Human Rights City

A Human Rights City is a municipality that refers explicitly to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards and/or law in their policies, statements, and programs. Analysts have observed growing numbers of such cities since 2000... The Human Rights City initiative emerged from the global human rights movement, and it reflects efforts of activist groups to improve respect for human rights principles by governments and other powerful actors who operate at the local/community level. Because of their focus on local contexts, Human Rights Cities tend to emphasize economic, social, and cultural rights as they affect the lives of residents of cities and other communities and their ability to enjoy civil and political human rights.

Human rights advocates describe a Human Rights City as “One whose residents and local authorities, through learning about the relevance of human rights to their daily lives (guided by a steering committee), join in ongoing learning, discussions, systematic analysis and critical thinking at the community level, to pursue a creative exchange of ideas and the joint planning of actions to realize their economic, social, political, civil and cultural human rights.” Human rights cities were defined at the 2011 World Human Rights Cities Forum as "both a local community and a socio-political process in a local context where human rights play a key role as fundamental values and guiding principles." This framework has generated various practices in different cities.

The Human Rights City initiative is the result of long-standing efforts of popular groups to defend and promote human rights, and thus represents an aspect of global human rights struggles.

Contemporary human rights city initiatives grow directly from earlier organizing around rights claims in urban settings. The widespread nature of urban problems affecting peoples’ everyday lives and survival have generated similar types of responses in places around the world, helping account for the simultaneous emergence and consolidation of popular claims to the “right to the city." According to David Harvey, “to invoke rights to the city means ‘to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade and to do so in a fundamental and radical way’."

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