The National Human Rights
Commission of Mongolia has been jointly organizing the series of human rights
public lectures with the Open Society Forum since 2013. For this month of
public lecture, we invited Ms. Suvd Namsrai, Honoured State Actress and Director
of State Drama Theatre, as a guest speaker to share her thoughts on delivering
human rights education through art on 21 September at the Government Building
11. The event conveyed over 50 participants including human rights activities,
representatives from government and civil society organizations, students and
teachers of the Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture.
The guest speaker highlighted the role of art in influencing the world history, particularly the history of Mongolia and its contribution to the solutions of social problems. She considered art as the most powerful weapon to improve and sensitize the society. The event brought an open platform for Ms Suvd Namsrai and the participants discuss about potential roles that art can play in influencing public awareness and attitude towards human rights and in addressing the human rights emerging issues. During the public lecture, LGBT Center working in the field of sexual minority rights presented its play script to Ms Suvd Namsrai to support their work.
Thanks to the open discussion and valuable lecture by the celebrity, the participants shared their ideas to raise human rights awareness of artists through training and advocacy works while expressing their concerns about art works such as movies and drama plays that explicitly violate the rights of certain groups and questioning whether there is any censorship for such art works. A take away from this public lecture was to support and use art works to deliver human rights messages.
