“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Letter from Birmingham Jail, Alabama, 16 April, 1963

A central theme of the Comparative Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut is that people everywhere share a common humanity. The program employs an integrated ecumenical approach to engage the academic community, educational institutions, human rights organizations, students, policy makers, practitioners and the public to foster a culture of human rights. The institute fashions its agenda to integrate human rights issues from around the world, though its activities are anchored by the experience of South Africa, for historical, intrinsic and practical reasons.

In the study of human rights, no year and no country provided a greater set of contrasts than South Africa in 1948. In that year, just three years after the world had confronted the full horror of the Jewish holocaust, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which set the standards for human rights observance, and the Genocide Convention was brought into force. In the same year, 1948, the South African Nationalist Party assumed power and embarked on a comprehensive project of social engineering that was effected through a series of laws that would institutionalize the racist regime and structure the country on the principle of “racial” inequality. Yet, the adoption of apartheid in South Africa did not generate international outrage. After years of struggle, however, when Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress came to power in 1994 through the country’s first democratic elections, they initiated an extraordinary transformation of that country into a non-racist democracy, through a novel formula of conflict resolution informed by principles of truth and reconciliation. It is an approach that has inspired people all over the world and may serve as a new model of promoting human rights.

The events in South Africa present the poles which any study of human rights must confront: the efforts to give all people equal opportunity and respect, set against dehumanizing practices driven by prejudice and often born out of ignorance and fear.
Comparative human rights studies represent an exciting frontier for the advancement of integrated multi-disciplinary inquiry, cross-cultural understanding, and international cooperation. The academic goal of the Institute is to award both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Comparative Human Rights and Peace Studies at the University of Connecticut that will combine grounding in theoretical scholarship with practical engagement in human rights-related activities both within and outside the U.S. An integrated approach to human rights education and involvement can yield a new genre of scholarship and fortify people against the habit of lapsing into cultural relativism or self-serving ethnocentrism.

The Institute of Comparative Human Rights at the University of Connecticut works collaboratively with already existing strategic partnerships with the African National Congress (ANC), the University of Fort Hare (UFH), and the UNESCO Oliver Tambo Centre of Human Rights in South Africa. The Institute will also establish partnerships with a variety of institutions in different regions of the world, to facilitate a truly global understanding and appreciation of human rights. In addition, the program will tap into the extensive archival resources of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and other materials. The overarching objective of the Institute is to provide education that prepares individuals for responsible global citizenship.