27. DEVELOPMENT AND RIGHTS: THE UNDENIABLE NEXUS.

For this issue of the Reader, I find it fitting to excerpt and adapt from Mary Robinson’s (High Commissioner of Human Rights’s) statement to the Copenhagen Plus Five meeting in Geneva in June 2000.

Without the rights rhetoric (and praxis),
I am afraid we will end up
with a total and uncaring market system
that will not solve our problems. (Judge Albie Sachs, South Africa)

1. Just a few years ago, the language of Human Rights was unwelcome in the work of development. Human Rights were regarded as ‘political’.
2. On those rare occasions when Human Rights were raised, it was often in the context of conditionalities set by donors.
3. Today, the situation is different. Most official and non-governmental aid organizations have now committed themselves to the integration of Human Rights into their work; at least in general. As was long overdue, a new dialogue is taking place, more and more using law-based approaches to Human Rights, and the same have been integrated into the latest reforms of the UN system.
4. The path to human dignity runs not through imposed technocratic solutions, imported foreign models, or presumed trade-offs between development and rights.
5. Health, education, housing, fair justice and free political participation are not matters for charity –but rather matters of right.
6. This is what is meant by the ‘rights-based approach’: a participatory, empowering, accountable, and non-discriminatory development paradigm based on the full set of universal, inalienable Human Rights and freedoms.
7. Poverty eradication without empowerment is unsustainable.
8. Social integration without minority rights is unimaginable.
9. Gender equality without women’s rights is illusory.
10. Full employment without workers’ rights may be no more than a promise of sweat shops, exploitation and slavery.
11. The logic of Human Rights in development is inescapable.
12. As said, rights-based approaches are normatively based on international Human Rights standards and emphasize accountability, equality, empowerment and participation.
13. The question is: How closely does the rhetoric match the reality?
14. Therefore, the focus of the next five years must be on accountability, because duty bearers delivering on commitments is crucial to the advancement of Human Rights.
15. All partners of development must accept higher levels of accountability!
16. Human Rights-accountable aid is the respective responsibility of donors.
17. Human Rights-accountable business practices will have to come to mean fair trade, decent jobs, protected consumers and clean environments.
18. But the will to protect Human Rights must be accompanied by the means to do so.
19. Because there are crucial resource implications, international cooperation is a sine-qua-non, including higher levels of aid with ‘rights-friendly’ priorities, deeper debt relief, and protection of poor countries from the negative impacts of structural adjustment and globalization.
20. Recognizing women’s rights as Human Rights –in law, policy and practice– is also crucial.
21. But perhaps no social phenomenon is as comprehensive in its assault on Human Rights and human dignity as is poverty.
22. Poverty erodes or nullifies economic and social rights (health, housing, food, safe water and education) and civil and political rights (fair trial, political participation and security).
23. People made poor are acutely aware of the indivisibility of these rights! But the same are elusive to them…
24. From a Human Rights perspective, poverty is a condition characterized by the sustained deprivation of choices and the power necessary for the enjoyment of fundamental rights.
25. The social exclusion, humiliation, abuse, rejection and harassment the poor are subjected to –and their lack of power in regard to insensitive local officials, corrupt institutions and inaccessible development decision-makers– all point to the need to create the new mechanisms necessary to ensure that the voices of the poor are heard and given authority in development.
26. The rights-based approach does provide a better response to the continuing challenges of poverty -particularly those not reflected in current statistical indicators…
27. This, because the rights-based approach brings with it a more rational development framework, more complete structural analyses, enhanced accountability, increased transparency, higher levels of empowerment, ownership and active participation, safeguards against harm, and — most importantly– a more authoritative basis for advocacy.