Announcements

Date Published: 10 December 2022

Dignity, Freedom and Justice for All

As Social Workers, human rights are fundamental to our practice and both our personal and professional values. We have often been drawn to social work because of deeply held beliefs that every human holds inherent worth, and all are entitled to live lives of dignity, freedom and justice. Yet we too often witness situations where these rights are exploited or ignored.

One of our professional values is kotahitanga. This is about building a sense of community, solidarity and collective action for social change, challenging injustice and oppression in all its forms. We reflect upon kotahitanga today, being International Human Rights Day, and how the concept of human rights is so commonly thought about in terms of individual and human-centred rights rather than collective rights of whānau, hapū, iwi, hapori, considering what our tūpuna have given us and Papatūānuku and Ranginui as the givers of life. It is when individual human rights take priority that oppression, entitlement, and exploitation have occurred. We must remember these injustices to prevent them from happening again.

We as social workers recognise the importance of collective rights within this discourse which prioritises individual. It is in this context that we strive towards achieving whānau ora for all, including our global community, and tino rangatiratanga for tangata-ō te whenua here in Aotearoa. We would like to see a world where kotahitanga around human rights recognises both individual and collective rights, the rights of humans and the rights of all living things and our environment in which we are so interdependent. All deserve dignity, freedom and justice.