To a chronic problem we cannot apply crises methods.
1. The climate, the economic and financial, the food and the fuel prices crises we have been faced with underscore yet again the need to organize and mobilize for badly needed social changes — and also the need to actually grasp the unprecedented opportunities these crises offer for doing so.* It is challenges that make women and men prove themselves!
*: The collateral damage from these concomitant crises has extended, not least on human rights (HR) territory. But it has also increased people’s hostility towards the market economy model….and this is an opportunity.
2. To prevent a return to business as usual in a move that leads us nowhere, the roots of all these crises need to be understood by the majority of people so they understand the nature, the self-interest bias and the limitations of the elites’ responses to these crises. (The Cornerhouse) These responses merely contribute to the winners getting the accolades and the losers being pushed under and into despair.
3. Not really as a surprise, contemporary macroeconomics does not even deal with the subject of crises. To crises we respond with relief efforts. But the human rights-based framework has blurred the traditional distinction between relief agencies and those active in people’s development. Jumping-in with short term life-saving aid through quick interventions and then leaving has now become insincere and disingenuous.
4. As regards the financial crisis, the ‘great regression’ of the last few years has prompted an age of austerity. Among other, for Amartya Sen, the responses have been a ‘spiraling catastrophe’; it has exposed the dark side of austerity-driven cutbacks, i.e., a deepening economic-and-social-rights-deficit. Deep cuts in public expenditure for social services are indeed actually slimming the State…and this is considered the ‘obvious’ cure. Unbelievable!
5. The slashing of public expenditure in health care, education, social protection and job programs required by these policies is violating people’s rights and making ordinary people pay disproportionately for a budget crisis they had no hand in creating. The ‘cut-to-grow’ fever has caught fire, with many low- and middle-income countries joining the headline countries in Europe and the US to cut public expenditure –at times clearly excessively– on the false assumption that austerity will drive growth.**
**: Have you heard of governments borrowing to invest in programs with real returns in social and environmental terms, as well as in economic terms? I have not. They would be doing a service to their people.
6. It is no news to you that economic policy-making is a highly contested terrain heavily influenced by political considerations and relations of power. It is not a fallacy or a myth that HR law can have a fundamental role in exposing economic and social injustice and in checking for the misuse of power. In an era of crises and of austerity, HR considerations should, more than ever, influence policy and be the basis for follow-up to secure accountability for lasting outcomes.
Crisis or not, HR are not only legally compelling, but also morally right
7. Particularly during times of economic hardship, States must come-up with and implement policies according to their human rights obligations, as well as promote economic alternatives that are not only centered on HR principles and norms, but also on human dignity and on prioritizing the most vulnerable.***
***: “No global economic and financial crisis diminishes the responsibility of State authorities and the international community with regard to human rights,” (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009).
8. In too many places, human rights are increasingly being sacrificed at the altar of financial stability. When individuals, households, communities, and whole nations must surrender their hard-won rights to education, to adequate health care, and to decent jobs in healthy conditions to balance budget sheets, the basic values of human dignity are turned on their head. Why shouldn’t, in these times, indicators of social and human well-being be monitored, prioritized and valued at least as much as financial balances and the production of tradable goods and services? Remember: Occasionally, small numbers tell a big story. (M. Soussan).
9. Crises are now multipolar; people both in the North and in the South must fight back for their human dignity**** in defiance of un-necessary, disproportionate and unjustified cutbacks –yes, beyond what they were doing before the onset of these crises.
****: I call your attention to the common etimological root of the words dignity and indignation!
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org