Although only a few of us who embarked on the journey to Bologna are enrolled in the Global Politics course, we all truly feel that both our academic and miscellaneous knowledge has been enriched by the passionate activists we met and the engaging lectures we were offered. From the Amnesty seminar to the innovative podcasts we crafted ourselves, we can conclude that our outlook on human rights has not only been magnified and broadened; but enhanced and elevated. This trip could not have arrived at a more timely occasion, as we are currently studying human rights in Global Politics, and now had the opportunity to tune in on the very words of the NGOs mentioned everyday in class. We thus wanted to share the connections we were able to draw between our prior and newly acquired knowledge in relation to human rights in this article!
We, the fortunate few who were selected to travel to Bologna, felt blessed to be granted as much free time as we were by our teachers. This is when we truly got to roam around the busy streets of the picturesque city, and as we were, we realized the liberty we had been endowed with. Liberty is one of the fundamental concepts of the human rights unit, which many constitutions, from the French to the American, have their spirits rooted in. Few are able to truly embrace the free-minded, liberated and flourishing state us humans were born to embody, but through the engaging and inspiring activities we were assigned with, we felt that we were given the chance to espouse the values presented to us by Amnesty and Emergency, and then create something of our own with it. This is perhaps what true liberty, in its purest and most candid form, feels like - namely being able to express one’s thoughts and be an Active Citizen of Tomorrow (which is the very title of our Erasmus+ project).
From the lectures we attended, two examples brought up by the Amnesty and Emergency representatives stuck out the most to us. Firstly, the Amnesty spokesperson emphasizing the connection between freedom of speech and police officers wearing full-body work attire, was one aspect we had never considered before. The representative explained that in countries where this is occurring, ranging from MEDCs such as Belgium and Italy to LEDCs, the police officers have an unproportionate amount of power in regards to the average citizen. Power is also a rudimentary key term in Global Politics, which is defined as the ability to produce an outcome according to one’s liking. Here, freedom of speech is confined as it is nearly impossible to hold an anonymous police officer, with their face completely covered, accountable in cases of, for example, police brutality. This also reminded us who take Higher Level Economics of asymmetric information, as the police officer is able to identify and record the personal information of the citizen, whereas the civilian is only able to recall, at best, the nametag on the officer’s uniform. We have also been taught that in a democracy, scrutiny of the government by the press and citizens is essential in order for checks and balances to function properly. The allowing for officers to wear face-covering work attire is thus problematic in terms of several key characteristics of a basic democracy, such as the right to protest and scrutinize the government.
Secondly, the Amnesty spokesperson brought up Hungary and Poland’s violation of the right to protest. In Global Politics class, we have been discussing the undermining of both countries’ democratic processes as a result of the Hungarian populist leader Viktor Orbán and Poland’s respectively populist ones Beata Szydlo, Mateus Mirawiecki and Andrzej Duda. It was thus very instructive to encounter new case studies, relevant to the ones we have been introduced to in class. Hungary and Poland have namely both, perhaps deliberately, kept their COVID-ban on the assembly of large groups. This severely limits the right to protest, which we were taught that the Bolognese value greatly as the city is renowned for its universities where aspirational and ambitious young students have a long tradition of speaking up against injustices they face in everyday life, and ones they witness in the international media. The human rights violations were thus brought up in a light different from anything we had been encountered with before, as the atmosphere in Bologna had been bestowed with the essence of activism and, of course, right to protest.
In conclusion, we feel that although our textbooks and teachers in the IB-programme are of utmost excellent quality, that little extra grain of inspiration is needed to truly usher the students into creating their minds of their own. This, to us, was that little grain of inspiration, much like the Youth Companies (UF-företagen) are to the students of Åva.
Written by: Tilda Jonsson
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