Have you ever noticed that when we have a problem with something, we declare war on it? The war on illiteracy, the war on AIDS, the war on drugs, the war on human rights violations (?). We don’t actually do anything about it, …but we’ve declared war on it. (George Carlin, comedian)
- It has been said that the world cannot remain ½ healthy and ½ sick and still maintain its economic, moral and spiritual equilibrium. (World Health Assembly President , T. Scheel, 1951)
This can be extrapolated to a world ½ respecting and ½ violating human rights (HR). Such a situation has high political cost so it behooves us to aggressively advocate to regain the above equilibrium.
- Staying in the realm of the ½s, we also live under ½ democracy and ½ oligarchy –and, in HR work, it is our job to keep it from becoming all oligarchy lest we become pawns in the rich nation’s/corporations’/ individuals’ chess game.
- HR work will win the endorsement of the ruling class only after long struggles. Democracy does not work without citizen activism. Trickle down politics does not work much better than trickle down economics. HR happen because we do not leave things to other people. What’s good and right does not come naturally; we have to stand up and fight for it –as if the cause depended on us, because it does! So go for it; never mind the odds. (Bill Moyers)
- Politicias and decision-makers do need intellectuals (HR activists?) to give them ideas and to reinforce (or actively oppose) their agendas. No political leadership can function without adequate intellectual support (and/or opposition) –no matter how spurious. And our ideas about the role of HR do have power –as long as we do not freeze them as dogma. So, no government must be automatically categorized as impossible to win over. HR-based alliances can and must be forged in our daily work. Only if this does not work, should HR work embark in de-legitimizing raw power.
- Neo-liberalism fans the illusion that anyone, anywhere can become a fully fledged capitalist. Actually, in the free-market-economy, citizens become customers… and in reality, for essential services (and thus for the fulfillment of most rights) prices function as the gatekeeper of access. So, what is the meaning of competition if/when those whose rights are being violated cannot win at all…? But the system trumpets its successes and only whispers its failures, so we get to hear little about the latter. The bottom line is that, under Globalization, there is no fair treatment or competition-on-an-equal-footing both nationally and internationally.
[Come to think of it: Is there such a thing as Globalization with equity…?].
- Keep in mind that, over the past decade, 54 countries out of 194 have become poorer (…and that inflation is one of the cruelest and most regressive of all taxes). (See the IMF’s F+D reference below, p. 32). This is why this Reader keeps trumpeting that without poverty reduction strategies, millions of dollars spent on ‘development’ will do little lasting good.
- Poverty reduction IS the main goal to achieve; not as an afterthought; not as a matter of secondary importance, but as a litmus test of the sustainability of our political choices. It is this test we have to pass. (Hilde Johnson, Minister of International Development, Norway)
- For poverty reduction to happen, we know, growth is necessary, but not sufficient. In many countries though, persistent poverty is the result of persistent inequalities that prevent the poor from participating in the necessary growth to begin with. Pro-poor growth policies, therefore, have nothing to do with economic trickle-down hopes. They are policies biased in favor of the poor –policies that enable them to benefit proportionately more than the rich. So, it is these policies that need to be the basis of pro-poor growth –and they entail the removal of existing institutional and politically-induced biases against the poor. In short, growth is pro-poor when: a) it is labor absorbing, b) policies specifically mitigate inequalities, and c) policies specifically facilitate income and employment generation for the poor, especially for women and marginalized or minority groups.
- So, to pass the litmus test above, a massive mobilization is needed…at-an-unprecedented-speed. The political choice to embark in this mobilization, both in the North and in the South, is the ‘joker in the pack of cards’ though. There are still manifold opportunities for powerful actors to evade their international obligation towards HR principles! With the lose way in which things are still set up, even otherwise powerful multilateral agencies remain toothless without the possibility of imposing sanctions on violators.
- Having understood this, let’s be sure we do not miss an important point: For us, as HR activists –and from a HR perspective– EVEN ACHIEVING THE POVERTY-REDUCTION MDG BY 2015 IS ONLY A HOLLOW VICTORY: hundreds of millions will still live in poverty, die preventable deaths, and suffer preventable suffering.
- Even with the prospects of only a hollow victory, it seems to me many world leaders have fallen in an ‘irrelevance trap’ best characterized by a caricature in which I see the theater director coming out on stage and shouting: “Fire!”, but the audience not budging, because they believe it is part of the play: That is how I see politicians reacting to warnings that the MDGs will be missed.
- Currently, governments are more concerned with inviting-in international consultants and with receiving international economic cooperation than about meeting the HR of their own people using locally feasible measures and resources. The resulting technical assistance sought by development projects has ultimately meant diverting attention from the real issues, the HR issues included.
- Therefore, any convincing HR agenda must explicitly address the issues of poverty, gender and equity. It cannot be assumed that HR are inherently gender sensitive and will promote gender equality lest the HR framework explicitly focuses on gender issues from a rights perspective. But most governments are not politically committed to engage in gender equality beyond the benchmarks demanded by donors! For instance, most of the PRSPs submitted so far do not meet women rights’ standards; they contain nothing more than a collection of stereotyped measures of old-style-promotion-of-women-in-the-health-and-education-sectors.
- Additionally, it is deemed that the HR agenda must examine its contradictions with ongoing structural adjustment programs (SAPs).
At the national level, this means that the agenda is to transcend SAPs to replace them with a HR-based program that is to directly impact on government budgets, their spending priorities and on the funding allocated to pro-poor programs.
Moreover, at the international level, since in practice poor counties are (almost by definition) indebted, balancing their debt servicing capacity has to be done against their de-facto actual allocating needed funds to finance these pro-poor programs and NOT against their export earnings as has been the case so far.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City