Each of this year’s five finalists for the Young People’s Human Rights Medal are passionate about their work and dedicated to bringing about positive changes in their communities and beyond.
Not surprisingly, their plans and aspirations don’t just stop with the work they are doing now. Yen, Prudence, Justice, Adam and Drisana all have clear goals they would like to achieve in the years ahead of them.
Yen’s dream is of a future where there will be greater understanding of how identity and inequality can be experienced as an intersection of a number of different factors – reflecting the complexity of individuals rather than the one size fits all definitions we have leant on in the past.
“Sometimes it’s not good enough to assume that the people that you advocate for are experiencing one type of marginalisation when in fact there may be many layers of structural marginalisation caused by overlapping identities...
“In other words, when human rights groups… recognise that the experiences of being a woman, intersects strongly with the experiences of not being white, or the experiences or being a queer woman... In lots of ways human rights work can have value added to it when people make those links.”
Prudence wants to graduate from her law degree and use the experiences she is gaining now as a human rights campaigner to support young people back in her home country of Chad.
“I will be a voice for those that do not have a voice,” she says, with a confidence and authority well beyond her years.
Justice, who has recently finished high-school, plans to study law, while continuing her work around mental illness awareness. She is certainly not shy about saying where her long term ambitions lay:
“My ultimate, absolute goal… is to become Australia’s first Indigenous female Prime Minister.”
Like Justice, Adam is interested in mental health but wants to tackle it in a different way – by having mental illness recognised in school curriculums across the country. He believes a greater knowledge of the warning signs of depression will go a long way towards eliminating stigma and increasing mental health recovery amongst adolescents.
“I am not going to be able to reach every young person, but if I can be a part of changing the curriculum… then I know that every single child will have a better chance,” he says.
And Drisana says she will continue to fight for the removal of the negative stigmas surrounding Auslan in the broader community and the right for Deaf children and their families to access Auslan (Australian Sign Language), from birth.
“This is a human right that has been denied to so many children in Australia who then grow up to be linguistically and cognitively delayed,” she says.
“Don't we want all Deaf children in Australia to succeed and to ensure their well-being?”
Despite their different areas of campaigning, what Drisana, Justice, Adam, Prudence and Yen share is a commitment to improving social justice in their communities and beyond, as well as the optimism and determination to make that happen.
As Drisana says, “The time is now, and it is only when we work together, that we can bring about a better future for Australia sooner than expected.”
The Human Rights Commission will present the annual Human Rights Awards on December 10 at a lunch at the Westin Hotel in Sydney.
Commission president Professor Triggs will deliver a key-note speech on the future of Human Rights in Australia. Tickets available online.
