1. Political pressures from the powerful and the abuse of public office affect a government’s commitment to human rights. This is especially true in the arbitrary world of autocracy (the…
In development work, ‘advocacy’ is a word in everybody’s lips. But what is it really? 1. Advocacy can be defined differently depending on the context it is being used-in. One…
1. We have a tremendous underutilized accumulated knowledge on the past and ongoing ‘development processes’ that, for the most part, have been human rights-blind. Allow me just a few examples.…
1. Mind you, we have duties towards people we never know… and they have similar duties towards us. The human rights framework thus basically looks at people in societies with…
Good moral rules help us act in the most rational way possible 1. Human rights (HR) tell us we should take into account others and not only our own interests…
To be effective in reducing poverty, foreign aid must first and foremost be disbursed in good faith for that purpose –without political naiveté or double talk Unfortunately, aid is still…
Understanding history for what it is 1. As individuals, we do not really create the historical times in which we live-in. But what we have to do is to understand…
1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 assumes humankind agrees with the institutions of a bourgeois society. According to the Declaration we are entitled to protection under the…
Background 1. On December 10, 1948, 48 countries signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rest is history –history not to be taken lightly since human rights (HR) are…
1. While health and human rights advocates have, from the start, taken a global perspective on the causes of ill-health, social medicine and particularly social epidemiology have been slower to…