RIGHTS: Advocates Welcome Human Rights Focus in This Year’s Developme nt Report

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Jul 2 2000 (IPS) - A leading human rights organisa tion welcomes the high profile given to human rights in this year’s “Hum an Development Report 2000,” published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

For Reed Brody, the advocacy director of the New York-based Human Rig hts Watch (HRW), the report places the UNDP squarely behind the struggle for hu man rights.

“This report is important because it affirms that all rights must be assured to all people all the time,” Brody remarked. “Too often, attention is gi ven to some rights to the detriment of others.”

Brody’s comments were also mirrored by the UN’s chief rights’ advocat e, Mary Robinson. For her, a rights-based approach to development emphasises “non-discrimination, attention to vulnerability and empowerment.”

There is so much to gain by embracing the right to development and by harnessing the instruments, mechanisms, and norms of the UN’s human rights programme to serve the cause of development, said Robinson, the UN ‘s high commissioner for human rights, on the opening day of the recently con cluded international conference in Geneva, the Copenhagen Plus Five.

And for governments and organisations who thought otherwise, she had a telling message: “Health, education, housing, fair justice and free political participation are not matters for charity – but rather matters of rig ht.”

Robinson called on the international community, in fact, to help tran slate the central theme of this year’s development report into a reality. “This is what is meant by a ‘rights-based approach’: a participatory, empowering, accountable, and non-discriminatory development paradigm based on uni versal, inalienable human rights and freedoms.”

According to the UNDP report, which was released on Jun. 29, the huma n rights approach offers a very useful perspective for the analysis of human development. “It links the human development approach to the idea tha t others have duties to facilitate and enhance human development.”

To illustrate such thinking, the authors pointed to the right to basi c education. “To assert a human right to free elementary education is t o claim much more than that it would be a good thing for everyone to have an elementary education – or even that every one should have an education.”

“In asserting this right, we are claiming that all are entitled to a free elementary education, and that if some persons avoidably lack access to it, there must be some culpability somewhere in the social system,” the a uthors argued.

Also highlighted in the report was the direct link between famine and the absence of a democratic culture. According to the authors, India’s su ccess at avoiding famines largely rests on its democratic political process, w hich has not permitted the government of that South Asian nation to remain ine rt when the signs of such a crisis looms.

Africa, on the other hand, provides a contrasting picture. The reason that continent has been ravaged by so many famines has little to do with t he substantial declines in food supplies and more to do with large numbe r of Africans being denied their right to food for a range of reasons, the authors observed.

This report, which has been published annually since 1990, includes i n its human development rankings for 174 countries, features that amplified its central theme. Among them: countries being ranked according to “gende r empowerment measures” and commitments to international conventions on a range of rights.

According to Kate Raworth, a co-author of the report, the momentum to link human rights and development has been gathering pace over the past fi ve years. “The UNDP adopted a policy to integrate human rights into its work in 1998.”

That has meant a progressive shift from the way the language of human rights had been interpreted hitherto – as a case of “international finger-pointing,” a situation where people expected to hear a long list of accusations, a nd, largely, a debate limited to civil and political rights.

“But today, people are realising this is only half of the story and t hat economic, social and cultural rights are equally important. Access to education for a child and decent healthcare for all are just as much rights as is voting in elections and getting the news through the newspaper or radio stat ion of your choice,” stressed Raeworth, who is also an economist in the deve lopment report office at the UNDP.

And what this year’s report accomplished, she pointed out, was to con firm such a link – that rights and development go hand-in-hand.

“This route – of building rights from the bottom up – is essential fo r ensuring that all people in a country, whatever their gender, ethnicity, relig ion or social background, are treated fairly and all can have a say in how t heir society is shaped,” she said.

To achieve that, the report has spelled out three areas it describes as “priorities for human rights and development policies.” They include the need to secure civil and political rights, for a state to meet its human r ights obligations, and for both state and non-state actors to invest econom ic resources in promoting human rights.

Regards the first priority, for instance, it would mean countries hav ing to ensure freedoms of speech, association and participation to “empower the poor people to claim their social, economic and cultural rights.”

Regards the second, the report urges states to implement policies and policy-making processes that are committed to secure economic, social and cultural rights for “the most deprived and to ensure their participat ion in decision-making.”

For Brody, however, such expectations from governments will only go s o far to secure human rights for the world’s communities. What also matters is that the struggle to achieve such rights “has to be fought and won by people o n the front lines.”