- This Reader keeps reminding you that the Rights to Health, to Food, to Development are all Human rights (HR), not policy-options-that-governments-can-choose-to-adopt-or-to-ignore!
It is thus not tolerable that governments observe only their commitments to economic and trade agreements and ignore their international commitments to people’s rights. It is the realization of this evidence (from the bad old days) that has taught us that rights can only be secured through struggle (to be understood in the sense of a “positive subversion”). (H. Pestalozzi)
1a. [As someone said in a literary parable: ”There is only one animal capable of dying of hunger without a fight. All beasts attack and die fighting for their food. Only man lets himself die of hunger without breaking the windows of a supermarket to survive. Men who do not obey their instincts –or the sequence of violations of their rights they are subjected to –die”. (Manuel Scorza, La Danza Inmovil, Plaza y Janes Literaria, Barcelona, 1983)].
- National institutions that look after HR do exist. But many of them are controlled by those who wield political power; and their mandate is often limited to civil and political rights. But governments do have binding commitments on economic, social and cultural rights as well!
- On the other hand, local social movements, civil society organizations and NGOs committed to and working on the defense of the rights of the oppressed, master neither the theory of the international HR instruments nor the workings of their practical application at the national level. At best, they have a catalogue of unanswered questions. In such a situation, it is easy for them to fall in the irrelevance trap. (F. Nuscheler)
- There certainly is a job to be done here since seeking redress for HR violations can be done individually, but much better with the support of a social movement or a civil society organization specialized in the protection of HR. The need for the training of such institutions is unpostponable since almost no mechanisms are currently in place to ensure compliance with any legal norms on HR.
- Additionally, the ignorance of HR principles and standards by local judges makes it difficult for HR activists to get redress using the judicial system. So, some training is needed here too.
- But our problems do not stop there: Rules, regulations and laws are ineffective without the will to enforce them. So it is the non-governmental HR watchdog organizations on whose shoulders this responsibility falls.
- Most development debates still miss the preceding points. The debate on the HR-based approach to development (HRBA) is still nascent, vague and bland …as many a church congress (or a G8 summit…). What we need instead is to have leveled stinging critiques of the current trends in development work that are violating HR with impunity.
- The HRBA holds up a mirror to society, a provocative and discomforting mirror, allowing society to understand that these problems are not ‘accidents’, but are a systematic consequence of the deliberate social and economic choices being made which benefit a few and marginalize many. (Abhay Shukla)
- Moreover, some see a conflict between public health and the HRBA to health: Public health aims for the best for the majority, now and in the future. In HR, we struggle for the best for each individual now. (Urban Jonsson)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City