Needs are met or satisfied. Rights are realized (respected, protected, facilitated and fulfilled). Needs do not imply duties or obligations, although they may generate promises. Rights always imply correlative duties…
For claim-holders to build their capacity is for people to understand their rights, to claim them and to contribute to realizing them. Claim-holders simply have to hold duty-bearers accountable and,…
For decades the ‘Development School’ and the ‘Human Rights (HR) School’ had progressed in a parallel manner with very limited exchange and interaction. It is only recently that both schools…
At the risk of sounding panfletary, I think the (mostly normative) elements that could begin making our work yield more potentially sustainable and equitable outcomes are the following: (presented in…
Sustainable development is about processes of popular enrichment, empowerment and participation that our technocratic, project-oriented view has simply failed to accommodate. Unfortunately, difficult problems have the power of leading us…
Discrimination against women (and minorities) is still common in countries that have undergone significant economic growth where one would have expected these groups’ rights to also have improved. . The…
To make sense of current world problems, we too often fall back on a “shish-kebab mentality”. This much easier and convenient approach looks at the various problems affecting the world…
A word of caution is called for at this point on the issue of what I call “pseudo-basic intervention techniques or approaches” that many of us have advocated-for at one…
As I had said earlier, factors such as foreign debt, international and national income maldistribution, the exploitation of the primary (agricultural) sector, the commoditization of agriculture, overt or hidden un-…
Given the present conditions, the outlook for quantum changes in the human rights (HR) situation in the world appears to be limited, but certainly not hopeless. The room left for…