Human Rights and Human Security
-The respect of the rights of others is what peace is all about.
-At a minimum, human security means freedom from violence and from the fear of violence. Unlike the more traditional concept of national security –which focuses on defending borders from external military threats– human security is concerned with the security of individuals.
25. The United Nations Development Program first drew global attention to the concept in its 1994 Human Development Report. The report’s broad definition of human security encompasses everything that constitutes freedom from want and freedom from fear.
26. Human security is indebted to the human rights (HR) tradition. The human security model can be seen to have drawn upon ideas and concepts fundamental to the HR tradition. Both approaches use the individual as the main referent and both argue that a wide range of issues (i.e. civil rights, cultural identity, access to education and health care) are fundamental to human dignity.* A major difference between the two models is found in their approach to addressing threats to human dignity and survival. While the HR framework takes an approach based on HR covenants, the human security framework adopts flexible and issue-specific approaches, to make them work at local, national or international levels as fits the specific needs.
*: Dignity is the enemy of charity (which in HR work we consider a sin); pride is no sin; pride is actually pure dignity. Pride is not a right; dignity is. (Carlos Fuentes) The basic demand for dignity is a demand shared by all in this world. (La Via Campesina)
27. Some human security advocates argue that the goal of human security should be to build upon and strengthen the existing global human rights legal framework. However, other advocates view the human rights legal framework as part of the global insecurity problem and believe that a human security approach should propel us to move above and beyond the more legal approach to get at the underlying sources of inequality and violence that are the root causes of insecurity in today’s world. (Human Security Research Group, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC, Canada — http://bit.ly/VQiKgQ and Wikipedia)
28. The concept of human security challenges a number of widely held assumptions about violence, war and conflict. Human security is the combination of threats associated with war, civil war, genocide, and the displacement of populations.
29. Human security and national security should be –and often are– mutually reinforcing. But secure states do not automatically mean secure people. Indeed, during the last 100 years, far more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies!
30. All proponents of human security agree that the individual should be the focus of security. However, consensus breaks down over exactly which threats to the individual should be addressed as human security issues.
Among the threats that have been proposed, sexual violence and violence against women and children, especially during war and conflict figure prominently (and armed conflict can be State-based and often persistent; it can also be non-State-based with deadly assaults on civilians).
The post 2015 outlook
31. Entrenched discrimination continues to force hundreds of millions into marginalization, exclusion and deprivation particularly where:
• the rules of the game are written by the powerful, for the powerful;
• the capacity to aspire is suffocated already at birth, or degraded over time through social conditioning;
• opportunities are denied by the willful intent or passive effect of public policy choices.
32. What does the international HR framework say about inequality and what does this mean for the post-2015 development agenda? On these two counts: A lot! No vision or measurement of human progress can be complete without an analysis and tracking of who is winning and who is losing in the quest for development.
33. I am troubled by how often international commitments –such as the MDGs– are concluded without proper regard to (or even mention of) existing and legally binding agreements that address the same or very similar subjects.
34. HR treaties call for more than mere equality of opportunity –or similar-treatment-for-all. Treating all persons equally in formal terms can literally be a death sentence to those laboring silently, daily, under the yoke of structural discrimination. We are taking of equality of results.
35. Rather, HR treaties require the active dismantling of discriminatory barriers to social, economic and political freedoms and rights plus special measures to level the playing field.
36. It simply does not matter what promises member States make in 2015, if there are not adequate incentives and mechanisms of accountability to ensure that those commitments will indeed be translated into real and durable action. Accountability for post-2015 commitments must be anchored in the already existing, specific, obligations that are inscribed in our HR treaties. To ignore these treaties is to undermine them.
37. New post-2015 goals that will eventually aim to be universal, that will center on the overall goal of equality and that will be framed by HR will indeed enhance the moral resonance, the mobilizing force, the sustainability and the impact of post-2015 commitments.
38. No new development agenda will eliminate, entirely, a problem as profoundly ingrained as the scourge of structural discrimination if injustice of this kind is not brought to the surface wherever and whenever it occurs. (Navi Pillay, UNHCR)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org