80-Day Human Rights World Tour in Honor of the UN "International Year of Youth" Culminates in Los Angeles

Online, May 12, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Dr. Mary Shuttleworth, President of Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI), has just completed her 7th annual YHRI World Tour traveling to five continents in 80 days to promote the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"When the United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Youth, I knew that our reach in terms of children taught about their human rights, had to be greater than ever," Dr. Shuttleworth said. She wasted no time in planning her trip, as every second lost could mean another child's life lost.

Only recently UNICEF reported that forty million children below the age of 15 suffered from abuse and neglect, while the USA National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse cited three million new reports of child abuse or neglect every year. That doesn't account for cases of human trafficking, when according to UNICEF, 1.2 million children are trafficked across international borders annually. Sold as commodities, these children are forced into inhuman forced labor, denied basic education and robbed of their childhoods. Youth who do not know their rights are vulnerable and easy prey for ill intentioned individuals, which is why YHRI focuses on education.

Following the success of the previous six YHRI World Tours and in accordance with the current state of the world, it was only appropriate that this tour be more extensive than ever. Dr. Shuttleworth traveled from New York to Mexico and on to Guatemala, Panama, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Swaziland, Portugal, Sardinia, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Taiwan, Japan and Hawaii finally returning home to Los Angeles, amounting to a 42,458-mile crusade for human rights education.

Dr. Shuttleworth was accompanied by Leslie M. Brown, who documented the tour with photographs and video. This was not the first major venture they did together. Brown was the Producer of the international award winning hip-hop music video UNITED. The UNITED music video was created in 2004 when Dr. Shuttleworth did her first human rights education crusade around the world accompanied by her then 19-year old son, Taron Lexton, Director TXL Films, who documented the tour and captured images for the new music video. UNITED was launched at the United Nations in August of that year. UNITED catapulted YHRI into a new era of audiovisual educational materials with the subsequent creation of 30 Public Service Announcements (PSAs), each depicting one of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today these PSAs have aired on over 4,600 TV stations in 101 countries. This was followed by the release last summer of the video, The Story of Human Rights, which briefly chronicles the history of human rights in less than 10 minutes.

In response to the urgent need for human rights education on a global scale YHRI has expanded to include activities in 105 nations with hundreds of YHRI groups internationally.

The YHRI World Tour 2010 reached tens of thousands of students as well as elected officials, judiciary, law enforcement, educators, community and religious leaders, while the media promoted our message of Human Rights Education to millions more.

The focus was on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ways "to cause the Declaration to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions" (United
Nations, 1948).

Citing rising statistics in child abuse and the inhuman realities of human trafficking in countries around the world, Dr. Shuttleworth stated "Human rights education doesn't only pertain to one level of society." She concluded, "The question is not what it would cost to teach human rights, but what it would cost not to."

YHRI was originally established in 2001 with the expressed purpose of teaching youth about human rights, specifically the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and inspire them to become advocates for tolerance and peace.

To learn more visit www.youthforhumanrights.org.