Food for a thought to be respected
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Human Rights Reader 124
PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS EVEN WITHOUT ANY SPECIFIC LEGISLATION SAYING SO.
1. Every person, anywhere in the world -- irrespective of citi-
zenship 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 prin-
ciples 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 al-
ways 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 over-
whelming 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 histori-
cally 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 presuppo-
sitions.
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 Capital-
ism are actually not based on ignorance, but are deliberately
blind to the true realities and HR violations faced by poor per-
sons, especially rural. No wonder, then, that equity continues
to be the big absentee in most anti-poverty strategies. Govern-
ments 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 pov-
erty 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 democ-
ratization 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; or-
ganized poor persons groups have to represent themselves.
--
Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
mailto:claudio@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.