In some agencies,selectivity and hypocrisy surround human rights. (Ignacio Saiz)
1. Human rights language in the successive post 2015 development agenda drafts still fails to move beyond aspirations and to address the real global determinants of underdevelopment with its human rights violations*: There is a tendency there to address human rights (HR) in purely aspirational terms (which objectives, which indicators, etc.). While these are important, the discussion at this level sometimes becomes a smokescreen to avoid addressing the fundamental above-mentioned global determinants, the ones that hinder strong local and sovereign expression of claim holders’ grievances. A critical shift of the conversation is needed at this level rather than the purely aspirational one being used.(Stefano Prato)
*: Beware: Underdevelopment is not a phase on the road towards development. Underdevelopment is the historical result of somebody else’s development. (Eduardo Galeano)
2. Moreover, besides high-flying rhetoric, the post 2015 agenda continues to be an agenda that pretends to regulate and prescribe for the local much more than for the global. As soon as one gets close to the big elephants of the global agenda (international HR law, trade, finance, the environment and migration), a hierarchy is immediately invoked to suggest that the HR agenda cannot enter those domains as they are addressed elsewhere in existing on-going processes. I believe this needs to be challenged. If the international community is serious in pursuing the ambitious objectives it is currently discussing, there needs to be a strong call for a clear change of locus cum-accountability-demands in the post 2015 agenda. (S. Prato)
3. On the other hand, HR have provided a common language to peasants’ and small-scale farmers’ organizations and movements, as well as other that are politically, culturally, and ideologically committedto HR on an increasing scale. (P. Clayes)
Human rights are at the heart of the emancipation of those denied dignity.(adapted from R. Luxemburg)
4. It is impossible to defend social rights in general if workers rights are not respected. Neoliberal policies constantly produce more poverty –precisely because workers’ rights are not respected. This is why, ‘at-the-end-of-the-pipeline’, social assistance cannot solve all the problems when there are limitations to social rights. Looking at it the other way around: workers rights cannot be defended if the rights of poor people are not respected. With growing poverty and poor people willing to accept any job at any wage (Marx’s Lumpenproletariat), if there is no decent social assistance, workers’ rights are directly undermined. This means that social rights, in general, and workers rights, in particular, have to be combined and be promoted and defended together in a comprehensive way. Separating the rights of poor people from workers’ rights is precisely what neoliberalism wants. There is a neoliberal willingness to ‘help the poor’ (that is the ‘deserving poor’, those able and willing to work). But, at the same time, the aim is to disregard workers’ rights and definitely weaken trade unions.What progressive forces have to work-at is a platform to fight the fragmentation of HR. In the end, by necessity, we have to fight together to re-dynamize and re-politicize our societies, away from neoliberalism. (Francine Mestrum)
5. As this Reader has often said, all too often, economic ‘freedom’ boils down to the ‘freedom’ of business interests to trample on the weak in the name of greater profits, or, conversely, the ‘freedom’ of a worker to sell his or her labor for less than a subsistence wage.** Many on the left have rightly turned to HR as a way of articulating claims for social justice and equality.(S.Wilson)
**: Think of it: freedom of choice is a bourgeois prejudice. Think further: Freedom of expression: What good is it if the other does not listen? (Albino Gomez)
6. The political left’s greatest contribution to the theory of HR is this: if political rights are to be worth anything, they entail recognition of the means necessary to exercise them. It clearly requires the redistribution of wealth and of economic power to the extent necessary to ensure that everyone has more or less equal access to the means of self-realization and ultimately of dignity. Ergo, redistribution (disparity reduction) does matter to HR. But existing laws are too weak or too compromised to deliver any meaningful form of change in the direction of social rights and redistribution. It is no good asking an elite judge, through elite lawyers, to do something truly egalitarian. His (and it is still usually his and not her) class and other social prejudices do interfere. This is why even narrow legal victories can help catalyze positive social, labor and HR changes. The corollary is that, if legal decisions are not the subject of popular political mobilization and follow-up action, they will wither and die. Once they are upheld through active mobilization, they can create opportunities for truly transformative political action. It is not necessary to be legally recognized in unions or other social movements to have political force! Indeed, leaving HR only to lawyers and courts forgoes much of their potential. To make a HR claim is to expand the bounds of the legally and politically possible. It is often also to challenge those in power to make good on their political promises, let alone commitments, and/or to expose the contradictions in those commitments. (S.Wilson)
7. Speaking about power, from their origins, philosophy and HR are disciplines that cannot function by paying obedience to power. Sustaining the existing order and not criticizing what exists is tantamount to a negation of HR. (A. Badiou)
8. So, HR cannot thus be negated. They are the defining issue of our age so that, to be really effective, HR work must be carried out on a global scale, and it must be radical in the exact sense of the word, i.e., it must go to the roots of the matter. (Geoffrey Cannon) Human rights are perhaps our greatest collective problem demanding collective, global action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Therefore, what is needed in HR work falls in the realm of big politics; it is not about better administering what we have, but to rebuild what has been and is mismanaged –starting from what has never been respected. (A. Posse) Key, then, is to address the failed governance that is responsible for so many HR violations.***
***: Note for accuracy: States violate ratified HR; other powerful actors, like TNCs, ‘abuse’HR.
The emerging human rights paradigm: There are no nations! There is only humanity. (Isaac Asimov)
Human rights are meant to hold fast to that which is good, and to identify and alter what is bad;they require universal awarenessso that a majority pays attention to what is right and what is wrong. (Therein lies the challenge of the needed massive HR learning).The over-riding responsibility of HR is to work towards passing-on to present and future generations an improved quality of human life in society. (G. Cannon)
9. The wealth of HR cannot be measured the way we measure the value of goods or the balance in our checking account. Its value is in the qualitative realm and in the territory of the many divergencies about what humanity and human values are or are not. If there is consensus, it is that the respect for others is a positive dimension in life, an inherent wealth, a common good, a part of the movement of change towards another paradigm. (Luis Weinstein)
10. The rapidly emerging social movements like feminism, ecologism, indigenism, pacifism, ecumenism and holistic medicine increasingly value and apply HR and popular education, they validate direct democracy and they struggle non-violently. These new, in good part, spiritual streams are all part of an emerging culture that in some way questions the ruling and dominant paradigm, as well as announces a new possible post-crisis society that upholds human needs, human rights and human capabilities. These are all spaces of hope. (L. Weinstein)[The latter, Despite the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi tells us:“I do not ‘hope’. I work hard to get where we need to get with our movement.”].
11. In the sense Thomas Kuhn gave them, these movements are spontaneous manifestations already operating outside the dominant paradigm anticipating and showcasing the emergence of the new basic, holistic integrated, cultural and political paradigm. The prevailing development model proposesto us ‘doing’ over ‘being’; individuality over an integrated vision of human beings in nature.**** The prevailing power is rightly seen as one of domination, of using pressure and force, authority and seduction; its mood is one of control, of instrumentalizing, of neutralizing (of distancing us from one another). We end up living with a fake certainty, avoiding to seriously questioning our many doubts, our ambiguities, our ambivalences and our contradictions.(Luis Weinstein)
****: Caring for your fellow human beings is a mood to fit into your own nature, not one to be used to fit-in with the nature of the rest of the people. Caring must be seen as ethics and as part of our human rights culture. (Leonardo Boff)
12. The alternative path to be used by the-new-way-of-being-political is to use the new spaces these emerging movements (pacifists, feminists, HR… and all the above) are opening to launch the new ‘concrete utopia’ being forged. In this context, HR activists are here to remind us of our identity as human beings, of our species in relation to others in the planet, of our infinite diversity; these activists are pushing the possible and the necessary, they are going to the roots, encouraging a new needed political thrust. Yes, they represent a new form of doing politics. (L.Weinstein)
13. More and more, social movements, public interest civil society organizations and human rights organizations are not accepting that the lives of their members, their dignity and their struggles, be fragmented. Representing their people, they do not want to see their rights reduced by unacceptable policies that only offer unacceptable minima commensurate with charity. People are no longer willing to exchange their self-determination for safety nets, their territories for meager cash transfers that carry conditionalities, and their healthy and culturally adequate meals, eaten in family and/or in community for ‘ultra-processed micronutrient-enriched’ products or genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). People further reject the public space being governed by private corporate interests. (Flavio Valente)
14. So, to recap: The overall principles that guide HR are ethical in nature*****. They are concerned with our humanity and the values of human conduct; not with description, but with judgment; not with ‘is’, but with ‘should be’. Ethical issues are ‘transcendent’ and so are HR issues. They may be well grounded in evidence, but by nature, they are above and beyond experiment. Ethical questions are usually not addressed by the exact sciences but, in reality, scientists cannot justify or sustain a value-free attitude. (Geoffrey Cannon)
*****: HR may be elusive, but they unavoidably challenge many right and wrong assumptions;HR thrive best when actually practiced.
15. All this leads me to say something about science: The widely-held view of science as a set of specialized, highly technical methods for revealing ‘the truth’ about the natural and the social world is a major obstacle to HR. Modern reductionistic science, now entrenched in the heartland of Western culture, makes it harder for us to imagine with humility and awe how we as humans are interdependent among ourselves and with nature. The task we face in HR work ranges well beyond the classical and supposedly secure scientific paradigm of data collection and data analysis. Classical rigor may be appropriate enough if we are carrying out research to find out how the world and societies work normally. Scientists have been doing that for many years. But when the research question is more urgent, when the world has stopped working normally, and the repercussions are flagrant HR violations, then, step-by-step empirical hypothesis-testing rigor may be an unaffordable luxury, i.e., number-crunching has its place, but as a servant! Directly grasping the context and the views from those affected, in our case by HR violations, is essential. Decisions and actions in the public interest depend on circumstances, and must be guided by down-to-earth judgments. The task is to find the relevant evidence that is most likely to be of value (as directly felt by claim holders) to take remedial actions that literally impose fairness and compensation. (adapted from T. McMichael and G. Cannon)
The UN and its three pillars
16. Human rights are regularly described as one of the three pillars of the United Nations (along with development and peace and security). That makes for a short pillar and a badly aligned roof. UN member states should make sure that, as one of its core and mandated activities, HR are properly funded. Human Rights cannot be promoted and protected on a mere voluntary basis. Voluntary, and particularly earmarked contributions are often not the solution, but rather part of the problem. Earmarking funds –as we see when funds come from public-private-partnerships– tends to turn UN agencies, funds and programs into contractors for bilateral or public-private projects that erode the multilateral character of the system and undermines democratic governance. Member states simply must revert their austerity policy towards the United Nations and increase their contributions!******
******: Actually, governments treat the United Nations like firefighters. They call them to put out a fire, but do not give them the water to do so and then blame the firefighters for what is their failure. (J. Martens and R. Pomi)
17. Furthermore, voluntary guidelines, (too) often promoted and trusted (too much) by UN agencies, are unfortunately only as powerful as the General Comments adopted by the Committee on ESCR. Being non-binding, they are less frequently used by those they call upon to act. At the eleventh hour, signatories find them ‘over-prescriptive’. (Olivier de Schutter)So, then, what…?
18. Human rights are indeed not voluntary. Their progressive realization means that it is not acceptable for a UN member states to remain passive. No single part of government can avoid being called to account for failing to take the measures it is expected to take. Therefore, independent monitoring by public interest civil society organizations must result in sanctions associated with non-compliance for the processes and timelines that have been set or not been set for a progressive realization.*******
*******: We all know there are major actors who are able to block change as a result of the dominant position they have acquired in the political system. The democratization of the HR discourse thus is a necessary condition to affect change. To exercise democracy,people need to own the systems on which they depend –and for that, those systems need to be radically and democratically redesigned.(O. de Schutter) Yet another renewed call for massive HR learning here.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cscuftan@phmovement.org