Russia

To help further address this problem, YHRI’s educational work in Africa now includes teaching children, as well as adults, about the causes and prevention of HIV/AIDS. YHRI has produced an easy-to-understand handout that defines HIV/AIDS, disposes of common misconceptions about it, explains how infection occurs and sets out what each person can do to minimise the risk — vital information on a continent socially, economically and humanly devastated by an AIDS epidemic.

YHRI has also begun to tackle the problem of human trafficking or “modern day slavery,” a type of crime that now affects an estimated 27 million people, mostly women and children, worldwide. YHRI has worked tirelessly to bring about greater public awareness of the problem, believing that increased understanding of its scope will compel effective action. In furtherance of this aim, YHRI has held a number of seminars and roundtables on human trafficking, including one in Los Angeles in January 2004 attended by a representative of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Thailand

Due to the success of various YHRI campaigns, government officials have begun integrating YHRI educational materials into national programmes. Witness the mayor of the city of Morón in Argentina, who was so impressed by the school-age winners of a national YHRI art contest that he decided to place YHRI’s educational materials in the hands of every child in the city’s 90 schools and to add the teaching of human rights to the curriculum.

Ghana

With the expansion of YHRI and its message that human rights should be learned when still young has come a demand for more information from all over the world. To fill this need, in February 2004, YHRI representatives set out on a 72,420-kilometre World Educational Tour. In the space of five weeks, YHRI delegates travelled to both well-populated and far-flung locations, including Tokyo; Bangkok; Accra, Ghana; Georgetown, Guyana (South America) and Mexico City to increase the understanding of human rights among youth and to found new YHRI chapters. Along the way, YHRI representatives met with senior government officials, visited local towns and villages, and distributed to both parents and children copies of What are Human Rights? and YHRI’s educational flier on AIDS. At each stop, they asked the children to write short accounts of what they understood of human rights and why these are so precious (click here to see samples).

Germany

What resulted from this tour was a veritable wave of interest in human rights education for the young. As Elizabeth A. Ohene, the Ghanaian Minister of State, Tertiary Education, wrote, “You have certainly managed to break down the two difficult subjects of human rights and AIDS in the booklet What are Human Rights? and the flyer entitled ‘Protect Yourself [and Others] from a Sickness Called AIDS’ into child-friendly tracts.”

The reason Scientologists work with such persistence in this field arises from a simple understanding: The teaching of human rights principles must form a vital part of any effort to combat intolerance and ignorance if we are to prevail in establishing a stable, peaceful and secure future for our children.