PHA-Exchange> Food for a thought to be respected

[Claudio]

Human Rights Reader 124

 

PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS EVEN WITHOUT ANY SPECIFIC LEGISLATION SAYING SO.

 

1. Every person, anywhere in the world --irrespective of citizenship or territorial legislation-- has rights which others should respect. (A. Sen). 

Further, human rights (HR) are blind to nationalities and are internationally mandated. Ultimately, HR are value-driven principles that ought to --but do not have to-- become normative and legislative instruments. Likewise, the many legal arguments wielded against HR are theoretically unfounded and, for all practical purposes, cynical. Here, one also has to bear in mind that the fact that something is regarded as a right does not always mean that it should be tax-financed, e.g., the access to adequate nutrition is a right, yet nobody argues that it is wrong to charge for food. (G. Kent) 

 

2. But despite of the above, what reality has taught us is that, even if poor people are informed about their rights, they often have little means to have them enforced. This, because the overwhelming forces of Capitalism deny people, not only a whole range of their rights, but also their dignity.  

 

3. Under current-day Capitalism, the prevailing social contracts still result in HR violations; they are the result of a historically unfair bargaining situation in which poor persons --whose rights are not respected-- do not have (and never had) a chance to negotiate the fate of their situation as equals. and if they did, Capitalism has made sure the explicit or implicit clauses of such contracts lose legal force. In too many countries, the political system simply works with the lowest possible common denominator of social responsibility and social consciousness; in these countries, the limited knowledge of leaders of the true social reality continues to breed distorted subjective presuppositions. 

For example, bourgeois and religious allegories have become part of the fabric of this social-reality-as-seen-from-above --and living in that made-up reality makes millions of people pretend-they-are-getting-better-off (or going to heaven.). This is the true, authentic portrait of a myth. The truth is very different though. Rural districts, the world over, share a common thread of poverty, weak formal institutions, weak civil society, and sometimes of violence; none of them possesses a middle-class of any significance.  

 

4. Many of the so-called pro-poor-policies promoted by Capitalism are actually not based on ignorance, but are deliberately blind to the true realities and HR violations faced by poor persons, especially rural. No wonder, then, that equity continues to be the big absentee in most anti-poverty strategies. Governments and their partners are simply not amenable to come up with pro-poor policies that have any chance of redistributing wealth and power and of ending HR violations. But this is not the full story: Pro-poor-economic-growth alone --even if happening-- is not enough to effectively help the chronically poverty-stricken. 

 

5. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the urge to eradicate poverty is not as prevalent in developing countries as one might expect it to be and as it actually should be. The affluent and rich there --the winners in nature's and history's lottery-- do not, in general, feel responsible for the misery of the rest of their fellow citizens. and they are the ones that pull the strings of the majority of governments.

 

6. If the prevailing political system does not give an advantage to a significant part of the majority-groups of society, so-called 'democracy' is unlikely to work --especially not to eradicate poverty. There is no other way: democratization will always mean that the ruling elites lose power as majority actors gain influence; herein lies the fear of the 'haves' that democratization will have a destabilizing effect. In that sense, the Gramscian view of civil society as the site of the struggle to transform social, economic and political life is right on the dot. 

 

7. The lessons for HR activists to learn here are two: a) beware of democracy-in-form that is not really democracy-in-fact, and b) it must be ensured that more vocal interest groups are not allowed to 'represent-the-poor' in the democratic discourse; organized poor persons groups have to represent themselves.

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn

Mostly adapted from Review of Radical Political Economics 37:2 , Spring 2005, D+C 32:6, June 2005, F&D, 42:1, March 2005, D+C 32:8/9, Aug/Sep 2005, and Dev Pol Rev 23:5, Sept 2005, F&D, 42:2. June 2005.

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