Human rights?

The majority of the schools who come to the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand come to learn about Human Rights In the context of the Holocaust, a popular topic for year 10 students. Yet I am not sure what we can teach them about Human Rights. We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights displayed on the wall, but this is beyond the comprehension of most of the students. This was promulgated as a response to the events of the Holocaust which Western jurists and law makers in general needed as judicial instrument to call to account perpetrators of unspeakable crime, But the concept of Human Rights evolved during the eighteenth century, when philosophers looked at the nature of society, the idea of the state as distinct from a kingdom or an empire, held together by a network of loyalties to the divinely ordained ruler. The feudal political structure of intertwined loyalties, rights and obligations had been disintegrating for some time, and was gradually replaced by the idea of the nation state and citizenship. Citizenship involves obligations such as paying taxes, serving in the armed forces, obeying the laws of the state, but it also involves the right to have a say in the governmental process, and the right to be protected and safeguarded against discrimination. There were three different references in one of last week's newspapers to Human Rights violation, all involved murder, violence, perhaps imprisonments, but their links to human rights violations were not clear. So I am not prepared to talk of Jewish children being forbidden from sitting on park benches or going to swimming pools as issues of human rights violations, because this would trivialize the issues underlying the Holocaust, nor treat the mass murder of people on an industrial scale as anything but a heinous crime because saying that killing someone deprives him of his human rights is simply bizarre. The definition of Human Rights is part of the fundamental principles that modern liberal enlightened Western civilization is based on and I am reluctant to deal in vague simplifications. The accurate, precise use of language is important for the understanding of the process that was the Holocaust.