”The sovereignty of States must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of Human Rights”. (Kofi Anan, Nobel lecture, Dec 2001)
- Betting on the invisible hand of the market and ignoring the needs and rights of the socially excluded is just dangerous and morally unacceptable.
- It is therefore that the macroeconomic policies insisted-on by the IMF do not simply have a negative social impact; their design embodies a profoundly unjust social content giving the financial rights of creditors priority over Human Rights of the people; the IMF chooses to prioritize the interests of the creditors.
- Rights can be usefully seen as the codification of needs. Reformulating needs as ethical and legal norms implies a duty on the part of those with the power to provide all the means necessary to make sure those needs are met.
- Without Political and Civil Rights, there is no guarantee that other rights –even when they are inscribed in laws and constitutions– will be made effective; the lack of citizens’ power to make governments accountable and responsible to them is perhaps the greatest obstacle to all rights-based agendas.
- But democratic elections (allegedly giving citizens off-and-on, periodic power) do neither guarantee state responses to collective needs, nor the participation of civil society in decision-making, nor, for that matter, guarantee greater social and political accountability.
- On the other hand, claims are sometimes wrongfully made that universal rights are a form of Western hegemony; the caveat in this assertion is that a right is a right only when it is universal; otherwise it is a privilege.
- There is also the wrong belief that the Human Rights approach is ‘political’ while the humanitarian approach is not…and is therefore ‘safe’; others phrase the same groundless fear saying that applying the Human Rights approach compromises one’s ‘neutrality’.
- The reality is that any legal Human Rights system (including humanitarianism) is indeed (and must be) related to political theory and social values.
- Nevertheless, let us not forget, International Human Rights Law only recognizes the obligations and duties of States (!). To cover the entire web of interrelated Human Rights violations, there is indeed a need to extend the same obligations and duties to other subjects at sub-national level.
- This, because Human Rights obligations are closely linked to a multi-layered system of accountabilities. For a duty bearer to be accountable, three conditions are needed:
-the person must accept the responsibility and obligation to uphold Human
Rights (‘should act’);
-the person must have the authority to act (‘may act’); and
-the person must control the resources needed to act (‘can act’).
- Responsibility/authority/resources are necessary components of a capacity to act. Often, lack of action is due to a lack of capacity rather than negligence or ill-will. It, therefore, behooves us to identify capacity gaps of all duty bearers! Where duty bearers are intentionally violating rights, different types of interventions will be required as lack of capacity is not the problem.
Taken from UNRISD News, CARE’s ‘ Promoting Rights and Responsibilities’ Newsletter and SCN News (Jonsson, Levine and Young, The Right to Nutrition in Conflict Situations).
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City