revised

Matt Ellor

The Fundamental Rights of Citizens of The World

Matthew was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1988. He was placed in foster care and at the age of 4 he was adopted by his foster mother who in his eyes has been and always will be his real mom. He grew up in the lower east side and spent most of his time in New York City as well as occasionally oversees in England. He has attended city public school his whole life. He is currently attending The City University of New York (CUNY) LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens. He aspires to work in Public Policy and Civil Service and hopes to make progressive changes to better people’s lives, happiness, and well-being.

During my studies I was lucky enough to be part of a cluster class in Liberal Arts of Social Science and Human Services with a main focus on Human rights.  We examined in depth the language of human rights and considered how it can affirm, deny, or limit rights of citizens.  We discussed many topics in regards to human rights through literature in which we looked into times of slavery as well as the civil rights and economic movements, in linguistics we learned about the development of language, and in our political science class we discovered how law plays a major role in the destruction or advancement of our rights.  Many of these issues I was hearing and studying about for the first time and it heightened my ambition to pursue a career in public policy and civil service.    

Human Rights are protections, liberties, and freedoms that belong justifiably to all humans as citizens of the world and are awarded to us at birth. These rights have been put in to place to protect all of the world’s citizens in particular the neglected and least protected ones. These protections of rights can be found in many countries such as The United States of America in which the amendments in the Bill of Rights attempt to help ensure the safeguard of these indispensable rights. In the late 1940’s after the Second World War, the United Nations general assembly created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which consists of 30 articles, which issued all humans their fundamental and necessary freedoms without restriction to sex, race, religion, or political view point. Language plays many key roles in human rights, it articulates our goals in order to be understood by those it aims to protect and it makes sure that these rights are intelligible and accessible to all.

Human rights are being infringed upon and these violations are happening on a scale of a wide variety, from local levels all the way through to international ones. We as fellow citizens of the world need to be advocates and ambassadors of human rights. We must demand that our goals found in the UDHR be constantly protected and continually and increasingly enforced. We have the ability and power to use the language of human rights and speak up for those whose voices have been muffled and muted by those who oppress, restrain, limit, violate, and or neglect their freedoms, rights, or liberties as free citizens of the world.