1.In many communities, Human Rights (HR) values still need to be promoted from above, because they have not yet been internalized by unknowing, potential claim holders. This promotion from above is far removed from traditional charity approaches (*) to development though.
[*: Charity is here seen as “love and the right feeling towards one’s fellow human being”].
2.Ultimately, HR cannot be imposed; they must be sought/pursued from within, and only be supported from outside.
3.In our work, it is primarily the (majority) deprived/poor people (**) who are the main holders of rights; our HR work with them is to have them empower themselves to claim their rights and to choose their own development path (i.e., circumstances and chance should no longer dominate their lives).
[**: Poverty is here seen as a lack of choice and minimum control of resources].
4.HR are thus to be seen as what they really are, namely, the legal expression of our human dignity. Because of that, HR are universal; they are indivisible; and they are interdependent. There is nothing like ‘basic rights’.
5.But HR do not yet feature explicitly (***) in the charters or mission statements of many international private voluntary organizations (importantly those NGOs traditionally involved in mostly charity-type work); we all need to become more vocal in demanding this be done.
[***: Or may have been added lately without those organizations having operationalized these principles in their field work yet].
6.Participation, you may not know, is a HR per-se; it should be treated as a necessary outcome of development work and has to become a necessary part of the process. Charity may share this concept, but definitely does not share the HR perspective that it is inescapable to directly address the basic/structural causes of rights violations (see below).
7.So, what is then involved in a truly participatory HR-based planning and programming? And who is to do it?
8.To start with, UN and bilateral agencies and NGOs with active programs in the field should already be applying HR-based programming —with the participation of their respective constituencies! National governments should, ideally, follow suit as a way to concretize their commitment to HR (this can, therefore, at the same time, be a test of commitment).
- Participatory HR-based planning has several recognized steps
- Participatory Causality Analysis:
Before anything, communities must first recognize they have problems, and then characterize them; they must then collectively identify the causes of the same. (Without a reasonable consensus on the causes of the problems at hand, it is not likely that there will be a consensus later-on about how to solve the same). Any causality analysis is greatly helped by an explicit Conceptual Framework (e.g., the one UNICEF uses since 1990 for the causes of preventable ill-health, malnutrition and deaths). Planning in a HR context requires a full understanding of the causes at all levels (immediate, underlying and basic) with simultaneous attention being given to addressing the causes at different levels. Causes of problems related to the violation of people’s rights that are identified with the help of the framework need to be analyzed for each violation at each level of causality; then, a quali and quantitative relationships must be established among them. This is to be followed by reaching consensus regarding the most important determinants affecting the realization of those rights found to be violated.
The Causality Analysis will thus produce a list of rights that are being violated together with the major causes of these violations.
- Participatory Pattern Analysis:
This step explores the relationships between claim holders and duty bearers; these relationships form a pattern. The work to identify duty bearers for each particular right benefits from the earlier causality analysis in that one can identify duty bearers at different levels. One has to insist that, at this point, it is necessary to focus on priority problems to reduce the analysis to a limited set of claim-duty relationships that are likely to be the most critical in the given situation; if not limited, one risks ending up with a very large number of such relationships that we will not be able to tackle and a number of actors too large to involve and support (i.e., the situation analysis should cover all rights while programming will address the most relevant violations first).
Pattern Analysis thus arrives at a list of the most crucial claim-duty relationships for each particular set of rights violations selected.
- Participatory Capacity Analysis:
This next step is about analizing why duty bearers do not seem to be able (or capable) to perform their duties as is expected from them. It s about identifying their shortcomings and confronting them with such evidence. As pointed out in HR Reader 33, this analysis looks at the responsibility/authority/resources components of capacity (or about how duty bearers should act, may act, and can act). The importance of two-way communication systems are to be recognized here so as to put resources to really work for the benefit of claim holders.
Capacity Analysis thus ultimately identifies capacity gaps of each duty bearer for each identified rights violation to be redressed (also see HR Reader 33).
- Participatory Selection of a Strategy and Best Actions:
Here, actions are selected to help close capacity gaps identified in the previous step.
This step thus results in a list of candidate actions organized into a draft strategy.
- Partnership Analysis:
At this point, discussions are held with key partners/strategic allies with the aim of reaching agreements on who will do what, how, where and when.
- Programming:
This final step aggregates all activities in the strategy into (a) program(s) and/or project(s). No general advice is sensible enough here to prescribe how best to do this. Groups involved in the planning will have to learn from practice on how to best cluster activities for maximum results (by sector, by theme, by geographical location, by level of causality, etc).
10.As can be seen, HR are thus not to be treated as a ‘separate’ concern of development planning; they are an integral part of it. Without explicitly addressing HR, the problems of economic underdevelopment and poverty will never be fully solved. (****)
[****:The principle of ‘low cost – high impact’ pursued in traditional development planning is merely utilitarian; in HR-based planning it must thus sometimes be rejected. Simply put, morality often leads to a different set of priorities than those of an economic analysis].
11.But, beware, the HR approach is not a magic panacea either. It will not see resources and policies and power instantly transferred to the poor and vulnerable… Keep in mind that –unlike the WTO– the UN or any other international body have no practicable way of imposing punishment or fines on governments that violate or ignore their internationally sanctioned commitments to HR; we all need to contribute our grain of salt to help empower people to stop these violations.
[Mostly taken from Jonsson U., An approach to HR-based programming in UNICEF ESARO, SCN News No.20, pp.6-9, July 2000].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City