PHA-Exchange> Food for an a vant–garde thought

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

Human Rights Reader 163

HUMAN RIGHTS HAVE TO GO FROM THE CONCEPTUAL, TO POLICY TO ACTION.

           The pathetic belief in the collective wisdom that there simply is
           widespread individual ignorance about human rights and we can do 
           nothing about it will lead our work nowhere. (Adapted from 
           H.L.Mencken)

1. Since you have been following these Readers, you are now a ‘human-rights-
insider’. This should not mean you are infected by ‘groupthink’. Ultimately, 
you have to process the information you get here and independently come to 
your own conclusions. Of course, we expect you to become personally engaged in 
the struggle for human rights (HR) and that means getting proactively involved.

2. Ideas do matter --and matter a lot. The point is not to ‘wear’ one’s ideas 
lightly, but to make powerful ideas become mainstream. The role of ‘public 
intellectuals’ in HR is less to come up with good ideas --which is hard-- but 
more to serve as a watchdog to get rid of bad ideas and prevent them from 
coming back. The question is why this role takes root and is played out in 
some places at some times while making only ‘cameo appearances’ in other 
places and times. If our mutual creative-anger is to have some impact, our 
self-confidence is far from being safely established yet. (D. Gasper)

3. When our outrage meets ancient tradition (rooted in deeply enshrined norms 
and values), an engagements in a meaningful dialogue often seem impossible. 
But individuals and institutions that bluntly violate HR do need to be 
confronted.  Easier said than done, no?  Not really, if we understand that 
what we are called to do is not just moral pontification; it rather is 
political activism. Ergo, each of us has to spell out precisely what we are 
prepared to tolerate and what is plainly unacceptable to us.

4. You will be happy to read that we are not alone in this. There is an 
increasing salience of the HR discourse within international professional and 
political institutions; claims are arising from many ends for justice and 
fairness. Many more every day strongly feel that redistributing resources 
across, as well as within national borders is a duty, and that redistribution 
is a necessary condition for the attainment of HR. Many also contend that we 
simply have to interrogate scarcity in a world that embraces markets while 
neglecting their negative consequences. (R. Labonte) It is thus a fallacy to 
maintain that markets ‘eventually’ turn unrestrained greed into socially 
optimal outcomes.

5. An ‘illusion-of-well-being’ is being sold by free market proponents, an 
illusion created and maintained by the combined action of global financial 
institutions, politicians, academics, advertising companies and the media.
But free markets are simply neither efficient nor fair; they do not lead to 
and are not synonymous with economic freedom.

6. On the other hand, the HR-based framework pays concerted attention to 
exclusion, to discrimination, to disparities and to injustice and emphasizes 
tackling the basic, structural causes of HR violations; the same framework 
helps us to redirect and restructure our stands towards policy analysis and 
action; it changes where we look, what we look at, the questions we ask and 
how we try to answer them. As a result, HR activists are to be more struggle-
oriented than workers in other development discourses. This, because major 
structural changes, we believe, only happen when we directly work with poor 
people for them to confront the privileged, and do so with sufficient 
strength. (D. Gasper)

7. This shift in our frame of reference is significant, because it moves the 
critique and the solutions from a reformist approach to a more radical 
proposition of a world that challenges the very tenets of globalization. 
[Complexity theory provides us with a disturbing warning that globalization 
has generated a complex adaptive system that contains the seeds of its own 
destruction. In a way, the negative effects of globalization provide a 
valuable contribution for us to glimpse at the abyss
].

Passivity makes us accomplices of the status quo:

8. Activists have to actually become THE change they wish to see in the world 
(Gandhi). They ought to take direct action in their communities to implement 
this alternative HR vision. How, otherwise, would they become the unsung 
heroes of this new era? Without pressure from convinced and devoted HR and 
other activists, the HR-violating conservatism of institutional structures 
will continue. Wishful thinking is no match to the neoconservative avalanche. 
The world simply needs to prioritize people’s rights over money.

9. One of the big problems HR activists face at present is that no effective 
supranational mechanisms exist to ensure the respect of HR by international 
economic institutions (IFIs).  The globalization the latter push-for is merely 
the latest episode in the history of dominance of the rich industrialized 
countries over the poor ones; its parentage extends right up to the days of 
colonialism and imperialism. (D. Banerji)
 and fighting for rights provides 
the needed springboard to move from dependency to empowerment.

10. For IFIs, the social dimensions of globalization remain recognized merely 
in reports and declarations; in them, the issue of redistribution remains 
mostly untouched so that their actions feed directly into growing social 
inequalities. In short, they remain oblivious about the accepted fact that 
social policies towards redistribution are about human security, about the 
prevention of hunger and of preventable ill-health and deaths, they are about 
the redistribution of resources, as well as about ensuring that all people are 
able to use their capacities to the maximum of their abilities.

11. The challenge for the future thus is to find the way to strengthen social 
and political alliances across the globe to address these common concerns 
together --united in international coalitions. (The People’s Health Movement 
is one such outlet: www.phmovement.org ). 

12. Bottom line, a more systematic and systemic approach to HR enforcement 
needs is to be advanced within the institutions of global and regional social 
governance. (Copenhagen Social Summit 10-Years-On)
 and we are supposed to be 
the protagonists in this approach. 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn
______________________
Mostly adapted from F+D, Vol. 43, No.3, (IMF), June 2006;  D+C Vol.34, No.1, 
January 2007; and Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol.38, No.3 , Summer 
2006. 



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