Programme 1

Programme Outline

A class on citizenship in a Plymouth school is dramatically interrupted. Armed men in uniform burst into the room to seize one of the students, Pete. He is dragged brutally from the classroom, stripped naked and held in a cell. 'They can't do that, can they, Sir?' asks one of the students.

Jill Morrell begins to discuss what human rights are. Scratched on a prison wall we see the names of some of the many countries where violations of human rights take place: Libya, the Philippines, Mali, Iraq, Liberia, Cuba, Korea, and so on. Should the UK be added to the list? Students introduce three recent Amnesty International cases of young victims of human rights violations, and mime the incidents described: an Algerian schoolgirl is shot dead by Islamic militants for not covering her face with a veil, a Guatemalan street child is murdered by police, and a Turkish girl of 12 is tortured.

What are human rights? We see shocking archive film from the end of the Second World War, of the Holocaust and the liberation of Belsen.

We see Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt introducing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN in 1948 to try and ensure that such events are never repeated, with hopes of a new world order of justice and peace.

But human rights violations by governments against their own people did not stop in 1948. Kate Adie discusses the massacre of hundreds of unarmed young Chinese protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. We see the victims of 'ethnic cleansing' fleeing from Bosnia in 1995.

The programme introduces us to people taking action against some recent human rights abuses in the UK: the men wrongly jailed for 17 years for the murder of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater; the mother of Joy Gardner who died after her arrest and gagging by the police; a gay youth campaigning against the unequal age of consent; the Friends of John McCarthy; and a young girl who was bullied at school.