Human Rights Day: Fighting for the Right to Have Rights
Treatment
Action Campaign, South Africa
The Paris declaration then and now
Contemporary development debates are buzzing with discussion of the Paris Declaration, the joint agreement by more than one hundred countries on how best to deliver international aid. Focusing on principles of country ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results, and mutual accountability, the 2005 Paris Declaration is remarkably quiet on questions of achieving human rights and social justice, and the role of citizen action in doing so.
Another meeting of government leaders in Paris 60 years ago led to
a very different declaration: the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the
first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently
entitled and the wellspring for all other human rights treaties and
campaigns. Wednesday 10 December 2008 marks the sixtieth anniversary
of this earlier ‘Paris Declaration’ – one whose principles
are often forgotten in today’s more technocratic debates on aid.
An invaluable asset for those seeking social justice
These principles have perhaps been forgotten by the participants of High-Level Forums, but not by citizens. As a series of research projects by the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability show, the declaration remains an invaluable asset for groups everywhere seeking social justice. Indeed, after six decades, we can now judge whether the declaration’s 30 articles were truly as universal, truly as transcendent of culture, as its architects claimed. The research conducted in more than a dozen countries over the past eight years suggests that they are inherent, though the challenge remains to make them real.
Whether struggling for land in Brazil, for respect for people living
with HIV/AIDS in South Africa or for better working conditions in garment
factories in Bangladesh, the research has found that movements across
the globe are all fighting for the most basic entitlement of citizenship:
the right to have rights.
Supporting citizen action for positive change
The research points to how human rights are an indispensable tool for demanding accountability from the state. A recent series of case studies, for instance, documents examples of when citizens have successfully mobilised to change national policies, often invoking the social, political and economic rights outlined in the UN Declaration.
Yet the research also points out how the call for redress is just as
often directed at non-state actors, as in the case of communities in
the Niger
Delta demanding their share of oil profits from Royal Dutch Shell
or female garment workers staging protests against the working conditions
inflicted by their employers in Bangladesh.
Increasingly, these movements are also globalised – focusing simultaneously
on non-state actors, nation-states and transnational actors, as in the
case of the Global
Campaign for Education.
Rights-based action and citizen empowerment
While legal scholars have spent the last six decades debating a hierarchy of rights – whether civil and political rights should take precedent over economic, social and cultural rights – the research has shown that not only are rights truly interdependent and indivisible, but that in demanding their rights – any of them, all of them – citizens are asserting new identities as political actors, and forging new relationships that empower them further.
Rights-based struggles by AIDS
activists in South Africa associated with the Treatment Action Campaign
and Medecins sans Frontieres, for example, have allowed citizens to
overcome social stigma by allowing them to formulate new identities
– positive HIV-positive identities – giving people confidence
and social networks that are needed as crucially as anti-viral treatment
for confronting the disease.
Rights for egalitarian social relations
Finally, the research points to the vital importance of a series of collective rights not enshrined in the Universal Declaration: recognition, self-determination, solidarity.
When residents of the favelas in Brazil mobilised in the 1980s to demand the right to use the land on which they lived, their first act was to seek to publicise the results of their own survey to show the other citizens of their city that they too were decent, hard-working citizens – in other words, deserving of rights – rather than ‘idle people, marginals or prostitutes’ as the popular stereotypes suggested.
This case and others show that the struggle for human rights is not just about holding states or other powerful actors to account. Rather, human rights are fundamental to a much more ambitious project to create more egalitarian social relations at all levels – an endeavour that does not require the approval of any high-level delegation.
Related Resources
Towards an Actor-Oriented Perspective on Human Rights - Nyamu Musembi, Celestine
(Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2002)
Oil, the Niger Delta and Accountability - Abah, Steve Oga; Okwori, Jenks; Okpe, Mary and Ghitis, Keren
(Zaria, Nigeria: TFDC, 2005)
Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings & Expressions - Kabeer, N.
(Edited by Kabeer, N.; London: Zed Books 2005)
Global Citizens: Social Movements and the Challenge of Globalisation - Mayo, Marjorie
(London: Zed Books 2005)
Meanings of Citizenship in Latin America - Dagnino, Evelina
(IDS Working Paper 258; Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2005)