Farmer's food for thought
-------------------------
Human Rights Reader 53
[I have the satisfaction to report that the new book by Paul
Farmer (PATHOLOGIES OF POWER: Health, Human Rights, and the New
War on the Poor, with a foreword by Amartya Sen, University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003) sees human
rights along the same lines this Reader has been doing for almost
two years. Dr Farmer's human rights "iron laws" can be para-
phrased as follows (parentheses added):]
HUMAN RIGHTS ARE UNIVERSAL, BUT THE RISK OF HAVING ONE'S RIGHTS
VIOLATED IS NOT.
Rats and roaches live by competition
under the law of supply and demand;
it is the privilege of human beings
to live under the laws of justice and (rights).
Wendell Berry.
1. Utopian ideals are the bedrock of human rights. Human rights
are the birthright of everyone: no one has the right to deny
them, and everyone has the right to fight for her or his own
rights.
2. Human rights are respected when everyone has food, shelter,
education and health care (--and the poor effectively claim these
rights).
3. Most victims of 'structural violence' do have rights on paper.
(Voting in elections is a very weak and almost symbolic act of
people exercising their rights as claim holders). The right to
vote has not protected the poor from dying (preventable) prema-
ture deaths.
4. The right to survive is being trampled-on in an age of great
affluence. Human rights violations are not accidents; they are
not random in distribution or effect; they are symptoms of deeper
'pathologies of power' and are linked to social conditions that
determine who will suffer abuse and who will be spared.
5. In each local context, it is thus the social forces at work
that structure the risk of most forms of human rights violations.
6. Far too many human rights violations are committed in the name
of protecting and promoting some variant of the free market ide-
ology. Because of that, the weekly harvest of human rights viola-
tions undermines the best of optimisms.
7. It is astonishing how ideology is used to conceal or even jus-
tify assaults on human dignity and such assaults are not haphaz-
ard.
8. Human rights violations somehow fail to draw on our deeper un-
derstanding of the social (economic and political) determinants
of the wide variety of ills (and abuses) we see -- this lending
them a random appearance when, in fact, they are a highly pre-
dictable set of outcomes.
9. So far, human rights scholarship has largely been more the
province of lawyers and judicial experts than of academics;
(mostly) legal documents and legal scholarship have dominated the
human rights literature. But it is difficult to find a (positive)
correlation (between the) steep rise in the publication of human
rights documents and a statistically significant drop in the num-
ber of human rights abuses.
10. It is the present social and economic structures that foist
injustice and exploit people; so the question is: since laws de-
signed to protect human rights are not neutral at all, what addi-
tional measures have to be taken?
11. The struggle to impose a human rights (development) paradigm
is one measure; searching for the mechanisms and conditions that
generate human rights violations is another. (But these are not
the only ones).
12. The task at hand is to identify the forces (and individuals
responsible for each major) human rights violation (--and these
are weighed differently in each local setting). In this context,
analysis means bringing out the truth, no matter how embarrass-
ing. Merely telling the truth often calls for extensive research.
Telling who did what to whom and where and when indeed becomes a
complicated affair.
13. In the past, the human rights community has defined its mis-
sion narrowly; some issues are (selectively) ignored; the gaze,
for example, is too often diverted from structural violence;
(outside observers) look away from its (root causes and) effects,
avoiding to look at power issues to understand human rights
abuses.
14. (But the plain truth is that) no honest assessment of the
current state of human rights can omit an analysis of (the root
causes of) structural violence.
15. Human rights abuses are best understood from the point of
view of the poor. It is mostly them who are the victims and they
have too little voice, let alone rights.
16. The poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also
less likely to have their suffering noticed. The more there are
suffering human beings, the more neutral their suffering appears.
A wall between the rich and the poor avoids the poor 'annoying'
the rich; they die in the silence of history. (Pablo Richard)
17. Only through a careful analysis of the growing international
inequalities will we understand the processes that structure so-
cial and economic rights locally. Human rights are, (first and)
fundamentally, trans-national in nature.
18. To explain human rights, one has to embed them in the larger
context of culture, history and the prevailing political economy.
We must not fail to study human rights abuses; but we cannot
study them out of context. We thus have to move beyond good
(proximal or outcome) analysis.
19. We (simply) cannot avoid (participatorily) examining the po-
litical economy of the human rights violations we investigate.
(This is easier said than done, because) the institutions we
work-in put sharp limits on (any type of) activism.
20. Invoking 'cultural differences' is one of several ways to ex-
plain away assaults on dignity and on human rights. As may be ex-
pedient, oppressive practices are said to be part of 'the local
culture'. These are analytic vices we have to combat. Culture
only has a very limited role in explaining the distribution of
human rights violations. Culture per-se does not explain human
rights violations --it may, at worst, furnish an alibi.
21. So, we need to ground our understanding of human rights vio-
lations in the broader analyses of power and social inequality.
Human rights violations are, as said, the result of pathologies
of power.
22. Injustice (in the world) goes too deep to be responsive to
palliatives. Hence we speak of liberation, not of development,
not of modernization. In that sense, many quests for rights by
the poor have been quests for power sharing, for social-justice-
for-all.
23. The human rights arguments are most powerful if we really be-
lieve that all human beings are equally valuable. Once we believe
this, we are less likely to accept second-rate interventions.
(But we all know that) social inequalities have always been used
to deny some people a 'fully human' status.
24. In health, we cannot simply worry about poor or lack of ac-
cess to health care; we have to link that to social and economic
rights in general. This, because, as health workers, our work
takes place at an intersection of medicine, social theory, phi-
losophy and political analysis. For too long, health has been
only peripherally involved in work in human rights.
25. Medicine and public health benefit from an extraordinary uni-
versally accepted 'symbolic capital' that is, so far, sadly un-
derutilized in human rights work (and is largely untapped). (In a
way, this is paradoxical since) health offers a critical dimen-
sion to the human rights perspective; (the hurdle to be overcome
is, therefore, an ideological one).
26. The concept of human rights may at times (seem to) be used as
an all-purpose tonic (--it just isn't). Originally, it was devel-
oped to protect the vulnerable, those most likely to have their
rights violated, i.e., the poor and otherwise disempowered.
27. (So, to pretend that the vulnerable are being protected,) hu-
man rights has become mainstreamed into the foreign policy rheto-
ric of most Western liberal states. But human rights is not just
an additional item in the priority policies of states.
28. Just passing more human rights legislation is not a suffi-
cient response either, because those in charge already disregard
many of the existing, but non-binding instruments. Laws alone --
without enforcement mechanisms (triggered and controlled by the
people)-- are not up to the task of relieving the immense suffer-
ing already at hand.
29. States honor human rights laws largely in the breach --
sometimes intentionally and sometimes through sheer impotence.
The chief irony of human rights work --i.e., that states will not
or cannot obey the treaties they sign (of free will) -- can ei-
ther lead to despair or to cynicism. (Ultimately), laws are nor-
mative ideology and are thus tightly tied to the prevailing power
relations. Under neoliberalism, policies erode the right to free-
dom from want. The other irony of human rights laws, therefore,
is that they consists largely of appeals to the perpetrators.
30. (Under such circumstances, states (are not) able to help
their citizens attain (internationally recognized) social and
economic rights --even though they do often retain their ability
to violate human rights.
(A couple notes of caution):
31. In human rights work, moral relativism is not acceptable.
(There are no half-rights).
The diffusion of the human rights culture can thus be perceived
as a form of moral progress. (Michel Ignatieff)
32. We too can be implicated-in and benefit from the increasingly
global structure that is actually violating human rights. (If we
stay in our ivory towers), human rights can reduce us to seminar-
room warriors. At worst, we risk standing revealed as hypocrites.
(Why?) Because, in human rights work, research and critical as-
sessment are insufficient. No more adequate is denunciation.
Knowing carries obligations.
33. To confront ongoing abuses is to be faced with a moral di-
lemma: do one's actions help the sufferers or do they not?
34. So, to speak of inalienable rights and to wait decades to see
them vindicated is NOT what it is about.
(A couple notes on action):
35. (De-facto) engagement to relieve human rights violations IS
relevant even if not in possession of a tried and true remedy.
36. To work on behalf of the victims of human rights violations
invariably means becoming deeply involved in pressing for social
and economic rights. This, since the absence of social and eco-
nomic power empties political rights of their substance.
37. The fact that we have failed to enforce human rights does not
imply that the next step is to lower our sight; rather, the next
step is to try a new approach.
38.(Our intellectual recognition of all the above) is only a nec-
essary first step towards pragmatic solidarity, that is, towards
taking a stand by the side of those who suffer most from an in-
creasingly harsh and unfair new world order. (But is this
enough?) (Perhaps) the world's best hope is to elicit the (proac-
tive solidarity) of the oppressed for their (fellow) oppressed.
(Bertolt Brecht)
--
Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
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