The new UN human rights approach... (6)
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WHAT DOES THE NEW UN HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH BRING TO THE STRUGGLE OF
THE POOR?
Part 5
The participation factor in Human Rights
41. Getting Human Rights implemented means not only engaging develop-
ment agencies, but also the government. For the latter to happen, the
people (those whose Human Rights are being violated every day) will
have to be mobilized, and that is a political decision.
42. While there is a fair spectrum of policies, legislation, struc-
tures and programs pertaining to the realization of Human Rights al-
ready out there, there are still many people who do not receive these
basic rights. Human Rights are not yet being applied for many. We
thus need social mobilization efforts of a more aggressive type to
fight for the enforcement of such rights. (28)
43. Under the existing Human Rights Covenants, it is one of the
state's obligations to actually facilitate the mobilization of civil
society, to make them powerful actors in the process. But we all know
the difference between doing and paying lip service.
44. Therefore, fostering a viable civil society is key for pressuring
governments into doing what they solemnly signed and are supposed to
do in the first place.
45. In the process, capacity building alone is not enough. We need to
empower people along the lines of their rights being upheld.
46. All this, because only when those living in poverty are under-
stood by all to be the most effective analysts of their own problems
and agents of their own solutions is it possible to formulate effec-
tive and sustainable interventions. (19)
47. In short, to succeed, we need citizens action in a broad two-way
consultative process aimed at enforcing Human Rights. (5)
The use of indicators in Human Rights work
48. Tools need to be developed to assess the impact of Human Rights.
49. Under the new paradigm, activists in every country must demand
verifiable benchmarks be set to monitor the evolving status of peo-
ple's rights; and they also will have to struggle for the adoption of
a framework law to be used as a major instrument to implement the na-
tional Human Rights strategy. (16)
50. On the other hand, a responsible research community also has much
to offer, particularly in terms of collecting information on rights
violations and feeding the same back to communities directly. (11)
51. They also need to again reanalyse all the information stored in
official data banks of routine data collection systems to try to re-
interpret that information from a Human Rights perspective, i.e. dis-
aggregating it by gender, socio-economic group and other pertinent
parameters that can uncover flagrant or hidden inequities and Human
Rights violations.
52. An example can illustrate this need for reinterpretation: We can
no longer celebrate growths in GNP/capita while nutritional status is
not improving -- and using that to argue that malnutrition is not
significantly a poverty (or income) related issue... As it turns out,
child malnutrition can and should be used as a prime indicator to
monitor Human Rights violations. Stunting is a good poverty indicator
as is the percentage of household income spent on food. (29, 30)
Claudio Schuftan
Hanoi, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
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We have to begin thinking in Human Rights terms! Collect and share
these segments.
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