Human Rights: Food for a thought of those getting screwed ‘Economic rights the mother of all rights’
HRR 826
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This Reader is about why economic rights should determine civil, political, social and cultural rights and how the legal process is coopted to undermine these rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. Over 20 years ago, Arundhati Roy saw the writing on the wall! In her words: “Human rights and humanitarian rights professionals are beginning to be regarded with a degree of suspicion. Many resistance movements in poor countries that are fighting huge injustice and questioning the underlying principles of what constitutes liberation and what constitutes development, view human rights and humanitarian NGOs as modern day missionaries who have come to take the ugly edge off of imperialism, to diffuse political anger and to maintain the status quo“.
2. She went on to say: “Every time we fail to decentralize decisions, every time we soak up funding before it flows downstream, every time we negotiate neutrality as a cover for impunity, we strengthen the logic of the system that needs fundamental alteration. I am not alone in wanting to reimagine all of our work in human rights (HR), in humanitarian relief, in development, in social change, and in the environment through a lens finally and ultimately rooted in economic justice”.
It is safe thus to say that economic rights should determine civil, political, social and cultural rights
–Unfortunately, neoliberal zealots exalt the latter over the former four.
3. Yet common sense tells us that for anyone to truly enjoy political, civil, social and cultural rights, the individual must be actively enjoying his/her economic rights. This is because, people rendered economically underprivileged have proven, time and again, that they cannot enjoy the rights provided in the constitutions* of their states, precisely because they are too poor to demand them. (Tersoo Nande)
*: The rules of law derive from the Constitution, from international treaties, from statutes, from regulations, and from case law (jurisprudence), right?. Their source, in theory, is popular sovereignty, i.e., the voice of the Polis, the people. But Marx already viewed the law as an instrument of class domination, designed to serve the interests of the ruling classes. The law, therefore, is contestable in the class struggle. (Louis Casado) Furthermore, the law is never innocent of the society that gave birth to it (Boutros Ghali) considering that neoliberal constitutions were designed so that the market cannot be touched even if citizens wanted to touch it.
Just ponder: Without fundamental economic transformation, the legal process is co-opted (Esteban Gonzalez P.)
–“In my first year of college, during the Introduction to Law exam, a professor asked me if the Constitution was neutral or ideological. I replied that it was ideological, because it expressed a political worldview”.
4. It was an exam. I was corrected in front of everyone: the law was a technical-legal instrument, independent of politics; mixing the two was a conceptual error, and the law operated on reality regardless of who was in power. My classmates looked at me as if I had been disrespectful, and that answer cost me the course.
5. What the professor called technical neutrality was the way in which the law conceals its origin. Modern law was not born from universal reason, butborn from the needs of the market. Equality before the law is not an ethical ideal won over the course of centuries: It is an operational requirement of Capitalism and commerce. The law is not the same as a right. The law is what the state produces and it can be just or unjust. A right is the freedom won in social struggles, i.e., that what the people have wrestled from power through their organization and their struggles.** This means that rights do, not emanate solely from the state, but fromsocial movements, communities and from people struggling. Think of decent pensions, water as a common good, public health and tuition-free education. These demands were not in any code, but they were and have been rights. A law that criminalizes protest or enshrines dispossession is not anybody’s right, even if it bears a signature and a seal.
**: Do not fail to recognize that the power of the people is greater than that of the people in power. Power can be taken, but is not given. The process of taking it is empowerment in itself. (Stephen Bezruchka)
6. To sum up here:
- What happens in community centers, at soup kitchens and in neighborhood association meetings is the basis of rights emerging from below before any law recognizes it.
- The forces pushing from below are not exhausted by an electoral defeat. Rights, when they work, work because someone fought for them,*** and who gives it meaning is not decided in books: it is decided at the local level. (E. Gonzalez P.)
***: In Europe, HR are overwhelmingly applied within its own territory. (Francine Mestrum)
7. For all the above reasons, the work has to continue, in courts and communities, in streets and classrooms, at national and local levels so that the future of HR will depend on whether these movements:
- can adapt to, listen to and imagine new ways forward together.**** (Lucila Santos)
- can escape tired-out/holding-back old echo chambers and move more proactively to reach people in the ‘persuadable middle’, i.e., people that are neither hostile nor deeply committed to HR.
****: Moving forward, here, means, not only broadcasting messages, but also understanding why skepticism exists in the persuadable middle and responding to it seriously. (Akiko Hart)
In this context and with these challenges
Burnout rises and innovation stalls when social movements remain reactive rather than proactive
—There is really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. (A. Roy)
8. I will here ask you two questions: Should claim holder organizations in countries rendered poor continue-to or stop engaging with increasingly ineffective international and regional HR mechanisms? Or should they redirect efforts toward national and local struggles, where impact may be more immediate? (Note that national organizations can still use international mechanisms tactically, but they must now move towards building from the bottom up and support and work with others fighting injustice).
9. As for citizens in the North, they are economically well off and have the time to demand mundane social rights, especially gay rights. This exception has become the norm that one of the hallmarks of a contemporary free society is now the guarantee of gay rights. But in doing so, HR have been reduced to a lower status. Not enough international actors in the North have seen it fit to put pressure on the government to holistically address structural issues, for instance youth unemployment, gender discrimination… No one has talked about the gross violation of HR governments are committing by denying citizens the right to a decent job/source of livelihood —these are non-mundane issues. (quoting T. Nande)
Finally, beware: Visibility without power is exposure (Samuel Chu)
10. Many working within the HR field have begun to confuse visibility with influence. Too often, they have treated convening large groups of HR proponent itself as evidence of power rather than only one of its building blocks. In some cases, the field became very good at organizing and carrying out such gatherings. But we are no longer operating in that environment. For years, activists often believed that international attention would translate into protection. In reality, it only sometimes still does.
11. Under conditions of transnational repression, visibility can also be a vulnerability. The more centralized and prominent a network, the easier it is to trace, map and disrupt it. States no longer simply suppress dissent. They study civil society ecosystems. They watch who funds whom, where people gather, how institutions react to pressure and who is most easily isolated.
12. The consequences of transnational repression are not distributed equally. Large organizations can absorb the logistical and political costs of disruption, building alternative platforms or moving meetings behind closed doors. Senior figures in the field can rely on established institutional and personal relationships. But smaller organizations, independent journalists, and younger activists and HR defenders frequently lose access entirely; the conversations continue without them.
13. All this does not mean we should abandon the global civic space. But the current circumstances demand different strategies to build and sustain HR. In lieu of giant annual convenings, the future likely belongs to smaller, more specific and more resilient meetings built on trust and overlapping relationships. These systems can continue operating when permission or access suddenly disappears. Neither panels, zoom meetings, nor pompous declarations sustain movements! These grassroots organizations survive, because people know, trust, and remember one another. They survive, because advocates continue operating, even under pressure.
14. Bottom line: Don’t wait for permission. Dare to go where you are not allowed. (S. Chu)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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