Endorsed by Amnesty International and sponsored by blogging directory BlogCatalog, is an initiative to publicise the fact that our planet – 60 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – still suffers from a multitude of human rights issues.
Bloggers Unite is an initiative designed to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By challenging bloggers to blog about a particular social cause on a single day, a single voice can be joined with thousands of others to help make a real positive difference; from raising awareness for cancer, to an effort to better education systems or support 3rd world countries.
Bloggers, of course, can write about any human-rights related issue they chose. It is a worthy exercise and I really do think the blogosphere plays some part in encouraging and developing an internationalist conscience in people of different countries, nationalities and cultures.
In fact, bloggers were themselves the topic of the 2006 campaign, when bloggers in free countries were asked to express solidarity with their counterparts living under tyranny.
I do think that one part of their PR blurb is a little naive and optimistic though.
While the words might change from country to country and are sometimes taken for granted, human rights represent one of the universally agreed upon ideas — that all people are born with basic rights and freedoms that include life, liberty, and justice.
I’m not convinced, I regret to say, that this is true. Is there an innate, universal belief, value or expectation of ‘life, liberty and justice’? Is it even intuitive? Or does ‘freedom’ require a bit of a hard-sell?
May 15 is the big day.