By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Dec 10 2003 (IPS)

Social, economic and human rights in the South are being undermined by the growing power of the global marketplace, and the eroding ability of national governments to protect citizens from market fluctuations, according to a new analysis from the United Nations University (UNU).

“The Globalisation of Human Rights” says globalisation has been a mixed blessing for human rights around the world. The report was issued by the UNU Wednesday in New York to mark International Human Rights Day.

On the plus side, globalisation is fostering a greater sense of world community and international solidarity. This is seen in the unprecedented collective interventions in internal national conflicts on compassionate humanitarian grounds, according to the report.

There is an international consensus on rights and the basis requirements for human life that crosses geo-political, cultural and religious boundaries, says Jean-Marc Coicaud of the UNU and co-editor of the study.

However, the report also says that international inequalities have become much worse as a result of globalisation, a process marked by the enhanced mobility of ideas, peoples, goods and capital across national borders.

“Globalisation has done more for the rich and powerful because it was designed, by the rich and powerful, to do precisely this,” says co-author Henry Shue, a senior research fellow in the department of politics and international relations at Merton College, Oxford.

While inequalities worsen, international commitment to human rights remains firmly parochial. The international community has not yet shown a serious commitment towards human rights beyond their respective borders, says Coicaud.

During the 1990s, the global community spent 20 billion dollars on humanitarian interventions around the world, including in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia. That amount is a fraction of the annual U.S. defence budget of 280 to 300 billion dollars over the same decade.

Even when compared to Japan’s more modest 40-billion-dollar a year defence budget, there is little willingness by rich countries to spend money outside their own borders on human rights issues, Coicaud told IPS.

“Countries are eager to use force when they perceive their national interests are at stake but will not act to protect human rights outside their borders,” he said.

The United States had no problem going into Iraq because it saw it as a threat to its national security, he says. Protecting rights is not just a moral issue, but is the key to global security, Coicaud argues.

Political instability, social unrest, and millions of hungry, resentful people who can be manipulated politically are serious threats to global security.

Solutions to this are not just military but require a wider vision, he says.. A form of investment that looks after the rights of people within their own communities is sorely needed.

And by investment, Coicaud is not thinking about more trade deals but rather enshrining social and civil rights into the process of globalisation.

The implications of globalisation are immense, seriously affecting the power of states to relieve the social and economic concerns of their populations, says Ruth Gavison, a professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and one of the authors of the report.

The 216-page study cites several factors that undermine social and economic improvement in many countries, including the mobility of industry, labour and capital, and huge disparities in the cost of labour around the world.

Unskilled workers in the developed world cannot compete with wages in developing countries. Production moves elsewhere while immigrants arrive in industrialised countries willing to work in conditions that are no longer acceptable to natives, the study found.

Another factor is that global economic decision-making is “conducted by international forums in which, quite often, the affluent classes of a number of countries decide on agreements that are good for them but bad for their countries as a whole,” Gavison said in a statement.

This creates dependence on Western technologies and capital which increases the vulnerability of developing world leaders and people.

While globalisation has greatly benefited China economically, Africa is being left out because it lacks the infrastructure to participate, says Coicaud.

Most African countries do not have basic conditions like literacy and transportation networks. More importantly, they lack fair and effective taxation policies that can fund those structures and deliver other public services, he says.

Without taxes, countries are dependant on aid which leads to dependency, state institutions that are disconnected from local people and corruption.

Protecting rights is also difficult without taxation that funds courts and law enforcement and other services. The international community good do a great deal more to help, experts say.

One of the first things needed is to review current development policies, which Coicaud says are not working very well. It is also important for developing nations, and their elites in particular, to take a greater responsibility for creating their own future.

These elites have a choice of building bigger fences to protect them from the poor, or to help improve conditions so that individual rights, including the right to food security, are achieved, he says.

“In living behind these fences, the rich become victims and suffer a loss of their own rights as well.”

The same may also be applied to the international community. To ensure security and avoid living behind fences, the rich countries must help secure the social and civil rights of the poor, Coicaud argues.

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