The pathetic belief in the collective wisdom that there simply is widespread individual ignorance about human rights and we can do nothing about it will lead our work nowhere. (Adapted from H. L. Mencken)
1. Since you have been following these Readers, you are now a ‘human-rights-insider’. This should not mean you are infected by ‘groupthink’. Ultimately, you have to process the information you get here and independently come to your own conclusions. Of course, we expect you to become personally engaged in the struggle for human rights (HR) and that means getting proactively involved.
2. Ideas do matter –and matter a lot. The point is not to ‘wear’ one’s ideas lightly, but to make powerful ideas become mainstream. The role of ‘public intellectuals’ in HR is less to come up with good ideas –which is hard– but more to serve as a watchdog to get rid of bad ideas and prevent them from coming back. The question is why this role takes root and is played out in some places at some times while making only ‘cameo appearances’ in other places and times. If our mutual creative-anger is to have some impact, our self-confidence is far from being safely established yet. (Des Gasper)
3. When our outrage meets ancient tradition (rooted in deeply enshrined norms and values), an engagements in a meaningful dialogue often seem impossible. But individuals and institutions that bluntly violate HR do need to be confronted. Easier said than done, no? Not really, if we understand that what we are called to do is not just moral pontification; it rather is political activism. Ergo, each of us has to spell out precisely what we are prepared to tolerate and what is plainly unacceptable to us.
4. You will be happy to read that we are not alone in this. There is an increasing salience of the HR discourse within international professional and political institutions; claims are arising from many ends for justice and fairness. Many more every day strongly feel that redistributing resources across, as well as within national borders is a duty, and that redistribution is a necessary condition for the attainment of HR. Many also contend that we simply have to interrogate scarcity in a world that embraces markets while neglecting their negative consequences. (Ron Labonte) It is thus a fallacy to maintain that markets ‘eventually’ turn unrestrained greed into socially optimal outcomes.
5. An ‘illusion-of-well-being’ is being sold by free market proponents, an illusion created and maintained by the combined action of global financial institutions, politicians, academics, advertising companies and the media.
But free markets are simply neither efficient nor fair; they do not lead to and are not synonymous with economic freedom.
6. On the other hand, the HR-based framework pays concerted attention to exclusion, to discrimination, to disparities and to injustice and emphasizes tackling the basic, structural causes of HR violations; the same framework helps us to redirect and restructure our stands towards policy analysis and action; it changes where we look, what we look at, the questions we ask and how we try to answer them. As a result, HR activists are to be more struggle-oriented than workers in other development discourses. This, because major structural changes, we believe, only happen when we directly work with poor people for them to confront the privileged, and do so with sufficient strength. (D. Gasper)
7. This shift in our frame of reference is significant, because it moves the critique and the solutions from a reformist approach to a more radical proposition of a world that challenges the very tenets of globalization. [Complexity theory provides us with a disturbing warning that globalization has generated a complex adaptive system that contains the seeds of its own destruction. In a way, the negative effects of globalization provide a valuable contribution for us to glimpse at the abyss…].
Passivity makes us accomplices of the status quo
8. Activists have to actually become THE change they wish to see in the world (Gandhi). They ought to take direct action in their communities to implement this alternative HR vision. How, otherwise, would they become the unsung heroes of this new era? Without pressure from convinced and devoted HR and other activists, the HR-violating conservatism of institutional structures will continue. Wishful thinking is no match to the neoconservative avalanche. The world simply needs to prioritize people’s rights over money.
9. One of the big problems HR activists face at present is that no effective supranational mechanisms exist to ensure the respect of HR by international economic institutions (IFIs). The globalization the latter push-for is merely the latest episode in the history of dominance of the rich industrialized countries over the poor ones; its parentage extends right up to the days of colonialism and imperialism. (Debarbar Banerji)… and fighting for rights provides the needed springboard to move from dependency to empowerment.
10. For IFIs, the social dimensions of globalization remain recognized merely in reports and declarations; in them, the issue of redistribution remains mostly untouched so that their actions feed directly into growing social inequalities. In short, they remain oblivious about the accepted fact that social policies towards redistribution are about human security, about the prevention of hunger and of preventable ill-health and deaths, they are about the redistribution of resources, as well as about ensuring that all people are able to use their capacities to the maximum of their abilities.
11. The challenge for the future thus is to find the way to strengthen social and political alliances across the globe to address these common concerns together –united in international coalitions. (The People’s Health Movement is one such outlet: www.phmovement.org ).
12. Bottom line, a more systematic and systemic approach to HR enforcement needs is to be advanced within the institutions of global and regional social governance. (Copenhagen Social Summit 10-Years-On)… and we are supposed to be the protagonists in this approach.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@phmovement.org______________________