HUMAN RIGHTS: Globalisation’s Unfinished Business

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Aug 16 2000 (IPS) - A report commissioned by the United Nations emphasises that the time has come to establish guidelines for the human rights obligations of the primary agents behind the globalisation process.

The obligations would cover the realms of international trade, investment and finance, and would also apply to the institutions that regulate these areas, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO), according to the study.

The report, which focuses on globalisation and its impact on the full exercise of human rights, was requested by the special rapporteurs for the UN Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, a panel of independent experts.

The authors, J. Oloka-Onyango and Deepika Udagama, say it is essential that human rights be “brought directly into the debate and the policy considerations of those who formulate the policies and operate the institutions that are at the forefront of the drive for the increased globalisation of contemporary society.” They then provide guidelines for the process.

One of the institutions falling under their criticism is the WTO, whose policies are “a veritable nightmare” for certain sectors of humanity, particularly in developing countries.

“The assumptions on which the rules of the WTO are based are grossly unfair and even prejudiced. Those rules also reflect an agenda that serves only to promote dominant corporatist interests that already monopolise the arena of international trade,” says the report.

“Even its purely trade and commerce activities have serious human rights implications,” a situation that is “compounded by the fact that the founding instruments of WTO make scant – indeed only oblique – reference to the principles of human rights.”

This has been the case even while the organization has “extended its purview to encompass additional areas beyond what could justifiably be described as within its mandate,” such as intellectual property rights, government procurement, and investment.

As far as the IMF and World Bank, the report maintains that their influence over many developing countries has had serious repercussions on basic human rights questions.

Such issues include the right to self-determination and full expression of civil and political rights, as well as the “ability of developing countries to progressively realise economic, social and cultural rights, especially in the arenas of health, education and basic welfare.”

Of the two institutions, the World Bank has made a greater attempt to address the criticisms against it, especially those targeting its “addiction to grandiose projects, its insensitivity to environmental, indigenous and minority concerns and to the issue of gender,” according to the authors of the study.

But the World Bank continues to uphold its framework of conditionality in providing credits and recommendations for reforms to establish free market trade, they said.

The IMF, meanwhile, persists in its practices of “intense secrecy, centralisation of power and denial of responsibility even when crises can be traced to the policies that a country was forced to adopt on account of Fund conditionality,” says the report, with the case of Thailand as an example.

The central issue of criticisms against the international financial institutions involves their lack of transparency and accountability.

These organisations must apply “basic human rights principles – principles that can be translated into common parlance like transparency, accountability and participation,” emphasises the report, which did not exclude some agencies of the UN from the reproach.

Not all UN organisations have participated to the same extent in globalisation activities and their impacts on human rights, point out the two authors, explicitly mentioning the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the World Health Organisation.

The study calls on the two UN institutions to address the human rights issue in a far-reaching manner, apparently alluding to their attempts to patent biological knowledge and medications.

In contrast, the two authors applaud the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) for its “consistent and incisive criticism of the economic liberalisation policies pursued by the IMF and World Bank.”

Meanwhile, the report stresses that the ways the UN Secretariat and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have sought to establish links with major corporations and multilateral institutions “raise numerous concerns.”

“A danger exists of such linkages being exploited by the latter, while only paying lip-service to the ideals and principles for which the United Nations was created and to which it continues to be devoted.”

The document, considered a preliminary study, was presented before the Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, which is wrapping up its annual period of sessions this week in Geneva.

Oloka-Onyango and Udagama proposed further in-depth research on the relationship between human rights and globalisation for a final report that would be presented to the Subcommission and to the UN Commission on Human Rights during their next sessions.