Team Herald

MARGAO: “Human Rights is a misnomer and should actually be called Humanitarian Rights as they are rights accruing by virtue of being a human being,” said Adv Jagdish Prabhudessai speaking as a chief guest at a seminar on Human Rights at Margao, on Sunday.

He said humanity should not lose faith in the goodness of mankind even though the human rights challenges are immense given the fact that human being violates human rights of others. He pointed out that humans are expected to behave like human beings with others.

Pointing out that a human being is neither independent nor dependent upon others, he said, they are interdependent and therefore it was time that the society makes a corrupt person feel ashamed of his deeds and that instead of rewarding them, they should be punished.

Speaking on “Women’s position in Human Rights,” Dr Sneha Bhagwat lamented that women are women’s biggest enemy and pointed out by treating a girl child differently a mother conditions the girl child from her childhood itself to be meek and humble instead of free and independent.

She stressed the need to build up confidence in women, particularly, in a girl right from the young age. “Why should a woman fight for her right and not claim it as her privilege?” she asked pointing out that it was indeed a tragedy that even today a woman has to fight for her rights.

Claiming that many rights are denied to women by the society, she pointed out to the lack of toilet facilities for women at workplaces and denial of mandatory working conditions including leave for pregnant women as some examples.

Giving another example, she said, while it is acceptable for a boy to come home late from work, when a girl does the same she becomes a topic for gossip and bad mouthing thereby being forced to give up a career just because of wagging tongues.

Prof Dr Bernard Rodrigues, with the help of a power point presentation, put up a case of how corruption is a violation of human rights and said it was unfortunate that India is ranked as the 87th corrupt country in the world.

He suggested that setting up special courts aimed at speedily dealing with corruption cases could be one effective way of tackling corruption and referred to neighbouring China that has dealt with corruption with an iron hand to curtail it.

Initiating the seminar, Diogo da Costa, president of All Goa Senior Citizens’ Federation, Margao, listed out the ways in which human rights of elderly people are violated, very often by their children. He appealed to senior citizens to contact their office for any help.

While lauding the Goa government for giving a lot of monetary aid to senior citizens, he however lamented that the bureaucrats drag their feet in dealing with cases of senior citizens. He said that while the law mandates such cases to be decided within four months, there are cases dragging on for 15 months and more and appealed to the government to direct the bureaucrats to dispose the senior citizens’ cases speedily.