Dignity at the Heart of Human Rights: Lessons from Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Annie Bright [00:00:05]:
Hey, everybody, this is Annie Bright from the Journeys Project, and you're listening to the Human Rights interview series where I sat down with professionals and experts in human rights to better understand what human rights are and what human rights advocacy can look like in various professional fields. In this episode, Chidi Orinkalu, human rights activist, lawyer and professor of practice at the Fletcher School, breaks down what human rights are, how the concept evolves over time, and who he believes is involved in human rights advocacy.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:00:40]:
Well, I don't know what version of the journey you want me to share, but I am Nigerian and I grew up in Nigeria. I was born into internal displacement in Nigeria during the Nigerian Civil War. And that quite substantially shaped my trajectory between being born in internal displacement and beginning life, at least my earliest memories, into military rule. That wasn't particularly comforting. I think my choices are pretty much made for me. By the time I was in high school, it was clear that this was not a sustainable path. I qualified as a lawyer shortly before I turned 20, which generally I don't recommend to anybody, you know, but it, it was a useful tool for purposes of trying to do work in civil liberties, supporting the protest movements against the military or being part of the protest movement against the military. So my initial journey began in domestic civil liberties work really at Nigeria, which easily melded into pro democracy work, civic participation work, because you needed to keep beating away at the constraints that the soldiers placed on civic participation and your rights as citizen.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:01:55]:
And that naturally kind of melded as well into domestic human rights work. And then you could not do domestic human rights work without also seeking and cultivating international solidarity. And so there was a natural logic to all of that, from protest movements to civic building to human rights and constituency building for human rights, which then thematically led to international human rights work. But then I became exiled at 23 to the UK because of all of that, which didn't just crystallize that transition or that body of relationships, but meant that it cemented it. And so in the United Kingdom, I worked to support the Nigerian pro democracy movement and human rights movements, but also to then help to shape that across the African continent in the early 90s in a place called the International center for the Legal Protection of Human Rights. I also then did further studies, took my PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in public international law, and the two streams came together. I've subsequently worked in too many other things in philanthropy with the Open Society foundation, setting up their legal work in Africa, and also domestically at the end of exile, going Back to Nigeria to lead the recomposition of Nigeria's National Human Rights Commission. A lot has happened, of course, in between going in a lot of different institutions before taking on the current stint.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:03:40]:
I'm the grandson of teachers and the son of teachers, and really there are few jobs in the world as satisfying as teaching, to be perfectly honest with you. And so I didn't want to pop my clogs without having to really invest time in teaching. So that's how I've ended up here.

Annie Bright [00:04:00]:
Exile took you into the uk, and after that you worked and researched around human rights issues at every level, international, national, local levels. And I was curious, what are the largest differences approaching human rights at those various levels from the language that you used, the objectives that you're seeking to achieve with your work?

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:04:21]:
Obviously there are differences. Working at human rights from 30,000ft or working at them from ground level. Some of my earliest work involved things I would probably not wish to do today, which was work on extrajudicial execution, executions in the late 80s, but mostly into the early 90s, basically picking up dead bodies from different places, executed by police and security services in different parts of Nigeria's commercial capital in Lagos. And so then again, connected with prisons and detention centers. At the international level, I don't have to do that. The immediacy of having to do exhumations and all of that mobility that comes with it, you're spared. And so I guess you transition from somewhere between advocacy and service probation because it involves a mixture of both to more concentrated intellectual work, research work, strategy work at the international level. So, for instance, at the national level, you know, you could go to litigate a case of prolonged pretrial detention or a case of asylum, for instance, and you're representing someone who doesn't have money to go home, right? Or money to take transport, to come to work, to get a rail card to come to the court.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:05:42]:
And so your first order of business is not necessarily to begin to advance very highfalutin arguments about law or rights. It is actually the practical matter of how the person comes to your venue and. And whether or not they eat. And those basic things are not things that human rights workers take seriously. And when I transitioned into philanthropy, I found that rather curious because we had security guards and we were able to provide food for our staff, but the security guards were provided by independent contractors. And my colleagues did not see the need for the security guards to be fed. And so we were eating, but the security guards were not eating. We're not getting the food that we were getting.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:06:31]:
And I found that both offensive and difficult to take because these were your first line of defense. And the first thing you do, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of self protection, is to make sure that they are properly fed and cutted for indignity. I mean, dignity is so fundamental to the human rights enterprise, to advocacy, to protection, to enforcement, to compliance, to everything, that we have to learn to live it. Because if we don't live it, you cannot preach it. So, you know, it took my deciding I will not eat unless these people eat for us to find the budgets, to make sure that the security guards were fed at that level. In terms of language, as you pose the question, the biggest thing in my view and experience is example. We cannot just preach human rights without making the effort to imbibe it as a way of life, as an exemplar. Because when you do that, you will recruit people who defend exactly that example.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:07:37]:
They see, even if they don't understand that it isn't the universal declaration of Human Rights. You may not have to do that in the international sphere because the challenges may be different. But at the local level, at the granular level, at the community level, at the national level, that for me is critical. And again, when I was the chair of the National Human Rights Commission, that struck me. I mean, the day after I was appointed chair of the National Human Rights Commission, you know, basically it's the equivalent of a senior appellate justice in the United States. I decided to go to the offices of the National Human Rights Commission to find out what they were like. And so I wore a sweatshirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of slippers. And I took an ordinary taxi and headed there.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:08:26]:
And I required a taxi to stop me some distance from the place. And then I walked in my pair of flip flops to the offices and the security guards would not allow me in. They wanted to know where I worked, what I was doing. And I told them I was unemployed and just needed their help, the help of somebody in the place and invented a problem with unemployment. And they would not allow me to get into the place. So I kind of confectioned contretemps between the people at the gate. And it was while that was evolving that somebody who knew me from the place came out and he went to the security guards, don't you know this is our new chairman? And so instantaneously their attitude changed. But at that point I'd learned what I needed to learn.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:09:13]:
He told me that the culture of the place needed to be changed. And if you don't have that culture at the front desk at the gate, then there is a problem. So it is that service provision, practice, example, pastoral side of human rights work. I think that the international side probably doesn't do as well.

Annie Bright [00:09:37]:
Well, I guess this is a good time to ask a very simple question. Would you mind providing us with some kind of working definition of human rights for this conversation? Just an easy little softball question.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:09:51]:
I'm not even going to try to do that because I think whatever definition I gave will probably not work. Rather than give a definition, I'd probably try some illustration. I like to use the language of information and computing and computer technology and the distinction between hardware and software. This is our hardware, you know, we come created with a physical hardware infrastructure. You know, one head, two ears and eyes, skeleton, the dermatological dimensions and then our lower extremities and all of that. But that's a shell for the most part. What makes us tech is a software, an intangible. And that intangible is defined in my view, by a sense of dignity.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:10:49]:
Human life is a dignitarian project. And that dignity has different component to has a substantive side, it has a social side, it's got a process side, depending on the situation you find yourself in. I don't know whether you've got siblings, but if you do and you are in a fight with your sibling, for instance, and then somebody comes in and starts smacking you or starts telling you of, without asking you what transpired, without giving you the opportunity to say your side of what transpired, you do feel heard, you do feel agreed. That is a procedural side. Just the entitlement to be heard and rights at the end of the day are about entitlements and expectations. An entitlement to be treated fairly, to be treated as a human with dignity, irrespective of who you are, where you come from. The idea, for instance, that we infantilize across the board, and particularly Victorian civilization, infantilized women a lot and that we have created a culture universally across the world of that, so that the expectations of the female of the species are still very limited. It sounds so long ago, but in 1871, wasn't it, or 1872, the US Supreme Court decided that the place of the woman was in the kitchen and in the bedroom in Bradley and Illinois.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:12:17]:
And of course, the legal profession in the United kingdom only marked 100 years. The centenary of the enrollment of the first woman in 2019. This is not ancient history. That's just the end of the First World War. Right. So that entitlement to a software that is viable, that enables you to live life to the fullest, optimize your capabilities, in my view, is what human rights are about. But it's not frozen in time. It is a dynamic process, it's an iterative process.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:12:51]:
The frontiers of attainment and expectation must continue to evolve and evolve positively. Otherwise if we freeze them in time, then that is not human rights. You know, that's a graveyard, right? That's why I'm not keen to, to define human rights. Because the content of those rights or the expectations that people had at the turn of the 19th century, when Queen Victoria was alive, is different from the expectations that people have now. And the expectations that people have now. And what would give people dignity at this particular time must be different from what will give someone dignity in 120 years time. There is an intertemporal dimension therefore, to the content of human rights. And they've got to continue to evolve positively.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:13:41]:
But at the end of the day, in my view, nothing makes for human rights that does not embody dignity. That's really the way I understand it.

Annie Bright [00:13:54]:
One thing I'm interested in is that aspect of human rights that have either taken away or not respected, that's when they're demanded. And it seems as if that's when that evolution happens. Is that violation necessary, required for that kind of continuing evolution that you're mentioning? Or do you think it's possible to have the kind of evolution that we've seen in the past hundred years without the violations of those rights being at the center of that evolution?

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:14:25]:
I think we need both. I don't think we have to wait for people to be abused before we recognize that they have rights, whether as a state or as a community, or as a family, or as a learning community, or as anything. For instance, we don't have to wait for people to be landless before we recognize that shelter is essential to the well being of the human being. And that landlessness conduces people to an absence of shelter and indeed absence of food or lack of access to nutritional. Obviously you test rights in a particular way at the point of contact with violation. But that point of contact with violation presumes the existence of two other things. One is the existence of a cognitive threshold of the spectacles to recognize violation. The other is the existence of capability, a capability to mobilize assistance or protest.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:15:23]:
Now some people lack both. Some people are unable to recognize when they are violated for whatever the reasons may be, and may also be unable to mobilize help for that some other people lack. One invariably is the capability side, that even if they recognize that they have been violated, they are unable to mobilize our systems or help. And being able to do both is essential to an effective enjoyment of rights and to being able to push those frontiers across the generations. And I think as advocates or people interested in rights, we do have an obligation to continue, in particular to address those two deficits, the cognitive deficit and the capability deficit, in my view. I think those are the two things that advocates must continue to do without fail.

Annie Bright [00:16:22]:
Since the holder of human rights are humans without qualifiers, why does it seem that we predominantly see human rights in our policies and political conversations in the position of the underdog? For example, when we see human rights in the news, it's in the context of a violation, often at the systemic level. And advocates for human rights are having to argue that the behavior is not justified, instead of the people violating or the systems that are violating those rights having to fight to continue justifying the system. Perhaps as loudly. Does that seem more just like a.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:16:55]:
Pessimistic perspective, but that could reflect limitations or constraints of communication or the reportorialism tendencies, because, you know, compliance probably doesn't make news in many ways. Sometimes it may make a magazine program, a news feature program, but generally it doesn't make great news because it's not outlandish enough that people are doing things the way they're supposed to be done, or that people are doing right. Examples, as the journalists like to say, man bites dog is news, dog bites man is no news. So in many ways, I think this may be a case of man bites dog, but in my view, nevertheless, protection of human rights should not be about making news. It should actually be about normalizing some of these things. It should be about normalizing balanced social life, and it should be about normalizing human dignity. So the fact that Alexandria in South Africa, for instance, is this shanty town or this hovel comprising nearly 1 million humans in like 1 square kilometer of aluminum roofing shades, who nevertheless have to go and service all of these big and comfortable families every day, should make us pause to think, why do we allow this to happen? But because we've normalized that, nobody really takes it as news anymore. And yet it should be news.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:18:32]:
So my take is that human rights shouldn't be just about performatives, you know, about creating optics. As important as optics can sometimes be, it should really be about things more important than just the optics of what is reported or what is not reported. And I don't think we should allow the contemporary fads of journalism of the day to preclude a bigger, a fuller appreciation of what the issues should be.

Annie Bright [00:19:02]:
What kind of solutions, or maybe barriers to be overcome. Do you see in making the concept of human rights and this normalization of ensuring human rights and a living of dignity for people who don't consider themselves human rights experts or don't consider themselves as having power to improve those situations or to adopt more dignity centered treatment of other human beings.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:19:30]:
Yeah, I see the power dimension, particularly when we're dealing with political rights to human rights, whether it's the right to vote or the right to protest, particularly in a political context. Those are very important civic rights. But I think human rights are a lot more than that. And I still don't know anyone yet who doesn't do human rights actually. It's just that again, many people don't have the cognitive spectacles to recognize that that's what they're doing. Take a teacher for instance. And lots of teachers don't see themselves as human rights advocates. But few jobs involve as much exposure to human rights advocacy and human rights practice as teaching, particularly basic education into high school.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:20:13]:
You're nurturing a mind whose future is entirely in your hand. You can destroy it, you can shape it positively, you can shoot it up with steroids and make the kid fly. You can give this kid wings and tell the kid you will not fall down, you know the world is your oyster. Or you can tell this kid you will never get anywhere. This is the ceiling of your attainment. You can make this kid feel loved. You can make this kid feel like they are not up to anything in life and they are third class human beings. All of that is in the hands of a teacher.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:20:52]:
And how the teacher approaches that is a human rights enterprise full time. But most people don't recognize that. Or indeed take a faith leader who goes to church or who goes to the mosque, whether you are an imam or a pastor. And all they are saying is all you women here you are adulterers and all you women here you are third class citizens. And all you have to do is you are slaves to these men. And the women who come to worship are eating up all of this because they believe that the faith leader is the person whom they have to listen to. And meanwhile all the person is doing is setting them up for a life of perpetual bondage and being victims of discrimination. You take a medical doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, every one of these, particularly the liberal vocations are involved in rights protection, or you take a judge who goes to court to collect bribes before deciding a case, or who decides a case because they are interested in the families of the party and they're no one family and they don't know the other family.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:22:05]:
Or indeed, as parents, we're bringing up our children and we give the guys a different range of skills from the skills that we give to the women. And you know, in the part of the world I come from, in a lot of Africa, families, we bring up their sons with a different set of skills. And you see boys who grow up without being able to do anything because they've been brought up with a sense of entitlement and privilege to believe that the women exist to clean up after them, to wash up after them, to make their lives meaningful and to make up for all the things that their families have not done for them. Basically, they are going to engage a slave whose name is woman as long as they exist. Parents, in my view, are first line human rights workers. And once we take on that role of parenting, we've got to learn to wire our children with a set of basic values that then makes the job on business and enterprise and vocation of human rights much easier to translate going down the road. So I'm yet to see a vocation that doesn't really fully actively involve the protection and articulation of rights. And that's probably why the question is a little difficult for me to deal with.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:23:24]:
I do think, therefore, the part of our charge for those who are interested and involved in rights is to make that part of the lifestyle of people. For me, human rights is about a way of living. So it's a value system really. Before it is a course in a university.

Annie Bright [00:23:46]:
Are there any skills or tools or mantras or reminders that you recommend that you think are important to broaden that cognitive capacity to recognize human rights around you in the normal world. I know for parents you're in the middle of cleaning a dirty diaper and certainly you're not thinking, I am a human advocate because, you know, I think there's something to be said about the omnipresence of human rights advocacy.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:24:16]:
No, for me, I think there is everything to be said about it and there's a huge benefit to it, particularly in the family space, for instance, you know, lots of guys, we don't ever take a role in the lives of our kids until it's too late. And then, you know, we are going downhill in our lives and we discover we don't have any relationship with our children because we were brought up with a sense of privilege to believe that taking a role in the life of your child is the fate of a sissy, right? And that's how you're dismissed for actually investing in protecting yourself. Because for me, that's really what it is. Because the human life is a bell curve, right? It's a normal distribution curve. You come up that way, you go up and then you go downhill, and then you're off. So you build up on this side of the bell curve the benefits and entitlements, whether it's pensions or relationships, that then tide you over when the winter of your life comes. But if you've not built up those investments, then of course there's nothing for you to profit from A plunder. Those times when natural destitution comes in as a result of the withering of just natural transitions in, in human life.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:25:34]:
So that's the first thing that. For me, the first justification for rights, defense and rights values in life, and the first thing I try to imbue in people is self protection and self interest. The second thing is dignity. I can't repeat that often enough. So whether it is for the theologically minded people do unto others, or just the idea that dignity begins from regarding other people as being entitled to exactly the same things that you are entitled, that is the basis for advocacy for human rights. And you know, as I tried to say in class, it's more than a course, international human rights law. It's really about something bigger than passing an examination, because passing an examination is the easy part.

Annie Bright [00:26:28]:
Well, if someone is either beginning their professional life or already professionally experienced and looking to pivot in the interest of centering human rights in their work, are there any recommendations that you have for them from your experience, both your lived experience, but also as you've witnessed other people in the human rights professional space.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:26:50]:
Throughout your career, I actually do think that you need a little bit of experience, worldliness, to optimize life in representing other people, in taking on other people's causes. I probably was very lucky that I did have mentors in different parts of life, professionally, personally and in. In so many other ways who were able to hold my hand and guide me through those early years. But in terms of trying to do rights work now, rather than when, for instance, people like me got in, because we didn't have a roadmap actually, we didn't have any major loop, any recognized lodestars as such, when I got into this area, other than I knew from about 1213 that I wanted to do social justice work in some way. I was pretty clear about that to the point that I had an argument with my dad about it at dinner table and he ejected me from the dinner table because he thought that my manners had become bad, that I was talking back at my father over dinner. So I had absolute clarity about that. Now, I don't think most people would have that level of clarity or that level of insouciance, as a matter of fact, at that age for that purpose. And I do think that an early contact with some people who do this kind of work or who are involved in social justice would not be useless.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:28:28]:
Let me put it that way. And it doesn't have to be defined as human rights, whether it is local support work to migrants groups or children's groups, or shelters for battered women, or support group for a local LGBTQ IQ community. Those things that are not just about self gratification, those things where you learn exposure to how the other in quotes lives, I think those things do matter because you learn skills. And in learning those skills you also do a second thing, which is build networks. And I do think it is important to build networks, both networks of knowledge and networks of empathy. Invariably people like to build networks of attainment in a role, the network that will give me what I want, when I want it, how I want it. But the problem with networks of attainment, networks of end result, is they're never really that constant. The networks that actually will be there for you and will give you attainment are networks that you did not seek to build for attainment, but that prove themselves when you then need to attain particular goals because they know that you fit the bill.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:29:45]:
And building those networks, I think, can begin early. As you begin to do that, the cognitive spectacles will arrive and you can then thirdly begin to equip yourself with a substantive knowledge and skill with which to profit from the aggression of goodwill of other things that you have built over time. I think it's also a point I've made that human rights has been somewhat over legalized. And the idea of increasingly is that if you don't have a J.D. and if you're not enrolled to practice in the D.C. or New York bar particularly, you cannot do human rights. I find that just unprofitable. The fact of the matter is you can see that with Physicians for Human Rights, for instance, a lot of doctors are doing excellent work, nurses are doing excellent work, teachers are doing a heck of a lot of work on human rights education, for instance, you have all manner of people working on housing rights in different parts of the world.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:30:45]:
Both lawyers and non lawyers are working on migration issues. And it's not just refugee rights, it is the protection of migrant workers, women who are being exploited and sexploited as migrant workers. So howsoever you look at it, I don't think that not having legal skills at whatever part of the normal distribution curve of life, that not having legal skills should preclude someone from being involved or interested. Theologians as well. There are lots of theologians who are doing exceptional work in human rights and social justice. And as a matter of fact, liberation theology in Latin America was a fusion of human rights and social justice and theology. And some of the greatest work in human rights has been done by families. So if you look at Argentina, just as an example, the mothers of Plaza del Mayo changed the face of human rights advocacy in Argentina just by advocating for their children who have been disappeared by the military.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:31:51]:
And they created an entire genre in human rights advocacy. And they did it not because they were lawyers, but because they were mothers. They felt it and they could articulate it in ways that no other person could. And if you look through the history of social justice and human rights advocacy, the two places where the last redoubt of rights advocacy are two places, the courts and faith houses. Most people, when every other thing fails them, go back into faith houses. Of course, the thing with faith houses is that they've not always been welcoming to people who are not of their faith. But increasingly now many of them are able to do so. But even if it is not a faith house, you do need belief in something, not necessarily God or a higher being.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:32:47]:
You can be belief in another human being. It can be belief in human dignity. It can be belief in non discrimination affirmation of something intangible to drive your conviction to be able to stand firm. And I think that affirmation of an underlying conviction, together with the networks and the substantive skill at troika, is really what we've got to encourage people to acquire.

Annie Bright [00:33:15]:
It makes it feel not only very attainable for everybody, but also hearing that trajectory that you laid out makes all the efforts feel very connected. So it feels very doable. And the way you describe it describes as a much less individual fight for human rights as opposed to just joining a collective slow rolling ball, picking up people as it goes.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:33:37]:
So that that's how I see it, that that's how I've experienced it as well.

Annie Bright [00:33:44]:
Well, as a closing question, so I don't take up your whole afternoon, which I Will is, I would love it if you could share what you think the world would look like at any level, or each level, if you feel like that's tackleable through some broad description. But what would it look like if one, policies or life were rooted in this idea of dignity and promotion of human rights first? Or maybe two, whichever you feel more inclined to answer. What would the day to day for an individual look like if they had the cognitive capability and the capacity to implement human rights understanding and advocacy like you've described?

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:34:30]:
I'll give you a very selfish answer. I am male. And the male of the species is predicted to die on the average somewhere between three to five years earlier than the female of the species of the same age. Why do men die before women of their age? It's invariably because they think they are some champions of something. And in a lot of these societies you feel you've got to provide this and you've got to provide that and you've got to do this and you've got to do that. When, as a matter of fact, if you shed the burdens, both genders live more fulfilled life and a more companionable life. And therefore both genders would have a better life. If guys could just accept that we are all equal, we may not have to die earlier than women of our age, we would live longer.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:35:30]:
That for me, is just one basic personal thing. This is my own thesis. If we diminished gender discrimination or sex discrimination against women, the biggest profiteers will be men. It's really that simple. So if people understand it this way, it may be much easier to convince guys to say, you know what? Stop being an idiot. That's my view. Okay? Now. And it's possible to illustrate this with so many other things and in so many other ways.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:36:10]:
How, for instance, disrespect for human dignity or for political rights leads to political instability in a lot of countries. Or the fact that politicians are stealing hospitals and stealing schools, entire hospital districts and schools are putting in their pockets or financing bank accounts in foreign countries. The fact that they're doing that is undermining their capability to provide for themselves as human beings. And so when a president of the United States, a former president, is about to die, he will die in the United States. When Nelson Mandela was about to die, he died with an estate valued at less than $5 million in South Africa. But when the president of Angola, which currently is the largest oil producing country in Africa, was to die, he went to Spain to die. And when he finished dying in Spain, they needed a court order they needed a lot of contentious litigation to be able to procure his body and return it back to Angola. If he had built hospitals and protected access to healthcare in Angola, he would not have suffered the indignity of dying in a foreign land and of having his body returned to Angola in the cargo hold of a foreign airline.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:37:35]:
That for me sums up this whole human rights thing. You can translate it howsoever you want. But you see that the politicians and the political leaders who are unwilling to protect the right of education of their people end up sending their children to foreign school and profiting foreign land. And the children for whom they are stealing the funds of their countries often don't ever return to the countries as full fledged integrated citizens of those countries. Many of them invariably then become citizens of foreign countries. Is that really why you were stealing all those funds and denying your people access to basic entitlements and basic rights and basic dignities? I don't know. But that's the way I approach it that there is ultimately rational self interest in providing for, working for a world in which rights are better protected for everyone.

Annie Bright [00:38:32]:
It sounds like there's kind of two points in there. One, that the violation or disrespect of human dignity and human rights is very stressful detriment to your own lifespan.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:38:43]:
Yes.

Annie Bright [00:38:44]:
It's impossible to separate yourself from human rights even if you're the one wielding the power to either value it or undermine it completely.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:38:55]:
Agree. Yes.

Annie Bright [00:38:58]:
Those are pretty universal messages. It'd be hard to for anyone of any political, cultural, economic persuasion to argue with.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:39:07]:
Well, that's why they are said to be universal human rights, I guess.

Annie Bright [00:39:12]:
Perfect way to type our conversation. Thank you so much for letting me test you questions this afternoon.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu [00:39:19]:
Thanks so much. Thank you very much.

Annie Bright [00:39:25]:
You can find the transcript of my conversation with Chidi, along with links to the organizations and resources that were mentioned throughout the interview and the attachment catch show notes. Thanks for listening.