Ukrainian Youth Find Out About Their Human Rights

Youth for Human Rights International at the Kiev City Orphanage for Youth and Teenagers.

Over the next year a predicted 1500 lost or runaway children between the ages of 3 and 18 will spend up to three months at the Kiev City Orphanage for Youth and Teenagers. It was a group of these young people that Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI) addressed on the importance of human rights.

The program consisted of showing the children an award-winning human rights music DVD, UNITED, which illustrates how one young man prevails over a bully with the support of children from around the world. This was followed with a presentation of public service announcements (PSAs) that illustrate each of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in terms children and teens can relate to. The PSAs show circumstances where youth are faced with human rights issues in very personal terms, such as unscrupulous practices in the workplace where young people can be cheated from the pay they rightly earn, how being unfairly accused of stealing something violates one's human rights, or the fact that an estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked into slavery each year.

The director of the orphanage, which helps reunite lost and runaway children with their parents, welcomed Youth for Human Rights International's program and their gift of a set of these DVDs for her use. Seeing this as a way to raise the self-esteem of these youth, she also realized that for many, it could help them take responsibility for the issues that led to their being in her facility.