Human rights: Food for a non-mainstream thought  ‘HR beyond international HR law’

Human Rights Reader 590

[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about what a people-centered struggle approach to HR is all about and why procrastinating has been the way that has made HR feel they are expired. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].

-Solidarity is something that is made --and remade, and remade. It never just is. (R. Gilmore).

-Elemental Watson! Course-correcting measures that lead to the progressive realization of human rights (HR) can indeed be considered equally as mechanical systems (speedometers, thermostats...) can be adjusted and corrected. (George Kent)

What is the one element that defines the difference between a proactive people-centered approach to human rights and mainstream human rights practice? (Ajamu Baraka)

1. Any talk of HR that does not address the reality and consequences of oppression has little relevance to claim holders actively engaged in the struggle to liberate themselves. The de-contextualized addressing of individual HR violations as if they were occurring in a vacuum --that is part and parcel of the methodology of mainstream HR documentation and advocacy-- inevitably misses the systemic and structural basis of most, if not all, HR abuses. This touches on the challenge we face when we try to translate HR issues from global principles and processes to local realities. What I am saying is that local demands are neither being conceptualized as HR demands, nor are they being seen as linked to the global struggles of working class people’s for more power, for their self-determination and for their individual and collective dignity. The needed correction of this will only emerge from a practice and reflection initiated from the bottom-up. This is what is at the heart of a people-centered demand for HR. Human rights violations are thus to be located within the relationships of oppression as locally felt by aggrieved claim holders.* (A. Baraka)

*: Human (peoples) rights are not really being denied, suspended or violated: they have ‘expired’. They have become irrelevant and unusable in a world that has changed the rules of the game. Actors in the international community (who is this, again…?) do not really know how to use this ‘expired medicine’ that is HR and that its members purport ‘could have been useful in another time and another world’. (Gianni Tognoni)

2. The legitimization of the struggle for people’s power as an essential task of the HR movement must be grounded in the interests and grievances of the oppressed. Inequality, systematic discrimination, domination and marginalization cannot be reconciled with an idea of HR that is not informed by a commitment to the elimination of all forms of oppression. If oppressive relationships are part of the organization of society and of the State, the task for HR activists is to struggle for alternative structures of power that transform those relationships. Nothing short of this is acceptable from the point of view of the oppressed. Without a radical ‘de-colonization’ of its basic tenets, methodologies and institutions, the orthodox HR framework is unable to offer anything more than bland reforms and a ‘de-politicized politics’. (A. Baraka)

‘The market’ has neither room for social justice, nor for human rights --except for the private property rights unilaterally seized by the wealthy

3. In that context, opposing any universal HR, for instance the right to health, is an act of political indecency. Calling for “Leaving No One Behind” --and leaving hundreds of millions of people totally excluded from market options-- is an act of hypocrisy. The market’s best practical solution is for countries rendered rich to continue ‘helping’ countries rendered poor’… In such a context, the lives and the futures of those hundreds of millions will forever continue to depend on benevolent charity handouts from those rendered rich and powerful: What an indecent and cynical proposition(!) when the sovereignty and rights of these citizens are reduced to zero. (Riccardo Petrella et al)

4. It is because of this that ‘dialoguing’ with duty bearers on HR terms has come to a dead end. The term has become almost as banalized as speaking of sexual intercourse as ‘making love’. One does not ‘make’ love, and much less so through non-consensual relationships. One does not dialogue when one party is trying to extract advantages in a business or an electoral deal without considering ‘the other’ as an equal. We sometimes wrongly use the term conversation as a synonym for dialogue. A dialogue is an encounter of logos, of sense, a search for an encounter, an opening to talk openly so as to reach agreements that go beyond the particular interests of one side, beyond the walls that individualism creates. We are talking about an interaction that opens the road to the participating parties to cultivate a true relationship. Only in counted opportunities can a dialogue reach a moment of transformation. (Luis Weinstein)

The greatest value of international HR law has never been in its formal use as law, especially at national level

5. The primary value of international HR law has been its use as a language for people, communities, and social and political movements to proactively demand respect for their HR and for accountability for those who abuse them. These values are no longer just contestable moral claims!

6. And yes, there is discontent with the field’s professionalization and with the justicialization of  HR** --on top of their practical inaccessibility to social movements. Why the discontent? Because, in these movements’ eyes, the HR machinery has not provided (or provided too little) the scaffolding to frontally challenge capitalism, colonialism, and the overturning of the status-quo that social movements seek, in particular to address the most urgent issues these movements face, importantly climate change and run-away global and local inequality. (James Silk)

**: Rivers of ink flow from ‘n’ historic agreements reached and judgments pronounced demanding meaningful global reforms… (David Bollero)

The useful wisdom of a struggle approach’ to human rights (Christof Heyns)

7. This approach describes HR as ‘guides to action that trigger resistance against what is perceived as the illegitimate use of power, in particular state power; as such, HR are a potentially revolutionary concept.’ Moreover, a key part of Philip Alston’s take about the populist challenge to human rights is for a deeper engagement between the HR establishment and grassroots social movements. Ron Dudai added to that that ‘the litmus test for critical HR scholarship is to ask whether its authors spend time talking with HR advocates and with the victims of abuses before crafting their critique(s).

8. As said above, the scaffolding and the enforcement tools of HR may be (or are) weak.*** But for people demonstrating in the streets of Haiti, Myanmar, Russia, and Hong Kong, for Rohingya refugees speaking out in camps in Bangladesh, and for Black people demanding police accountability and reparations in the United States, HR are not a useless, liberal, elite, or formal instrument that serves the status-quo; instead, HR are a powerful language for making demands for justice and respect. (David Kaye)

***: Power and privilege have shaped the HR community itself. Global economic and power inequities, grounded in colonialism and other historical injustices, intersect with a host of languages, as well as ethnic, racial, and gendered identities and indigenous groups across localities and countries. Privileged groups, primarily white or of European descent, male, and from rich countries, have, by default, controlled HR narratives, priority setting and funding. This has resulted in the undermining of grassroots leaders, advocates and organizations that should actively help shape HR narratives. Since they have not, this has not infrequently fractured HR constituencies. New practitioners need to be armed with the humility and the specific skills required to intentionally change this imbalance. (Shelley Inglis)

This all leaves me with two questions ringing in my ear

9. Reform or transformation? Shall we mitigate and adapt or overhaul our imaginaries? Yes, the HR framework gives us a scaffold for tackling the bastions of colonialism, neoliberalism and discrimination and for rebuilding the systems that have rammed and already suffocated the health, food, socio-economic and other life supporting systems. It is time to rise up from a knowingly constructed nightmare. (Nnimmo Bassey)

10. Lives and deaths can be read-about in many reports, but only as numbers and percentages --all mixed up with WTO statistics of production, costs and markets --this, since the WTO was founded to defend and guarantee the rights of things and of commodities.

11. Furthermore, the clauses in international HR treaties are so often dead letter; …and we have not really dared hard enough to relaunch them in the name of the people. The verdict is already out and is very clear: The universality of HR is a nice concept; it gives the appearance that an ethically justified discussion is ongoing; but it is not. Procrastinating has been the way that has made HR feel they are expired. Let us be realistic and disenchanted. Let us not be a symbol of impotence. We need, not only to be seen as effective subjects in the defense of HR, but also to be able to show results and impact. We have to look back to get inspiration and regain conquests we had already made and go beyond. (G. Tognoni) Le succès est un voyage et non une destination!

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

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Postscript/Marginalia

-Because the notions of dignity and of a good society change from era to era, the notion of what ought to be a right will change over time. For example, there is at the moment no ‘right to transition’ from one gender identity to another. But with the growth of the transgender movement there is a recognition of a wide variety of gender identities. Or consider the right to privacy; this is a well-established right, but it is now under siege by sophisticated new technologies (is there a ‘right to be forgotten’ by algorithms?). And what about the right to health as, wealthy individuals and nations pursue genetic advancements at the expense of nations rendered poor? Or what about when human beings pollute a river or strip-mine a mountain, are we not in some sense violating that river or mountain’s dignity? (Think ‘pachamama’ and ‘buen vivir’…). Passing national laws based on HR raises them to a level of seriousness and permanence that the same laws alone cannot guarantee and thus, practically, fail to provide. It does thus make sense to expand our notion of rights, particularly for concerns that may appear on the distant horizon. (William Schulz, Shushma Rama)

-Human rights, especially civil and political rights have ‘a variable geography’: they are defended by the countries rendered rich according to their geopolitical interests (demanded in Venezuela and Cuba and overlooked in Colombia, Brasil, Yemen…). (Louis Casado)