Preventing Human Rights Abuses Matters to Danielle Celermajer

bjbj Danielle Celermajer: Even though we have now a whole body of formal international law and a rhetorical nodding towards the importance of human rights, the actual implementation and the way that people live their lives remains hugely disparate from what we say we re on about. Super: Tell us about your work in torture prevention Danielle Celermajer: The first part of this project is to bring together an international team of researchers in anthropology, behavioural psychology, political science and law. To bring together the very best knowledge on what do we know about the way in which torture occurs and what keeps it in place. At the same time we have local researchers in Sri Lanka and Nepal who ll be interviewing people who have been tortured, people in torture organisations and doing interviews with the military and the police to try and work out what s actually going on in these institutions. We re then going to design intervention. And then in the last part of the project we re actually going to train people to go into the military and the police to do this work and then we re going to evaluate it and see whether we make a difference in terms of the way in which police and military behave. Super: What is the impact of this work? Danielle Celermajer: What we re really trying to do is to think about prevention of human rights violations in a different way. So to generalise some of the knowledge that we get about shifting peoples worlds, not only in the area of torture but in the area of domestic violence, in the area of *** abuse in other areas where what seems to be the case is that people are responsible for human rights violations based on some understanding of the world that they have. Super: What are the challenges? Danielle Celermajer: I think the major challenges for human rights in the world are that - the same as they ve been for the last 2,000 years - that often people aren t concerned about what s going on until it s immediately in their own lives. And addressing human rights requires a recognition of the universality of humanity. [Content_Types].xml Iw}, $yi} _rels/.rels theme/theme/themeManager.xml sQ}# theme/theme/theme1.xml w toc'v )I`n 3Vq%'#q :\TZaG L+M2 e\O* $*c? )6-r IqbJ#x ,AGm T[XF64 E)`# R>QD =(K& =al- 4vfa 0%M0 theme/theme/_rels/themeManager.xml.rels 6?$Q K(M&$R(.1 [Content_Types].xmlPK _rels/.relsPK theme/theme/themeManager.xmlPK theme/theme/theme1.xmlPK theme/theme/_rels/themeManager.xml.relsPK ALABS Normal ALABS Microsoft Office Word University of Sydney Title Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8