Human rights are intrinsic values that give all human beings dignity.
1. Human rights (HR) are a foundation of the UN. Therefore, the UN has a core mandate to institute international HR mechanisms worldwide. “HR are foreign to no culture and native to all nations”. (Kofi Annan) HR are legally guaranteed by HR law. Governments are thus obliged to do certain things and prevented from doing other. Yes, but are they faring well at this?
2. In 2000, the Millennium Development Declaration was signed by 189 member states. But the MDGs that came from it, stripping it to the bone, do not underscore HR sufficiently thus absconding from one of the main purposes of the United Nations. Since HR and the MDGs both clearly confer obligations on governments –but do not fully succeed in it yet– they are to be considered two sets of interdependent and mutually reinforcing commitments: I wish I could say they were.
3. Readers should be aware that, in the UN 2005 World Summit, Member States in the General Assembly resolved and agreed to mainstream HR into their national policies and that UN agencies were to assist them to do so.*
*: More than 20 multilateral HR treaties have been formulated since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What HR treaties have done is to put into legal language the obligations of states (principally) and other duty bearers to do certain things, as well as to prevent them from doing other. The full body of international HR instruments consists of more than 100 treaties, declarations, guidelines, recommendations and agreed principles. The 1993 UN Vienna Conference recognized all rights as equally important; there is thus no hierarchy in HR: all HR have equal status.
4. To instrumentalize all the above, the HR-based Approach to Programming was born. [Together with some others, I personally prefer to speak about the HR-based framework, but we are in a minority. In this Reader, for once, I will yield to the majority].
So, what is the Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA)?
5. At its simplest, the HRBA is defined as the process furthering the realization of HR, being guided by HR standards and principles and developing the capacities of claim holders and of duty bearers to change the approach to development programming. In short, today, it is the right approach to follow –both morally and legally. Given the complexities involved, the HRBA prompts claim holders and duty bearers to think differently and to ask a different set of questions. But it does not automatically give them the ‘right’ answers as, often, in fact, there is more than one right answer.** Conversely, what the HRBA is not is a panacea to the world’s development challenges.
**: The HRBA offers us a process and guides us towards which questions to ask; it does not provide easy answers; to some degree, we are still left with the challenge of embarking in trial and error.
6. So, what are the Human Rights-Based Approach’s attributes:
• The HRBA alters the way that programs are designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated –it is a veritable new roadmap.
• It moves development action from benevolence into the mandatory realm of law.
• It considers the individual as an active agent.
• It recognizes each development challenge as a HR challenge –or as several unfulfilled or violated HR that need redress.
• It provides a mechanism for renaming problems as violations making it clear that violations are neither inevitable nor natural, but arise from deliberate decisions and policies. (!)
• It exposes the hidden actors and structures behind violations and sets out to change them face-on.
• It focuses on analyzing the unjust power relations that are the root cause of HR violations and of maldevelopment. It thus gives insights into the unfair distribution of power. (!)
• It imposes limits on excessive power and addresses all economic inequalities and their causes.
• It is the prime vehicle for governments to fulfill their HR commitments.
• It is directed at reducing the vulnerabilities of the most marginalized, i.e., it has a special focus on groups subjected to discrimination and suffering from disadvantages and exclusion. It thus gives the disadvantaged special priority.
• It sets out to impact prevailing norms, values, and structures –thus the development workers’ practice– and it shapes their relations with partners in a new way.
• It entails consciously and systematically paying attention to HR and HR principles in all aspects of program development.
• Making the needed situation analysis HR-based, it identifies the primary claim holders and duty bearers and their corresponding rights and obligations. i.e., it asks who is affected and who needs to be involved in solving the problem(s). Ergo, it looks beyond just the numbers (i.e., on what, how, who, why, and not just how many).
• It can invigorate NGOs by helping them recognize their roles as duty bearers as opposed to seeing themselves as strictly charitable institutions.
• It takes concrete steps to identify and combat social stigmas.
• It requires devoting time to capacity building activities (HR Learning) for both claim holders and duty bearers (includes forming HR trainers and mentors on how to use and teach the HR framework).
• It involves addressing areas that are highly political. (!)
• It opens up space for public dialogue, and
• It is not a rigid plan; it is an extremely flexible approach that consists in asking key questions, applying key HR principles to the program’s processes and outcomes, and in framing the program being designed around the realization of HR –a realization that governments are legally obliged to secure.
7. The caveat here though is that there is still little solid evidence to fully demonstrate the HRBA’s effectiveness; it has, so far, been difficult to measure success and widely shared indicators are still in their development phase. (But a growing body of evidence is indeed amassing).
You may think you are already applying the HRBA, but are you really?
8. Among other, this begs the following questions:
In your work,
• do you identify the HR claims of claim holders and the corresponding HR obligations of duty bearers, as well as the structural causes of the non-realization of HR?
• do you consistently assess the capacity of claim holders to claim their rights and of duty bearers to fulfill their obligations?
• do you design programs around strategies and plans to build these capacities?, and
• If you are a donor, are you according the highest priority to addressing the needs of the most vulnerable in the least developed countries?
9. Bottom line, the HRBA is a process with a myriad of different challenges –all of them surmountable with the right attitude, the right programming tools and the right determination.
We can truthfully talk of ‘the art of staging HR-based initiatives’.
Claudio Schuftan in Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org