Living Rights: Making Human Rights Come Alive

Many are unaware that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a landmark document spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 exists. Awakening to our inalienable rights can shift consciousness, can be life-changing and ultimately world-changing. Discovering this deep, unspoken truth can be like breaking a spell.

Living Rights is an interactive workbook and journal with activities for all ages with space for creative expression. It has resources for individuals, classes and groups and for planning workshops and events. It's designed to make our rights come alive with engaging activities to promote personal and global awareness and understanding of our place in history, our common humanity and the importance of human rights for all.

It has background information on the UDHR and 37 varied activities to enrich our appreciation of rights, including thought experiments; prompts to imagine 1948; categories of rights; applications to history, social studies, literature, current events, refugees, disabilities, Black Lives Matter, pandemic, the right to healing and repair from historical trauma, legal abuse, storytelling, vocabulary words, coloring pages, word searches, a maze and opportunities to make up rights and activities. A section was added to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to celebrate the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, highlighting the right to live free from the fear of war and the nuclear threat.

Living Rights amends the 1948 UDHR with new rights for the environment, war and nuclear proliferation.

The Journal Section provides a page for each right with blank space and a recommended strategy for a ”Right of the Week” theme.

The Resource Section includes quotes, lists of Nobel Peace Prize winners, books, films, songs & organizations; resources for disability rights, BLM & whistleblowers; a calendar of international days, weeks, years & decades; a Child’s Environmental Bill of Rights; and pledges, oaths & ethical codes. It provides an easy formula for designing events, workshops & assemblies.

Free downloadable pages with word searches, a maze and coloring pages for use with the e-book, for anyone are on https://www.consciouspolitics.org/livingrights. You can print and cut out your own human rights cards and keep your rights in your pocket.


This book is an invitation to act, to make a difference, to live with meaning...Read this book. Live with meaning.
--Edgar S. Cahn, PhD, JD, former counsel and speechwriter to Robert F. Kennedy

Diane Perlman’s Living Rights: Making Human Rights Come Alive ingeniously guides readers through interactive activities…we owe it to ourselves and to others to learn as much as we can about human rights, and then practice what we learn throughout our lives.
--Professor Richard Falk, International Law, Princeton University

Diane Perlman’s excellent, practical resource can help generate the deeper thinking and civic engagement so desperately needed in our broken world.
--Marie Dennis, Senior Advisor to the Secretary General, Co-President (2007-2019), Pax Christi International

It is an example for children, families and communities to use this book for education to bring human rights as the basis of human dignity. It is a gift of the spirit to those whose rights have been violated and feel depressed to show them that they have the same inalienable Human Rights without exception.
--Mubarak Awad, a Christian Palestinian-American psychologist, referred to as the Palestinian Gandhi, founder of Nonviolence International

As a literacy educator and researcher … Dr. Perlman provides the backbones for the development of another fundamental literacy: rights literacy.
--Allister Chang, Member, DC State Board of Education