This year the 18th Oxford Human Rights Festival shared the voices and stories of resilient individuals from around the world who have been through, and are still going through, tremendous challenges on a daily basis.
We explored cultures, encouraged debates and discussions and invited individuals to explore their own stories of resilience through music, film, art, spoken word and movement. The Lord Mayor of Oxford, Councillor Craig Simmons opened the festival on 13 March.
“The theme of resilience is particularly pertinent at this time – some of our basic human rights are being challenged, right of freedom of movement, right to education, right to assemble, the right to vote - we have just heard that the local elections are being postponed for a year.” The Lord Mayor continued, “throughout the world we need to see human rights expand and be globally and universally accepted.”
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| Lord Mayor Cllr Craig Simmons opens the festival |
Following Government guidelines around Covid-19 we had to cut the festival short onsite so we swiftly responded by taking it online - we will continue this into the year. You can find us @OxfordHumanRightsFestival
There has been growing interest in resilience in the academic, environmental and humanitarian sectors particularly around disaster risk reduction. Today, as the globe wrestles with the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen the word become part of a collective narrative as people find ways to acknowledge systems and their own abilities to cope with the sudden and often fatal challenges they are forced to grapple with.
By resilience we refer to the capacity to recover from difficulties swiftly – some would say the ability to bounce back. The UN states
“Resilience is the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions.”
Looking through the lens of resilience we are offered an opportunity to observe, measure and assess the ability of individuals and communities to mobilise their recovery. It allows us to pinpoint the gaps in system design and policy and leads us to consider preparedness, the idea that careful planning can prepare systems and individuals to lessen impacts, for example the evacuation drills practiced in Japan.
It is crucial to acknowledge the role of systems design, policies, planning and the actions that organisations and governments commit to, as these directly impact the resilience of individuals and communities. How can we keep organisations and governments accountable to the communities they are set up to serve? I, like many others, advocate that academia, human rights organisations, communities and individuals that are impacted by disasters and conflict should continue to prod and poke (if they can), to expose the gaps and allow experience and evidenced based rhetoric to push for more effective policies and systems.
We can see the gaps all around us. Today the UNHCR reports that there are 70.9 million people worldwide that have been forcibly displaced - the numbers account for 43.1 million being internally displaced, 25.9 million refugees (half under the age of 18 years old) and 3.5 million asylum seekers. It is not only the forcibly displaced that suffer stress; research has found that we are all susceptible to mental and physical adversities in our own lives. The 2013 Global Burden of Disease study stated that “the predominant mental health problem worldwide is depression, followed by anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.” In the UK “in an average classroom, ten children will have witnessed their parents separate, eight will have experienced severe physical violence, sexual abuse or neglect, one will have experienced the death of a parent and seven will have been bullied”. How about disability? “There are 13.9 million disabled people in the UK and life costs you £583 more on average a month if you're disabled.”
With the current Covid-19 crisis, economic policies, healthcare systems and society structures are being tested for their resilience and impact on human rights - the situation will no doubt expose the most vulnerable in our local, national and global communities asking us to re-think and re-imagine how systems are designed.
As a Festival based in Oxford, we acknowledged the poverty stresses closer to home. Ten of Oxford's 83 neighbourhoods are amongst the 20% most deprived areas in England experiencing multiple levels of deprivation, 25% of children in Oxford live below the poverty line and according to Oxford City Council’s September 2019 ‘Street counts’ report, 51 people were sleeping rough on the streets at the time.
All these statistics may pull at our heart strings and ask us to reflect on the structures and policies of organisations, companies, NGOs and governments on their role in the obstructions and challenges that individuals and communities are grappling with on a daily basis to keep resilient.
We are proud to be in the city of Oxford - a ‘City of Sanctuary’. We are part of a movement that has a vision of welcome and we are part of a promise - to be a place of safety for all, including people fleeing from violence and persecution. The ‘City of Sanctuary’ movement in Oxford also celebrates the skills that refugees and asylum seekers bring with them and work with partners to provide a platform to help them engage with the city. In 2018 Oxford City and partnering organisations settled 27 refugee families in Oxford under the Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement Scheme (SVPRS) and the Vulnerable Children’s Resettlement Scheme (VCRS). There is hope in a collaboration and a well thought out vision.
From mass migrations of people, civil society uprisings, environmental changes, mental health issues to the most recent global health crisis, our global strengths and weaknesses have never been more apparent. The world is going through extraordinary changes and our systems and human resilience is being tested like never before – by everyone on the planet.
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| The Lord Mayor of Oxford with members of the festival committee |
“We need to make sure that our human rights don’t get eroded because of situations like coronavirus and climate change.” Lord Mayor of Oxford at the opening of OxHRF 2020
Over the coming weeks we will be posting several blogs centred around the festival – we will be inviting readers to explore the stories of resilient individuals and communities from around the globe that we exhibited in Oxford. Through reading, observing, listening, questioning and discussing we hope that you will find inspiration in these challenging times.
Note: The theme for the 2020 Festival came out of suggestions from the 2019 Oxford Human Rights Festival student committee, CENDEP staff, students and alumni.
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