Many of you may feel a sickening sense of impotence about the widespread situation of injustice the world over; yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective can indeed be done. (P. Benenson).
1. In order for human rights (HR) to be actually claimed, the HR framework has to first be made better known, i.e., only when people know their rights can they actively claim them. This very essential yet difficult task can only be achieved through a quite massive institutionalized HR learning initiative with a bottom-centered approach.
2. Launching, keeping-up and overseeing these indispensable learning and training activities is, therefore, of utmost importance, precisely because we need to set up a long-term-empowering-monitoring system and a long-term-effective-advocacy system for HR that can coalesce into a veritable social movement. A vital responsibility is thus placed on (y)our shoulders: to become a mentor and a monitor of HR learning.
3. What this means is that only by getting international conventions off the pages of UN covenants and into the heads of those affected by HR violations will progress be made.
4. But this is not all in this 60th anniversary; HR also have to be made to become guiding concepts in the common legal order.
5. To overcome HR bottlenecks found in so many laws, policies and budgets that govern the actual use of government resources, we need to look at these systematically and with a critical eye (setting up a veritable ‘HR balance sheet’). This will allow us to we make sure the plans we develop to strengthen the realization of HR have a realistic chance to succeed –quite more so if backed by the legal system.
6. Ultimately, and in the medium term, changes will be needed in national laws in order to bring them into compliance with international HR obligations. This, because limits and standards that fall under the non-derogable clauses of international HR law can and must constitute a minimum level below which societies and their citizens fall into intolerance and oppression, i.e., into the violation of HR…and such discriminatory actions need to be made clearly sanctionable by law.
7. What it is all about, then, is to use the HR framework as a tool for social transformation. Why? Because it is by putting the HR framework to use, i.e., by becoming active claim holders, and negotiating with duty bearers, that people will eventually address the HR problems in their daily life. This calls for actually inventorying and identifying the HR realizations and violations in each national context in a way that leads to the elaboration of a strategy that then translates into a plan of action.
8. To achieve all the above, we need to go from an era of an intellectual commitment to HR to an era of their actual implementation (Koffi Annan);
from fighting for the respect, the protection and the fulfillment of HR in various scholarly fora (…like this HR Reader) to the enforcement and the practical realization of HR.
9. This all will require our developing and joining a whole new political culture based on HR.
10. The use of a ‘mobilization of shame’ or a ‘name and shame’ strategy, mainly achieved with the help of the independent and progressive media, can be very effective.
11. As Kofi Annan also said, we will not enjoy development without security; we will not enjoy security without development and we will not enjoy either without respect for HR. (…HR as birth rights, Boutros Ghali added).
12. In this day and age, does it sound plausible to the reader, then, that the protection of HR has to be a part of the struggle against terrorism? So many just don’t seem to get it….
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org