[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about what representation-with-a-truly-binding-character means. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–‘The Empire’ does not invite: it summons; …whoever it wants. (Louis Casado) Participation will not come from above!
1. With every email sent to parliamentarians, ministers, decision makers (i.e., duty bearers), at every attempt of telephone contact and pressure through social networks, claim holders have felt that none of their messages reach the power structures (this includes the UN). The reason is that the institutional political machinery has excluded social participation and public debate.* It is up to us to jumpstart the mobilization of claim holders, to articulate international denunciations and to use all the instruments of denunciation to stop human rights (HR) violations.
*: We are much better at presenting testimonies and at enumerating challenges than, based on our experiences of actions that work, demanding (not only ‘recommending’) concrete actions, true cooperation, coordination and accountability.
2. Working in the defense of HR, what remains is a feeling of claustrophobia by those of us who see from our windows the regression and the violation of HR advancing at a frightening speed –take hunger, unemployment, job insecurity and the advance of racism in all its incarnations. Today, claim holders’ actions remain palliative and mostly ineffective showing that HR work structures remain fragile. And this fragility must be read as such, so that we can find yet greater inspiration, motivation and resolve in the survival experiences of marginalized peoples.
3. In the end, what needs to be transformed within political advocacy is not only its modus operandus, but in a deeper way, its formal validity and our effectiveness in spaces that claim to be democratic but that, at the first breach encountered, undermine the possibilities of a level-field dialogue with the voices of public interest civil society. It is necessary that, in addition to making visible the current ineffectiveness of the mechanisms of participation (understood as representation with a binding character), we point the way to radical changes in the current participatory structures. (Thaynah Gutiérrez Gomes)
Are we confused about what truly is representation with a binding character?
4. We always say that what is public includes the state plus the community. But the political outlook of communities is not the same as that of the state. And, why do we say communities and not workers as perhaps the most legitimate claim holders? This, since HR issues are ultimately class issues! (including for indigenous people!). Food for thought.
The move from many to everyone is a small semantic shift, but one with extraordinarily radical consequences (Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri)
5. The construction of a genuine public sphere will have to go through the destruction of what there is in the state sphere; simply put: the public is what ought to be central. But there is no public domain if there is not an active social fabric. The latter must thus be (re)activated. There are many reasons for this, but a salient one is that what we have is a depoliticization of what is ‘the public’. Therefore, we need to re-politicize ‘the public’ and for that, we need to organize and mobilize the social base.
6. As claim holders, we will only achieve the needed political identity and human rights counter-power through bringing-in the persons next to us. (Vaclav Havel, Largo Desolato) Be a hero on this! [Blessed is the country that needs no heroes. (Bertolt Brecht)].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com