Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and rights. (Wendell Berry)
- Utopian ideals are the bedrock of human rights. Human rights are the birthright of everyone: no one has the right to deny them, and everyone has the right to fight for her or his own rights.
- Human rights are respected when everyone has food, shelter, education and health care (–and the poor effectively claim these rights).
- Most victims of ‘structural violence’ do have rights…on paper. (Voting in elections is a very weak and almost symbolic act of people exercising their rights as claim holders). The right to vote has not protected the poor from dying (preventable) premature deaths.
- The right to survive is being trampled-on in an age of great affluence. Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect; they are symptoms of deeper ‘pathologies of power’ and are linked to social conditions that determine who will suffer abuse and who will be spared.
- In each local context, it is thus the social forces at work that structure the risk of most forms of human rights violations.
- Far too many human rights violations are committed in the name of protecting and promoting some variant of the free market ideology. Because of that, the weekly harvest of human rights violations undermines the best of optimisms.
- It is astonishing how ideology is used to conceal or even justify assaults on human dignity…and such assaults are not haphazard.
- Human rights violations somehow fail to draw on our deeper understanding of the social (economic and political) determinants of the wide variety of ills (and abuses) we see –this lending them a random appearance when, in fact, they are a highly predictable set of outcomes.
- So far, human rights scholarship has largely been more the province of lawyers and judicial experts than of academics; (mostly) legal documents and legal scholarship have dominated the human rights literature. But it is difficult to find a (positive) correlation (between the) steep rise in the publication of human rights documents and a statistically significant drop in the number of human rights abuses.
- It is the present social and economic structures that foist injustice and exploit people; so the question is: since laws designed to protect human rights are not neutral at all, what additional measures have to be taken?
- The struggle to impose a human rights (development) paradigm is one measure; searching for the mechanisms and conditions that generate human rights violations is another. (But these are not the only ones).
- The task at hand is to identify the forces (and individuals responsible for each major) human rights violation (–and these are weighed differently in each local setting). In this context, analysis means bringing out the truth, no matter how embarrassing. Merely telling the truth often calls for extensive research. Telling who did what to whom and where and when indeed becomes a complicated affair.
- In the past, the human rights community has defined its mission narrowly; some issues are (selectively) ignored; the gaze, for example, is too often diverted from structural violence; (outside observers) look away from its (root causes and) effects, avoiding to look at power issues to understand human rights abuses.
- (But the plain truth is that) no honest assessment of the current state of human rights can omit an analysis of (the root causes of) structural violence.
- Human rights abuses are best understood from the point of view of the poor. It is mostly them who are the victims and they have too little voice, let alone rights.
- The poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed. The more there are suffering human beings, the more neutral their suffering appears. A wall between the rich and the poor avoids the poor ‘annoying’ the rich; they die in the silence of history. (Pablo Richard)
- Only through a careful analysis of the growing international inequalities will we understand the processes that structure social and economic rights locally. Human rights are, (first and) fundamentally, transnational in nature.
- To explain human rights, one has to embed them in the larger context of culture, history and the prevailing political economy. We must not fail to study human rights abuses; but we cannot study them out of context. We thus have to move beyond good (proximal or outcome) analysis.
- We (simply) cannot avoid (participatorily) examining the political economy of the human rights violations we investigate. (This is easier said than done, because) the institutions we work-in put sharp limits on (any type of) activism.
- Invoking ‘cultural differences’ is one of several ways to explain away assaults on dignity and on human rights. As may be expedient, oppressive practices are said to be part of ‘the local culture’. These are analytic vices we have to combat. Culture only has a very limited role in explaining the distribution of human rights violations. Culture per-se does not explain human rights violations –it may, at worst, furnish an alibi.
- So, we need to ground our understanding of human rights violations in the broader analyses of power and social inequality. Human rights violations are, as said, the result of pathologies of power.
- Injustice (in the world) goes too deep to be responsive to palliatives. Hence we speak of liberation, not of development, not of modernization. In that sense, many quests for rights by the poor have been quests for power sharing, for social-justice-for-all.
- The human rights arguments are most powerful if we really believe that all human beings are equally valuable. Once we believe this, we are less likely to accept second-rate interventions. (But we all know that) social inequalities have always been used to deny some people a ‘fully human’ status.
- In health, we cannot simply worry about poor or lack of access to health care; we have to link that to social and economic rights in general. This, because, as health workers, our work takes place at an intersection of medicine, social theory, philosophy and political analysis. For too long, health has been only peripherally involved in work in human rights.
- Medicine and public health benefit from an extraordinary universally accepted ‘symbolic capital’ that is, so far, sadly underutilized in human rights work (and is largely untapped). (In a way, this is paradoxical since) health offers a critical dimension to the human rights perspective; (the hurdle to be overcome is, therefore, an ideological one).
- The concept of human rights may at times (seem to) be used as an all-purpose tonic (–it just isn’t). Originally, it was developed to protect the vulnerable, those most likely to have their rights violated, i.e., the poor and otherwise disempowered.
- (So, to pretend that the vulnerable are being protected,) human rights has become mainstreamed into the foreign policy rhetoric of most Western liberal states. But human rights is not just an additional item in the priority policies of states.
- Just passing more human rights legislation is not a sufficient response either, because those in charge already disregard many of the existing, but non-binding instruments. Laws alone –without enforcement mechanisms (triggered and controlled by the people)– are not up to the task of relieving the immense suffering already at hand.
- States honor human rights laws largely in the breach –sometimes intentionally and sometimes through sheer impotence. The chief irony of human rights work –i.e., that states will not or cannot obey the treaties they sign (of free will) — can either lead to despair or to cynicism. (Ultimately), laws are normative ideology and are thus tightly tied to the prevailing power relations. Under neoliberalism, policies erode the right to freedom from want. The other irony of human rights laws, therefore, is that they consists largely of appeals to the perpetrators…
- Under such circumstances, states (are not) able to help their citizens attain (internationally recognized) social and economic rights –even though they do often retain their ability to violate human rights.
A couple notes of caution
- In human rights work, moral relativism is not acceptable. (There are no half-rights). The diffusion of the human rights culture can thus be perceived as a form of moral progress. (Michel Ignatieff)
- We too can be implicated-in and benefit from the increasingly global structure that is actually violating human rights. (If we stay in our ivory towers), human rights can reduce us to seminar-room warriors. At worst, we risk standing revealed as hypocrites. (Why?) Because, in human rights work, research and critical assessment are insufficient. No more adequate is denunciation. Knowing carries obligations.
- To confront ongoing abuses is to be faced with a moral dilemma: do one’s actions help the sufferers or do they not?
- So, to speak of inalienable rights and to wait decades to see them vindicated is NOT what it is about.
A couple notes on action
- (De-facto) engagement to relieve human rights violations IS relevant even if not in possession of a tried and true remedy.
- To work on behalf of the victims of human rights violations invariably means becoming deeply involved in pressing for social and economic rights. This, since the absence of social and economic power empties political rights of their substance.
- The fact that we have failed to enforce human rights does not imply that the next step is to lower our sight; rather, the next step is to try a new approach.
38. (Our intellectual recognition of all the above) is only a necessary first step towards pragmatic solidarity, that is, towards taking a stand by the side of those who suffer most from an increasingly harsh and unfair new world order. (But is this enough?) (Perhaps) the world’s best hope is to elicit the (proactive solidarity) of the oppressed for their (fellow) oppressed. (Bertolt Brecht)
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Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City