[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the many struggles for people to leave their comfort zones, fight apathy and engage in HR work from here to the future, i.e., claim holders to exercise their right to fulfil their rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
Why do so many people prioritize protecting ‘social harmony’ over actively struggling for human rights?
—Human rights (HR) are not things-that-are-put-on-the-table for people to enjoy; for them to materialize you struggle for them and then you protect them forcefully. (Wangari Maathai) But claim holders do not promptly realize they are immersed in a circle of violence; their brain too often normalizes the situation. (Alina Narcizo)
1. To fight this apathy, we must rise to the HR challenges of the day through a participatory solutions-oriented approach, namely by convening claim holders (from across generations*, minorities and geographies), supported by activist scholars and practitioners from various thematic/strategic specializations to, then, stake stern demands from policymakers in their role as duty bearers. (FORGE, NYU)
*: Recognition of future generations as holders of internationally recognized human rights: The newly approved Maastricht Principles recognize that the conduct of those alive today has profound implications for the HR of people being born daily and those who will be born decades and even centuries into the future. The failure to recognize the HR obligations of present generations towards future generations magnifies the risk that they will be born into circumstances that make it impossible for them to enjoy the full range of HR, including the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Recognizing future generations as holders of legitimate and legally-binding HR generates obligations on the part of states to respect, protect, and fulfill these rights –but these obligations have to be exacted from the state by proactive claim holders demanding! These obligations do include a) anticipating and preventing threats to future generations’ HR, and b) establishing institutions to advocate-for and represent future generations in decision-making –not forgetting the obligation to recognize that chronically impoverished groups must be prioritized. States must be lobbied to further impose reasonable restrictions on activities that will threaten the enjoyment of HR by future generations, including the unsustainable use of natural resources and the destruction of nature, plus recognizing the existing gender inequality that is transmitted across generations and is a deeply entrenched threat to the HR of future women, girls, and gender-diverse people. As for children and youth, they are the closest in time to generations to come. Their participation in decision-making with respect to long-term and intergenerational risks is a must. It is more, their perspectives must be given special weight in such decision making. (Maastricht Principles on the Human Rights of Future Generations adopted February 3, 2023)
Citizenship, as described by Hannah Arendt, is a prerequisite for ‘the right to have rights’
2. Yes, but non-citizens (a branch of ‘subhumans’ as per the Postscript below) are structurally deprived of many rights citizens have. Such is the case of the right to equal protection before the law; the right to work, and to equal pay for equal work; the right to education; the right to healthcare, including gender-affirming healthcare; the right to freely practice their religion; the right to a family life; and the rights to freedom of assembly, association and expression. Gender**, sexual orientation, age, disability, ethnicity and nationality are among the factors that further block non-citizens’ access to their rights.
**: Gender-based discrimination is perpetuated through restrictions on family migration, their right to reunification and the rights of pregnant women, to name just a few. Moreover, health requirements for visas and citizenship discriminate against those living with HIV, disabilities, and long-term health conditions. (Global South Women’s Forum)
3. Another group that is denied their HR can be seen in the case of care providers in society. So, care has also become an important field in the struggle for equality and HR, namely through plans to transform the current social organization of care, to prevent the mercantile colonization of care, to fight individualist responses centered on the ‘wellbeing industry’ and to build a new pillar of social rights around care as a public good.
4. The rebuilding the social organization of care must be based on five fundamental principles: a) recognizing the social and economic value of care work (paid and unpaid), as well as the HR to care; b) rewarding and remunerating care work with equal pay for work of equal value, ensuring decent working conditions and comprehensive social protection; c) reducing the burden of unpaid work on women; d) redistributing care work within families and among all workers, eliminating the sexual division of labor between families and the state; and e) recovering the public character of care services, reaffirming the duty and primary responsibility of the state to provide public care services and to develop care systems that transform gender relations and women’s lives. These five objectives, which underpin a global alliance of social movements, trade unions and organizations, provide a good platform for action and common ground for rethinking the care system.
5. The trade union movement and the parties of the left must give due importance to the organization of all workers in these care sectors (social assistance, home care, domestic services, but also cleaning, personal assistance, etc.) and to their struggles, both for greater social recognition and for decent wages, stable contracts and including the regularization of all the migrants who provide much of the care (in Europe, for instance).
6. In fact, the professional care sector is characterized by much lower than average wages, temporary and part-time work, punishing conditions that lead to exhaustion of workers, lack of safety conditions, high turnover of workers, in addition to the challenges posed by the ‘uberization’ of work, also in this sector, and the low union strength of several of these categories. Basically, it is a question of defending the right-to-care and care-with-rights. (Jose Soeiro)
Does might fall short of rights …or rights fall short of might? (O’Neill Institute)
—Human rights violations are not like a bomb that hurts only where it falls; (adapted from Henri Jeanson) they inflict collateral damage… [So not true in Gaza].
7. This is why HR are at the core of the rebalancing of the state-market-society-nature relations that new eco-social contracts*** the world over call for. Nevertheless, through their might, established elites and interest groups quite systematically oppose a more redistributive system as the one the progressive realization of HR calls for, i.e., investing maximum available resources in advancing HR, notably social protection,**** universal education and healthcare, food, housing, as well as delivering an adequate standard of living to all. (Volker Türk)
***: Human rights must thus play a role in assessing and sanctioning upcoming social contracts by pitching its well-established framework against eco-social contracts that do advance social justice and HR and distinguish them from unequal social contracts that actually do not meet this objective. (Sylvain Aubry et al)
****: But social protection provides compensatory assistance only to those who have been ‘left behind’; it responds-to, rather than prevents the exclusion of people. The focus is on alleviating poverty rather than narrowing the gap between the rich and those (being) rendered and kept poor by the former. This is not the social protection HR calls for.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
—In capitalist societies, the suffering of subhumans is treated in a totally different way from that of humans. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
—Dehumanizing the adversary is in the ABC of dictatorships. The Nazis did it with the Untermenschen (the subhumans). (Daniel Matamala)
Suffering is one of the most profound and disturbing human experiences. Depending on its severity, it is considered a real, physical and/or moral evil dangerous to life, because it threatens physical and/or psychic integrity; it jeopardizes self-esteem and self-control; it makes joy impossible. In short, it is an abysmal and alienating nonsense that diminishes the humanity of the suffering human. Neoliberalism has made both individual and collective suffering more visible and has dramatized them as calamities, as spectacles and even as business opportunities. What is the relationship between individual and collective suffering? The latter is conceived as a social pathology or as a negative social experience that is often invisible, and it is necessary to give it visibility because, in addition, the idea of suffering is associated with pathology, damage, crisis, personal and collective degradation, alienation of the self and dependence. The fundamental question people ask themselves is: why me? (in the case of individual suffering) or why us? (in the case of collective suffering) But the capacity to suffer is also a condition for resisting exploitation and cruelty in spite of the fact that the media trivialize the suffering of subhumans into a fleeting, transient state —as a media spectacle. (B. de Sousa Santos)
—Does the above prove the utter incapacity of every wo/man to truly share in the suffering that s/he cannot see?
The banality of life can get you through the days without trouble, especially once you have formed longstanding habits. And since habits are precisely what makes life not particularly exciting, whatever social problems surround you leave you unmoved and prevents you from joining protests or taking the steps the situation calls-for. (Does this include an aversion to talk about and act-upon HR and a reluctance to join claim holders as they claim their rights?). To start with, at all times, you have to find and speak the right words –not waiting until you reach the advanced ‘age of wisdom’. Realize that you can always do what has to be done by scaling up from thoughts to deeds. Here is a call for you to take a stand.***** (Albert Camus, The Plague) I only wish all this were as simple…
*****: Many fledgling moralists go about proclaiming there is nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. Their certitude that a fight must not be put-up and that this calls for bowing down has nothing admirable about it; it is merely logical when you are, well, a fledgling moralist… (A. Camus)