A/HRC/26/41 deepened with the support of the international community, especially the Human Rights Council. VII. Deepening human rights education 20. Given that, even with all their limitations, human rights now appear to be all that we have to interrogate the barbarisms of power16 and that human rights education and training is a key way of realizing human rights, there is an imperative need to take such education and training extremely seriously as an aspect of international cooperation in the field of human rights. With the help of the Advisory Committee, the Human Rights Council has made significant efforts to meet this need. In March 2011, the Council adopted the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training, based on a draft produced by the Advisory Committee. This text was later adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 66/137. Among other things, the Declaration makes the important point that human rights education should become an integral part of the educational curriculum, a point that many States have also emphasized. As importantly, article 12 of the Declaration lays stress upon the need for international cooperation at all levels to support and reinforce efforts at the local level to implement human rights education and training.17 The emphasis on human rights education as being one of the most effective means of promoting human rights cannot be gainsaid.18 It is one of the most practical methods of achieving international cooperation in the human rights field.19 21. Yet a partial paradigm shift may be required if international cooperation in the conception and execution of the project of human rights education is to achieve its full potential. It bears emphasizing here that human rights education ought to be founded much more than has hitherto been the case on a constructive dialogue among peoples and civilizations, and far less on an alienating and unhelpful sort of monologue in which one section of the world instructs the rest on human rights. While countries do differ in the degree to which they respect human rights norms, nowhere in the world is absolute respect for human rights as yet a mass cultural fact.20 So every society has something to learn from others. Thus, human rights education cannot be a one-way traffic and cannot flow in a unidirectional manner from one section of our global neighbourhood to the others.21 Genuine international cooperation in the area of human rights education ought to involve two-way or multidirectional exchanges of information, ideas and knowledge. This much is recognized in the concluding section of the report of the seminar on the enhancement of international cooperation in the field of human rights, convened by OHCHR in Geneva in February 2013 (A/HRC/23/20, para. 52). 16 17 18 19 20 21 U. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 4. D. Seetulsingh, presentation at the Seminar on the Enhancement of International Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights, Geneva, 15 February 2012. Ibid. Ibid. P. Houtondji, “The master’s voice – remarks on the problem of human rights in Africa” in UNESCO, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Paris, UNESCO, 1986), pp. 320–332. O.C. Okafor and S.C. Agbakwa, “Re-imagining international human rights education in our time: beyond three constitutive orthodoxies” in Leiden Journal of International Law, vol. 14 (2001), pp. 563-590. 9