On the 11 December 2012 the OHCHR Regional Office for Europe, along with its partners - the European External Action Service, the United Nations Regional Information Centre, The International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva and the BOZAR fine arts centre – continued the tradition launched in 2009 of holding a joint event to commemorate Human Rights Day in the form of a film screening followed by a panel debate.

“My voice counts – inclusion and the right to participate in public life”. The focus was on those articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which provide for the right to freedom of assembly and association, the right to take part in elections, in public life and decision-making institutions and the right to freedom of expression and opinion. Many groups of people around the world continue to be disenfranchised be they women, people with disabilities, individuals belonging to minorities and indigenous peoples, the poor, those with little or no education or remote rural communities.

The organizers were particularly honoured to screen the Belgian premiere of Pablo Larraín’s film “No”, winner of the Art Cinema Award at Cannes, about the opposition’s campaign during the 1988 plebiscite in Chile on whether Augusto Pinochet was to be granted an additional 8-year term as President. The film stars Gael Garcia Bernal as Rene Saveedra, a young advertising executive who is part of the team that creates a series 15 minute films for the opposition shown on 27 days leading up to the plebiscite – the so-called “NO” campaign.

In the ensuing debate moderated by journalist and writer Catherine Vuylsteke, panelists spoke of their own experiences of fighting for the right to participate in public life or on behalf of disenfranchised communities and what is needed to spur people on to have their voice heard. Eugenio García, creative director of the original “No” campaign (and the person on whom the character of Rene Saveedra is loosely based) said that “the dominant emotions in Chile under Pinochet were rage and fear. The task of the “No” campaign had been to transform these into a more positive emotion thus placing it outside the paradigm of the dictatorship.”

“Time and time again in political struggles there is a contest between hope and fear”, said Reed Brody, Counsel and Spokesperson for Human Rights Watch in Brussels. In his words, what had been extraordinary during the Chilean plebiscite was having a campaign that built on people’s hopes for the future rather than fears of the past.

Other panelists included Karel Kovanda, former student leader of the 1968-69 student movement in Czechoslovakia and Jessika Devlieghere co-director of the Palestinian Circus School in Ramallah. Mr Kovanda recalled Václav Havel’s famous example of the greengrocer who puts up a sign in his window saying “workers of the world unite” because that’s what’s expected of him by the regime - and how not putting up such a sign would be a small way of not going along with the regime and would be “adding one grain of sand to the opposition”. Jessika Devlieghere spoke of her work with young Palestinians: “The first stage of giving people hope is reconnecting people with themselves and with the belief that they can take the future into their own hands.”

If there was one overarching message that emerged from the debate it was of the importance of hope in any struggle for rights.