Human rights: Food for influencing a thought   ‘Spaces still available for HR’

Human Rights Reader 524

-Are we going to allow the status-quo to continue playing itself out, i.e., continue playing “the game of the status-quo?”

What three social reformers had to say: How relevant today?

1. Following Gramsci, the need to struggle is actually a built-in principle of human rights (HR). It is not the nice guys who bring about social change; nice guys look nice, because they are conforming. We cannot face heavy artillery with water guns. Struggle is also a principle of development work overall: to be is to do. The focus must be on results, not dogma.

2. A social contract (as proposed by the XVII century moral philosopher Thomas Hobbes) is to be understood as ‘keeping the promise’. It, therefore, carries an obligation. Therein lies its relationship with HR.

3. Against the most famous of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, re ‘interpreting, not changing, the world’, for scholars (and for those of us who split our time between HR research, desk HR activism and HR practice) not to be actively engaged is a luxury we cannot afford. What is required for all of these colleagues (and ourselves) is to adopt a realistic approach that embraces experimentation, gradual transformation, hybrid solutions, eco-systemic and socio-structural paths that takes us from the prevailing capitalism to our desired HR regime.*

*: Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. (Einstein)

4. Experimentation, hybrid solutions, eco-systemic and political thinking, as well as empirical analysis and problem solving do not come naturally to most HR thinking and practice though.  The grip of legal thought on HR means that the dominant mode of argument and analysis remains highly prescriptive. Therefore, comparisons to an-ideal-of-fully-realized-HR, as opposed to comparisons with currently existing practices and possibilities, tend to dominate the HR field and hamper the type of social experimentation that is needed to revitalize HR in a highly complex and rapidly changing world. We, HR activists and advocates, cannot realistically expect our frame to become the common universal moral sense. If the past of HR consisted fundamentally in constructing this frame, its future will be more hybrid and will depend on our capacity to create, detect and foster bridges with other frames of justice. (Cesar Rodriguez-G)

The origins of human rights lie in the rather subversive idea of protecting the collective interests of those rendered poor against those rendered rich and powerful in society. (Adilisha, FAHAMU)

-Human rights are a civilizational achievement, a historic effort to identify and agree upon what governments should not do to people and what they should assure to all. (Jonathan Mann)

5. Human rights as a discipline is a coming together of strands of ethics, science, politics in international development work. Among other, HR constantly present and contest evidence.**

**: As somebody said, HR work does not aim at having more and more people wear similar shoes; it aims at having them take off their shoes to expose and face the bare facts barefoot.

6. Bear in mind that, in the not so distant past, the hegemonic discourse of HR was used by self-proclaimed democratic governments to promote and praise the superiority of capitalism in relation to communism (that is for civil and political rights only). According to this discourse, the violations of HR only happened in the communist block and its sympathizing countries. The violations that happened in ‘friendly’ countries of the North were ignored or silenced (be they civil, political, economic, social or cultural rights). Thus was built the moral superiority of capitalism in relation to socialism. Thereafter, a split occurred between the defenders of prioritizing civil and political rights over social, economic and cultural rights --against the defenders of the indivisibility of HR. Then, after the 1980s, global capitalism (neoliberalism and global financial capital) promoted a narrative more and more restricted of HR as the one we see applied today. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)

So, what spaces exist for human rights today?

-Political space is tight, we face repression; economic space is tight, we face exploitation; ecological space, we are not claiming this space as a sufficient priority yet…

7. Just a sample of the problems we face here and now are:

• Among other, our inability to resolve HR problems also represents economic costs of great magnitude. Ignoring the benefits forfeited through our inaction is borderline criminal.* (Joachim von Braun)

*: I remember somebody not so facetiously asking: Do people at least have the right to die affordably?

• We must understand that HR cannot be implemented as a project! The difference between project and process is claim holders’ ownership.
• Beware: The over-legalization of human rights has resulted in losing sight of the fact that, more than a set of treaties and constitutional norms, HR are moral claims about the intrinsic value of every human being. (Michael Ignatieff) …But also remember: Entitlements are not justiciable; HR are (…and this is not an over-legalized statement).
• At the end of the day, you, the reader, cannot rent yourself a social and HR conscience. This means you cannot be HR shy or HR blind.

Human rights work cannot but be prepared to ride the wave of varied, often opposed, political interests

8. As advocates for economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR), we have faced three main challenges:

a) subverting entrenched ideas that these rights are not ‘real’ rights, but mere programmatic aspirations;

b) taking more pointed actions for ESCR to be taken more seriously in laws, policies, and practices; and

c) demonstrating that doing so could achieve meaningful progress toward social justice in the national and global order.

We have particularly failed with respect to the third.

9. Over the years, we have theorized about ESCR and what they implied in terms of social contracts (see Hobbes above), institutional arrangements, as well as the conditions necessary for diverse groups facing violation of these rights to effectively enjoy them. But as we were doing so, increasingly intrusive global economic governance, often in synergy with anti-democratic centralization of power at national levels, has been limiting the political possibilities to realize ESCR. In the end, it is the struggles with these we have most passionately pursued that have defined our lives. But have we succeeded? The vastness of the needless suffering we see is so normalized, that we must consider the fact that we may be hopelessly inadequate in our efforts to revert it. What is at stake is nothing less than what we owe to one another and to future generations. (adapted from AliciaYamin)

10. Most people believe in what they are doing (with the exception of a few cynics).*** But this is not enough. Uncritically accepting that what-we-do-is-important is also not enough. The challenge we face is to overcome the ignorance of what really causes the problems we are working on. (Urban Jonsson)

***: I would like to think that there are only a few genuine cynics in our guild; most people believe in what they do.

11. The mass mobilizations against extreme inequality, like those against the closely-related crisis of climate change, beg a holistic approach to the HR claims underpinning them. Human rights actors ought thus to rethink their traditional skepticism in their HR work with regard to the role of the reigning economic and political system, and adopt a more frontal critique of neoliberal, economic orthodoxy. The protests we now see more and more-of demand that we call out the devastating effects of neoliberalism as HR deprivations, and we challenge the fallacies sustaining this ideology and promote rights-centered alternatives.

12. A challenge for those working internationally is to build stronger links between their policy critique and context-specific advocacy with movement building. We certainly must support the efforts of national HR activists and organizations that are drawing attention to the structural and social rights dimensions of the above crises. There is a clear message emerging from the streets that HR actors ought to get behind: There can be no democracy without economic and social justice! (Ignacio Saiz)

Bottom line

13. First of all acknowledge we have failed to reach ordinary citizens anywhere, from whom we expect(ed) little more than to allow us to document and report their experience and losses and eventually litigate their cases, or to write letters on their behalf. Failing to conceive of more than that for the majority of people, we deprive(d) our efforts of a mobilized citizenry that comes to expect and actively demand HR from those who govern. We focuse(d) on leveraging states to pressure states rather than enabling citizens to pressure their respective states. Gradually, we privileged what we knew how to do over what was needed from us. Indeed, our gravest error has arguably been to imagine that we could achieve rights-respecting governments without a mobilized citizenry. We disregard(ed) the need for movements in our efforts, despite our knowledge of the essential role of social movements in all significant social and political transformations. (Mona Younis)

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

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Postscript/Marginality

-How far we are from tolerance: How much do we still need to change the most important: our mind. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Noticia de un Secuestro)