Human rights: Food for a youth-reminding thought
Human Rights Reader 412
The future will ultimately either go in the direction of the youth’s commitment, or along their indifference about human rights. (Oscar Arias)
And here are a couple bonus topics for them to understand.
Insist on rights not goals
The possibility for minority groups to actively claim is perhaps one of the main reasons for the existence of human rights. (Paul Hunt)
1. The absence of a specific human rights (HR) focus in Agenda 2030’s 17 goals is, as so many keep saying, problematic. In the SDGs, there rather is an accent on investment and infrastructure goals, while there clearly are more negative environmental and social and political impacts where using the HR framework would have been clearly more central …a challenge here for young activists in the next 14 years. The clock is ticking.
2. What this boils down-to is that, among other, the human rights to equality, to life and to a decent livelihood, cannot be reduced, as we now have, to aspirational ‘development goals’ and to voluntary codes of conduct or guidelines that can be (and are) usually underfunded, are left to the private sector, or are missed or pushed back due to ever-new ‘unforeseen circumstances’. (ESCR-Net)
3. If development is about all people’s unquestioned and equal entitlements, what must be used is binding HR language, e.g., language on claim holders and duty bearers, on HR principles and on HR standards –all referred to the respective UN HR covenants as duly ratified by nation states.* [Sure, this is further underpinned by the clearly stated principle of progressive realization –which does not undermine the idea of binding commitments– as we should have had (and did not have) in Agenda 2030].
*: As I said in HR Reader 411: We are not making this up: the vast majority of states have obligated themselves to respect, protect and fulfill all human rights.
Extraterritorial obligations (ETOs) are a sorely missing link in the universal human rights protection system
There indeed are collective obligations from states-in-a-position-to-assist to states-in-need-of-assistance.
4. Without ETOs, HR cannot assume their proper role as the legal basis for putting checks on the excesses of globalization and ensuring universal protection of all people and groups the world over: A challenge our youth should not miss. ETOs also provide for state regulation of transnational corporations, provide clauses for state accountability for its actions and its omissions nationally and for the inputs it provides to intergovernmental organizations in which it participates. ETOs also set standards for the HR obligations of intergovernmental organizations themselves and are a tool needed to ultimately also address climate change and the destruction of eco-systems. (Laura Michele, FIAN)
5. Although ETOs address only economic, social and cultural rights, it would be legally correct to apply them to civil and political rights as well,** except in limited instances where they refer to concepts that have been applied uniquely to economic, social and cultural rights, such as their ‘progressive realization’. (L. Michele) [To begin with, the ETO’s Maastricht Guidelines’ affirmation that economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) impose three types of obligations on states is now widely accepted. They include the obligation to respect, to refrain from interfering with the enjoyment of ESCR; the obligation to protect, to prevent violations of such rights by third parties; and the obligation to fulfill, to take appropriate legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial and other measures towards the full realization of such rights].***
**: A reminder here: Implementing the civil and political rights is cheap (no great investments are needed); implementing the economic, social and cultural is invariably expensive.
***: Implementation measures are bound to vary from one country to another, not least because all countries are at different stages of progressive realization (or non-realization) and have different resource capacities. (Paul Hunt)
Justice/Law: Although both are vital in order to protect the innocent, they do not always work to everyone’s benefit (Paulo Coelho)
Young activists, remember: S/he who was born privileged, does not feel the chains. (Albino Gomez)
6. Given that HR are one way to challenge the negative impact of neoliberal economic policies on claim holders (Paul Hunt), it is fair to ask: Have criminal and civil justice too often become a grand and biased spectacle requiring change? I would contend that it is the judges who day-in-day-out apply unfair laws who are to be denounced; the accused, often claim holders, do deserve being given the benefit of the doubt.**** (P. Coelho)
****: Some call this ‘the futile madness of some laws’. The judiciary also often transgresses the law in judgments in which connections, influence and means triumph over claim holders’ lack of all of these. If these things continue to happen, HR are condemned with very limited right of appeal. For claim holders, justice becomes a tangle of clauses, jurisprudence and contradictory texts. (P. Coelho) (I heard somebody mention the following paradox: When God sent his Son to save the world, what happened? He fell into the hands of the very justice He had allowed to take hold).
International human rights law is to be understood as an instrument designed to maintain and promote the ideals and values of a true democratic society
7. Built on a bedrock of HR principles, international human rights law is essentially concerned with validating the entitlements of individuals and calling on states to heed their correlative obligations. In other words, the main, but not only, focus of international HR law is intra-state; it is for the benefit of persons within the state’s jurisdiction. Our young activists are thus to relentlessly continue reminding states they have to submit themselves to a legal order within which they, for the common good, have to assume various obligations, not in relation to other states, but towards all individuals within their jurisdiction. (Paul Hunt)
8. Two corollaries flow from this:
• Subsidiarity applied to HR means ‘not governing anything at a higher level than need be’. If we think in terms of subsidiarity, we have to ask ourselves which problems are primarily global –then HR clearly jump to the foreground. But local HR actions are as important (although they may not always seem self-evident). Something for the youth to keep in mind thus is the fact that too much subsidiarity can lead to more influence of local powerful interests opposed to HR. [For claim holders, this calls to mind the old adage “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”] Ergo, think, strategize and act globally and think, strategize and act locally. Both.
• Human rights standards offer a powerful, universal and comprehensive normative framework in which to ground claims importantly for tax justice. The duty to devote the ‘maximum available resources’ to economic, social and cultural rights (a HR standard) gives legal force to demands for effective and way more equitable taxation systems that better contribute to the realization of HR for all. Framing taxes as a HR issue takes it beyond the elite-technocratic sphere and into the arena of legitimate public scrutiny, active demands and debate. (CESR)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com
All 400+ Readers are available in http://www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
– I want to have faith and I have it. The best news that we can expect about the major world’s crises is that we have already achieved the ‘critical level’ of a mass consciousness of big chunks of humanity, i.e., the proportion of human beings whose respect for the whole is sufficiently big, and coalescing, so as to bring about a massive awakening of consciousness of the people, as we are, more and more, seeing these days. (Lola Hofman) [This awakening has now to lead to a mass mobilization demanding the needed changes –with HR at the very center].
– Fraternity –as in the French Revolution– is merely an individual human idea, solidarity –(as in HR)– is a universal idea. (Victor Hugo)
– The simple replacement of the word ‘stakeholders’ by ‘peoples’ (or claim holders/duty bearers) provides us with the correct hint of the sort of conceptual-HR-widening that is dear to us. Claim holders/duty bearers is original and sanctioned UN language. Stakeholders is originally business language, i.e., to have or to hold a stake in something is the same as having an interest or holding shares! (Alison Katz)