Beyond the conventional human rights approach, towards a radical view of rights

 

  1. The standard conception of human rights relies significantly on the international legal framework discussed earlier. But the same often operates more at the moral level rather than. analysing the politics of exploitation, which is responsible for large scale denial of socio-economic rights. We also often ignore the link between historical social struggles –such as working class struggles, anti-imperialist struggles, struggles by various oppressed groups– and international human rights law. This tends to make invisible the political context in which it was primarily a combination of socialist countries and post-colonial developing countries which pushed for the adoption of an international instrument on social, economic and cultural rights.

 

  1. Abstracted from their origins, human rights appear ahistorical, and de-contextualised. In such a ‘de-politicised’ view, the human rights framework appears as the product of benevolence of certain well-meaning international bodies rather than the culmination of decades of social struggle.

 

  1. Similarly, this frame of mind tends to create the illusion that the international human rights system, by its good intentions, may gradually impose rights by their moral force without much social upheaval and struggle.

 

  1. The conventional human rights approach does not always analyse and consider the massive structural constraints which today prevent the realization of economic, social and cultural rights and, similarly, does not always emphasise the central importance of social and political mobilization in challenging these structural constraints.

 

  1. This leads to a strange dichotomy for at least some human rights activists: they feel a sense of somewhat unreal optimism when they look at the well-worded legal and philosophical framework of human rights, especially in international covenants, but they cannot avoid also feeling that the same are more like wish-lists than concrete-programmes-of-action.

 

  1. Knowledge of the contents of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other UN covenants will hardly advance the condition of those whose rights are violated. What activists need to foster is a movement that channels these frustrations into articulate demands that evoke responses from the political process. So far, many real life struggles for social justice have been waged despite human rights groups –often not by or because of them.

 

  1. Hence there is now a need to move beyond this dichotomy and to create a solidly grounded radical view of rights that stresses the centrality of social movements and proposes an alternative socio-economic and development model. Then, the time will have come:
  • to confront and challenge current structural violence resulting in human rights violations,
  • to name the oppressors, and
  • to identify the global and national exploitative systems and policies which are responsible for this structural violence.

 

  1. In summary, rather than endorsing the international human rights framework as the guiding ideology, rights have to be developed as useful tools for a struggle that is part of a more systemic, larger strategy for social change. In the health sector, this struggle:
  • should be based on a vision of collective (along with individual) health rights,
  • should emphasise the rights of communities and hence should promote community mobilisation,
  • should integrate the right to health care and the right to the determinants of health as part of a holistic approach,
  • should assist in the formulation of concrete demands and strategies to achieve the RTH,
  • should not hesitate to identify and denounce the strong vested interests which create obstacles for the realisation of the RTH care, and
  • should facilitate alliances of the health movement with other social movements.

  1. Again, if people are not aware of the historical and contextual nature of human rights, and are not aware that human rights become realized only by the struggles of real people experiencing real violations of their rights, then human rights are all too easily used as symbolic legitimisers for a variety of instruments of domination.

 

  1. We thus have to take a larger historical view and have to remember that systematised rights are by-and-large a creation of a capitalist society. The idea that claims for economic and social rights date back to the emerging socialist and workers’ movements of the nineteenth century also needs to be kept prominently in mind.

 

  1. By the very nature of their origin, rights have a dual character: they often sustain the capitalist order and the associated freedoms of the privileged sectors, but may also be wielded by the oppressed as a defence against exploitation. But either way, while rights can regulate and limit exploitation, the framework of rights in itself does not transform the society that continually generates this exploitation.

 

  1. [To use a metaphor, the anti-slavery movement did not just codify more and more rights the slaves should have; it had to struggle for the abolition of slavery itself, wiping out any further discussion about the ‘rights of slaves’].

 

  1. In short, we may either limit the use of rights to a system of checks and balances to ‘improve’ the system, or expand them as a tool (in conjunction with various others) to fundamentally challenge and transform the system.

 

  1. We need to increasingly focus our efforts on fundamentally changing the global and national political-economic architecture that is perpetuating and increasing these inequities. Then, rights become one more basis for organising and mobilising a spectrum of oppressed people who, in the process of collectively fighting for their rights will, after a point, also begin to question and challenge the system itself that institutionalises their exploitation.

 

  1. Our goal thus is to catalyse the transition to a new situation where these rights become subsumed under a much more equitable social system; such a vision changes the way we look at rights themselves.

 

  1. The present developments in some countries of Latin America and elsewhere do generate cautious hope that neo-liberal policies can begin to be rolled back and reversed by popular mobilisation, bringing social and economic rights centre-stage. However, such mobilisation will need to be intensified to ultimately confront and transform the basic socio-economic system; this alone can definitively ensure these rights in a lasting manner.

 

  1. There is no ‘End of History’ here. Though we have many more lessons to learn, and many more struggles to wage, we can look forward to a time when history will be made once again.

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn

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