-We cannot take scarcity-of-resources as a reply to claim holders’ demands without asking why scarcity.
-They may be able to cut all the flowers, but they will never stop spring. (Pablo Neruda)
1. An individual is seldom either a duty bearer or a claim holder; individuals and groups enter into claim holder and duty bearer roles. Strictly speaking, it is therefore misleading to talk about a meeting of claim holders and duty bearers; key actors are to meet to discuss and agree on their respective roles as claim holders and duty bearers.* (Urban. Jonsson)
*: Depending on circumstance, duty bearers have a set of global, but also more applied, local human rights obligations (all covenant-related).
2. A warning about the claim holders’ role is that, from the claim holders’ organizations side, it does matter whether rhetorical endorsement of human rights (HR) action in their midst actually materializes into political action.
3. We say this, because our efforts in HR work can (and have) be(en) subverted by traditional community norms and rules of patronage that stand in the way of claim holders’ action. Our work will have to face this challenge creatively and in a culturally sensitive way. Clientelism (that requires reverence and submissiveness) plays an important role in this and is in direct conflict with the notion of HR; HR challenges the dominance of clientelism and of patron-client relationships. (J. Cox)
4. Do not forget that HR is about giving authority to claim holders to hold the state accountable. Among other, two possible ways to do this are: a) to give citizens the chance to use report cards that ultimately call on the state to take key needed measures immediately, and b) to nominate an independent ombudsperson with formal sanctioning powers –including community-based mechanisms to ongoingly assess their performance.
5. Ultimately, the struggle for HR needs to be made attractive-and-urgent-enough to claim holders and to our peer professionals so as to be seen as a struggle for-all-of-us-to-be-part-of. (C. Roche)
6. Ultimately, those whose rights have been adversely affected by the actions of someone else have a right to hold that person or institution to account for the way they have been treated. As we know, though, lacking are the effective means for such a redress. At this point, let us just say that amassing the needed creative anger is never possible in the absence of a specific feeling of impotence.
7. A tool for claim holders we have often recommended in HR work is an a-posteriori-budget-analysis that really deals with a fait-accompli. It is actually upfront participatory-budgeting cum public-expenditure-tracking that really is the better approach.
8. Staying in the economic realm, in HR work, we uncompromisingly call for ‘GDP-fetishism-to-be-abandoned’ to, instead, focus primarily on minimizing unemployment since the latter entails a huge loss of livelihoods and of welfare for affected claim holders and their families –as well as unemployment being the source of many HR violations.**
**: Furthermore, lower unemployment is likely to increase GDP. Conversely, and as historically proven, higher GDPs have not necessarily lead to more jobs!
9. Devising policies that seek full employment have thus to forget ‘constant growth’ as an objective. The relentless pursuit of growth constrains us in our attempts to find ways of improving human rights. Diminishing the role of GDP does not imply being against growth. But GDP has come to be used as a measure of welfare simply by default on top of being used very uncritically. Nevertheless, our fellow economists seem reluctant to abandon GDP. They cling to it almost instinctively and dogmatically; it is emotionally difficult for them to criticize it.*** (J. van den Bergh)
***: Human wellbeing can only be defined by how it is measured. GDP is an index of production, not of consumption; it measures material wealth, but not economic welfare. The rate of increase of welfare is lower than the rate of increase of GDP. Material wealth only constitutes one of many dimensions of wellbeing –add health, education, voice, environmental and personal security… Conventional indicators overlook many of these. Rather, quality-of-life indicators should be used to asses impact so as to expose inequalities since it is inequalities that more deeply affect quality of life. (J. E. da Veiga)
10. Also instinctively and emotionally, economic, social and cultural rights are absurdly feared by those who, deep inside, do not think they can possibly be achieved. They thus either act as if “HR are a good candy that governments can give to the naïf progressives to buy their consciences” (J. P. Feinmann) or, if more scared, they may conspire to show economic, social and cultural rights as ‘dangerously possible and against their ultimate economic interests’ so that they act with full force against them.
11. On the other hand, as relates to civil and political rights, the right to property is the priority right of neoliberals. (Here we have another opus of neoliberal ethics with a perfectly cynical script).
12. For the above reasons, in hierarchical political systems, HR are in a precarious state and/or are ‘given’ unilaterally as a privilege; but privileges are revocable! HR cannot be reduced to a bunch of privileges.
13. In all truth, the two key questions our opponents stubbornly do not ask themselves are:
• How much underdevelopment can the global security they so emphasize tolerate? and
• How much more poverty can a fragile formal representative democracy tolerate?
14. Bottom line here: To be guaranteed, HR must still be exacted from the State through decisive claim holders demands. Defeatist attitudes will simply have to be overcome.****
****: When misery is made synonymous with the concept of HR being violated, HR will become a most powerful tool for change. (Victor Hugo) HR violations are like dry grass that eventually will, for years, feed a giant bonfire of claims.
15. In HR work, the adversary is thus visible and can be perfectly identified and found. Claim holders will eventually know against whom they are struggling. And they will also know why they are fighting her/him/them. Truth can be elevated to the category of a right…the right of claim holders to the truth.***** But HR activists often are involved in too many projects that keep them (us) far from confronting their (our) real adversaries –the ones that are blocking any progress. Growing rhetorical support for HR alone will not materialize into political action.
*****: Experience shows that it is easier to arrive at grasping the truth and grasping the validity of the HR-based framework through the-road-of-ignorance than through the-road-of-claim-holders-recognizing-they-are-mistaken.
16. Remember: Even the most noble causes age…and die.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org