from residents of Mokattam to tour guides, is a place past the Cairo citadel where there are literally piles...

After my last article, and the discussion going on over at the link, I've been thinking a lot about the rights of a child, or a fetus as the case may be.

The phrase in the UN Declaration of Human Rights is “All human beings are born free and equal,” a modern rephrasing of the US Declaration of Independence’s “All men are created equal.” But what does the phrase “everyone” or “all human beings” entail? Does it really mean everyone? Immanuel Wallerstein points out the problems with being so absolute:

“… It is almost universally agreed that an infant does not have these rights,...