Youth Group Rallies Support for Human Rights

The Youth for Human Rights Chapter of Puebla, Mexico, champions human rights education and reform.

The city of Puebla in southeast Mexico is home to an active and dedicated Youth for Human Rights chapter—proud that for the past two years their leader was chosen to attend the Human Rights Youth Summit—in 2014 in Geneva, home of the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights, and in 2015 at U.N. headquarters in New York.

 

Bringing their campaign to Analco Park in the center of the city they collect signatures on human rights petition drives.

These volunteers are seriously concerned about the state of human rights in their country and the urgent need to create positive change.

The 2015 Human Rights Watch World Report cited Mexico for failure to diligently prosecute and put an end to enforced disappearances and torture. The current administration has acknowledged the serious abuses by Mexican security forces during President Calderon’s tenure with 22,000 people reported missing from 2006 to 2012. But they have “made little progress in prosecuting widespread killings, enforced disappearances, and torture committed by soldiers and police in the course of efforts to combat organized crime….”

In addition to petition drives and other human rights awareness events, Youth for Human Rights Puebla conducts workshops in schools and campaigns to make human rights education mandatory in all Mexico schools.

Youth for Human Rights is an educational initiative supported by the Church of Scientology. Scientologists on six continents partner with government agencies and nongovernmental organizations to bring about broad-scale awareness and implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world’s premier human rights document.