 In the last lesson we talked about the many dimensions of human rights, and in this lesson we're going to go back to the first dimension and dive in a little bit deeper. The first dimension of human rights are civil and political. This means that these rights have to do with our liberty. If you remember from our first video, we talked about how the three dimensions of rights can be broken into the same sort of categories that we think about the French Revolution. If you think about these civil and political rights, and if you've seen some of the other videos that we've made here at Alversity about them, then you might know that civil and political rights are considered negative rights. Negative rights are hands-off rights. So this means that the organization or the country or whatever sort of group is involved has to keep their hands off of the people who are expressing these rights. You break them into the political and the civil. So the civil rights have to do with your sort of, I guess you could say, your life and safety have a little bit more to do with how you interact with society. And the political rights have to do with how you can exercise your, I guess your political and legal sort of rights. And on the political side we might maybe talk about things like the right to petition or the right to justice. So these are very practical things like being able to go to a court and be seen equally and fairly. Maybe something like freedom of association could be considered here or your freedom to assemble with whoever you feel fit to. So these political rights all have to do with that and they are really about exercising your rights as a citizen on a political and a political way. On the other side over here on the right we can talk about your civil rights which have a little bit more to do with things like your right to have original thoughts of your own or maybe your expression of those thoughts. Also have things like religion, so freedom of religion and also things like freedom of movement, for example. Now these rights are quite old. In a lot of ways these are the oldest set of rights as we sort of talk about them. And you might even recognize some of the ideas that we've discussed in some of the previous lessons because this actually kind of goes back to the days of the Magna Carta. And like we mentioned in that early video about the timeline, about the history of human rights Magna Carta was obviously for a very small group of people and these rights have very slowly unfolded over time to include a much larger group of people. But I would argue that we're not all the way there yet. Not everybody has their civil and political rights. But this is an old tradition, one that sort of starts there and moves all the way up through the French Declaration of Rights of Man, through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights which is really the most important document for this area. Really important to understand is that these rights have to do with your identity. So they're saying that just because you are a person with black skin or purple skin or because you're a man or a woman or anything like that, any way that you can divide your identity that just because you are that thing doesn't mean that you can't have all of these rights that we're talking about here. And that the obligation of the state and any organization working inside of it is to keep their hands off and allow you to express these rights. These rights are all about participation. They are all about people in society all having, paying their dues and therefore being able to participate fully and be completely recognized by all the institutions in that state. So not to be discriminated out because of your identity. Really important to this entire discussion before we move is that you'll notice this political and civil sort of tone to the entire dimension has a lot to do with citizenship. It's a really important idea. Because you have these rights it means that there is an obligation out there. And how this is now practiced at the moment is that these rights are generally enshrined as a part of your citizenship to a country or usually just to a country. There's very few other ways of dividing up society that we do this now. But as a citizen of maybe a country like Nigeria or maybe like Germany you have rights and that means that that country has obligations. And those obligations regard your political and civil rights and that is how those are expressed. So if you're a person without a citizenship well then you kind of in a way don't really have these rights because there's not necessarily a clear organization to give you those rights. Which is why Article 15 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks a little bit about or talks directly about citizenship. And why citizenship is such an important thing in the modern world. Now really quickly we're going to move over to a final, a real quick example of someone fighting for their rights in this area. And our civil rights hero for the day is Rosa Parks. Now I know if you are an American you've definitely heard of her before but if you're not you may have as well. Rosa Parks was a normal lady. I mean she was a member of an activist community which she was generally just a person who was working a 9-5 job and it was in the time of the civil rights movement. This is a time in the United States when people of color like herself, people with dark skin were becoming a strong political group that was sort of working and acting towards creating the rights that we're going to be talking about in this lesson. And you can see her here standing with another famous member of the civil rights community. I'm not sure if you recognize who that is but that is Martin Luther King. And now you can see her sitting here with her nice little jumper, smiling next to this famous good looking guy over here. And you can also see her down here getting arrested. Now why would that be? How did that happen? Well it was 1955 and she was heading home from work one day and the buses in the city that she was living in in Montgomery, Alabama were made or done in such a way, they were administered in such a way that people of color, so people with black skin like her, were required to get up when white people wanted to sit in those seats. This is because America had a very strange idea that white people were more valuable or white people had the right to sit in the seats and black people did not. Well this is all very arbitrary but in this case she decided on one day in 1955 that she was not going to do that. She would not get up, the bus driver called in the police and she was arrested. Now this is a moment when something really interesting happens. Something that we talk about once in a while in this intersection of civil rights and law. So we talked about law in the very first lesson. And here you have this moment when this very nice looking lady here is arrested by this, maybe this police officer, I'm not sure. And she asked the question, Rosa here, she asked the question, why do you always push us around? And the officer, some guy like this here, responds, I don't know but it is the law and you are under arrest. And here you see a very strange tension then and there's this space between law and human rights. In this moment in which we have to ask ourselves is the law respecting human rights? Is the law being fair? Well, in this case most people would agree that it was not. And really what Rosa was fighting in this moment was not necessarily for her seat. That was a big part of it obviously. But really more than that she was writing, or she was fighting, sorry not writing, she was fighting segregation. Segregation was this policy that was very big deal in the United States at that time and would be a big deal in lots of other places and kind of still is a big deal in other places. Where people of different racial backgrounds, so people, white people like this guy here and black people like this woman here, like Rosa, were basically held apart. Segregation means that you have a green person here and the yellow person here and society basically bids big wall between them. And this means things like people, the green people drinking from water fountains, they're different from the ones the yellow people do. And in buses it means that there is a green people section and the yellow people section. And that is really a sort of an idea that belongs to history at this point. But at this time that was not the case and that's what she was fighting. And really it's more than just about being separate but it's about equality. It's about being seen as being the same people no matter what color you are. Yellow, blue, green, black, white, doesn't matter. And this whole concept here, going back to civil rights, when you go back it has a lot to do with identity. If you think about it, this segregation is based on your identity. So it's based on what you look like, maybe what gender you are, lots of other things can be determined, sort of picked out as an individual trait that you have that makes you different from someone else. And then in some way worth segregating taking away certain rights or making you somehow different from others. And the civil rights movement or civil rights movements around the world are all about killing the segregation. Not the fighting of the segregation actually, we should just cross out the segregation. How will we do that? There we go, no more segregation. Alright, so that was your lesson on civil rights and political rights. We're going to move from this to the second dimension in the next video.