Last Friday’s post “Poverty is not a human rights violation” spurred a very healthy dialogue on rights, including a response from Amnesty International , which mentioned the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
I will not be a last word freak and answer Amnesty directly. But let’s talk about rights at the UN. The UN publicizes such positive rights as “right to water,” “right to housing,” “right to health”, etc. These rights sound wonderful, while not imposing any specific obligation whatsoever on any specific actor to do any specific thing for any specific poor person. It is impossible for the UN or any other body to allocate responsibilities for observing the “right to water,” and also decide who will be first in line among the 884 million people now without clean water. So even if the UN creates international pressure to observe these “rights,” the pressure is diffused across so many potential actors with unclear responsibility that it has no effect, accomplishing nothing for poor people.
What about the UN’s record on the more traditionally defined “negative” human rights, like freedom from state killings and torture? These human rights are a lot easier to specifically address – the UN could denounce human rights violations, identifying the violator and the victim each time. Here international pressure could have more of an effect, because it is applied to very specific wrong-doers to stop very specific actions against specific victims — some of whom are in the Amnesty International 2009 report
According to Amnesty, among those who could appeal to the UN Human Rights Council are:
–the families of the 100 Cameroonian demonstrators that dictator Paul Biya’s forces killed in February 2008, shooting some in the head at point blank range
– the family of Paltsal Kyab, 45, a Tibetan from Sichuan province, who died in Chinese police custody on May 26, 2008, after having been present at a protest march on March 17, 2008. The Chinese government did not allow his family to visit him in detention. When his family members went to claim his body, “they found it bruised and covered with blister burns, discovering later that he had internal injuries.”
—the 49 people the Egyptian government arrested after violent protests on April 6, 2008 in Egypt. The trial began in August 2008 before “the (Emergency) Supreme State Security Court…The defendants said they were blindfolded for nine days and tortured by State Security Investigation (SSI) officials …{including} beatings, electric shocks and threats that their female relatives would be sexually abused…Twenty-two of the defendants were sentenced in December to up to five years in prison.”
So such victims could appeal to the UN Human Rights Council for their rights vis-à-vis the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt – except that the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt are MEMBERS of the UN Human Rights Council. The UN is perpetrating a sick joke on such victims, by filling the Human Rights Council with human rights violators. This travesty is already well known, but that doesn’t mean anyone who cares should stop talking about it.
So here’s the scorecard on UN human rights. On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big. On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator’s side.
19 Comments
Interesting post.
The positive rights that the UN espouse seem to have become a standard working definition of rights in general. Should not a ‘right’ be always enforceble and always available? I may not be able to get access to decent food through no one particular persons fault, but I can always expect to be free from violence and can (in principle at least) prosecute some who violates this.
I think people have just confused ‘human rights’ with ‘human needs’. Elevating these everyday essentials to ‘rights’ is a just a cheap and rather meaningless way of trying to get some urgency into helping the worlds poorest. I don’t think people are any less willing or any more able to help the worst off in society now that their efforts are labelled as human rights enforcement.
I don’t see how you can argue against an entire set of human rights (what you call positive rights) because one institution fails miserably (I agree) in its goal to protect another set of rights.
Let’s just come back shortly to the initial question, if you don’t mind. Your main criticism of “positive rights” such as the right not to suffer poverty (and other rights I guess) is that “the only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator”, and that the rights you target don’t fit in this. In think that’s too simplistic. Regarding “traditional” or negative rights, it’s not always as easy to identify the individual violator as you assume it is. Take the Taliban for instance. Sure, there were easily identifiable thugs violating rights, but rights violations were (and are, in other places as well) often much more complex, i.e. the result of social pressures, traditions, mimetism, power structures etc. I think it’s fair to say that “traditions” can cause rights violations. So why not the “economy”?
Moreover, the distinction between negative and positive rights isn’t as useful as you think (as I’ve argued here). Negative rights, or rights to forbearance, are positive in a certain sense. They need government action (judicial, police action etc.). And some positive rights, or rights to active protection, are very negative in certain circumstances. The right not to suffer poverty was a very negative right during the Great Leap Forward.
I think Filip is correct to say that there is no right without a remedy. Focussing exclusively on a rights based approach is not appropriate when it comes to economic issues, instead the conversation needs to be about what is the appropriate distribution of the state’s resources.
By focussing on rights, we miss that this debate is actually about the way in which society should be structured and how resources should be apportioned – in broad terms you could say this is between socialism on one end and libertarianism on the other.
In our Western democracies, different political parties apportion these resources differently when they are in power. Rights defended in a court of law will form part of this discourse, but only part. Perhaps what rights advocates are really suggesting is that economic rights should be asserted (more)as a political project that deliniates how we apportion resources.
Prof. Easterly,
I am a great admirer of your work. I feel, however, somewhat disappointed that you have given such short shrift to the very complex discussion of the place of rights in development practices and discourse.
It is impossible for the UN or any other body to allocate responsibilities for observing the “right to water,” and also decide who will be first in line among the 884 million people now without clean water.
This statement is incorrect on at least two grounds: (i) international human rights law (and UN human rights standards in particular) allocates responsibility squarely on the territorial state (I will not go into a rather complex and technical discussion on the obligations of third parties who, at most, have shared responsibilities for development); and, (ii) law is no replacement for political process, nor should it be; it should therefore not be in charge of making prioritization decisions. Human rights were not designed to facilitate prioritization decisions, so they not being useful on this point can hardly be held against them.
This is akin to complaining that the US Supreme Court does not give sufficient guidance on how public spending on education should be arranged in the US. That’s not is role, and whenever it constrains public policies, there are plenty of voices raised against ‘judicial activism’.
The human rights obligations of the territorial state constrain the decision-making process of allocation decisions, demanding democratic participation, and prohibiting discriminatory outcomes. But it does not decide in lieu of the political process. And I think this is a good thing.
So even if the UN creates international pressure to observe these “rights,” the pressure is diffused across so many potential actors with unclear responsibility that it has no effect, accomplishing nothing for poor people.
The main ‘accomplishment’ human rights can have in development is to deny a merely programmatic character to certain aspirations, be they clean water, or protection from arbitrary detention.
People do not need to justify why they need clean water, proper shelters, or primary education. It is public authorities who need to justify their existence by showing what they have done to guarantee such goods. The same material constraints that apply to running an efficient judiciary also apply to running a sanitation project. Both are not only laudable political goals, but state obligations (whether the state carries out sanitation work itself or not, is not the issue here, and human rights law does not decide that for states).
What about the UN’s record on the more traditionally defined “negative” human rights, like freedom from state killings and torture?
What exactly is the implied expectation on the UN, here?
The UN is not the worlds ultimate adjudicatory body, or an international police force. It has only the powers that have been vested upon it by States, and States have not authorized the UN, or any of its organs, to ‘implement’ human rights. The fulfillment of human rights, in the UN system, is a State duty, supplemented by occasional collective action and monitoring by (subsidiary) international mechanisms.
The Human Right Council, for instance has a universal periodic review mechanism in which States, civil society and other actors submit reports on the human rights situation in a specific country.
Since you mentioned three, conclusion on Cameroon can be found here:
http://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session4/CM/A_HRC_11_21_CMR_E.pdf
China, here:
http://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session4/CN/A_HRC_11_25_CHN_E.pdf
And Egypt is scheduled to be reviewed in 2010.
I just checked the China report, and no ‘free and democratic country’ — the UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia — ever mention extra-judicial killings. They all suggest that ‘rule of law’ reforms should be pursued and/or deepened. But no ‘free country’ is criticizing China for the extra-judicial killing of protesters. The problem in the Human Rights Council is not the presence of ‘unfree countries’; it is the nature of the process, and the lack of willingness to criticize.
There is no individual complaints mechanism under the Human Rights Council. For the violations you’re concerned with, only those states that have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Egypt, Cameroon), and accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of their respective monitoring bodies (Cameroon), could be ‘investigated’ by the UN (via the Human rights committee of the ICCPR).
The UN is perpetrating a sick joke on such victims, by filling the Human Rights Council with human rights violators.
As I mentioned, in the HR Council, it is states, and not ‘the UN’ that should do the denouncing. If the ‘free countries of the world’ fail to do so, it is not to be blamed on ‘the UN’, but rather on those very same ‘free’ States.
It is easy to lampoon the UN — or any other institution — when you allow yourself to be blissfully unaware of how it actually works.
On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big.
Yet another misconception is the notion that the UN ‘talks big’ on some rights but not on others. The UN has not been empowered to ‘talk big’ on anything, i.e. it has been given no power to actually effect change, just to recommend it. I doubt the US, or any other country, would really like this to be otherwise.
On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator’s side.
And when the UN or other human rights bodies don’t ‘side with the violator’, as in regard to torture and disappearances in the war on terror, extrajudicial killings in Colombia, and so many other horrendous situations, many in the ‘free world’ are content to ignore it. Hypocrisy at its worst. There is no such thing as a State that has no human rights problems. This is one of the cold war myths that we would be well-advised to abandon.
You can’t start off by saying you’re not going to be a last word freak and then go ahead and be just that. You are introducing an element in the rights discussion that is confused and confusing. Rights are entitlements emanating from a person’s membership to a particular group – say a citizen of a country or entitlements owing to their personhood – human rights.
The intention of the universal declaration of human rights was an assertion of entitlements which were not subject to any person/government’s discretion. Rights do not depend on enforceability to matter or be valid.
As Matthias indicate above, you are making unreasonable and what appears like bad-faith expectations of the United Nations. It is a statist organizations operating only in the space accorded it by the constituent states. What are its options in Burma or Zimbabwe? Does it have a deployable army that it can commit at a moment’s notice across the world? A part of the UN’s mission is to develop norms – norms that over time inform how states interact with their citizens.
Poverty is a violation of rights, I was surprised you had to to write these post considering how much you enjoy ‘faux-feuding’ with Sachs.
Human Rights are a broad and difficult to define area but I think the basic idea needs to be examined. When we say “rights” what do we mean? I see “rights” as having the freedom to be treated equally and to pursue anything you want (with appropriate consequences if those pursuits are criminal). So using this definition the right to water and the positive rights you talk about are much more complicated. If we offer up water as an example well saying it is a human right does that mean, similar to the justice system, it should be provided freely to all people? Or does it mean that it should be provided to those who can pay for it? If you choose the first one then the US would be breaking this “human Right” because there is a charge for using water, which I am reminded of every month.
Overall the “Human Rights” the UN should focus on are those negative human rights such as corruption, torture, and political freedom. They should leave the issue of poverty as a separate issue to be handled separately.
If we offer up water as an example well saying it is a human right does that mean, similar to the justice system, it should be provided freely to all people? Or does it mean that it should be provided to those who can pay for it?
The right to water, like the right to food, is not about whether you should pay for food or not. The question is whether you should be allowed (by your state) to starve to death, or die of thirst.
And the answer is “no, you should not”. And that supposes that the territorial state should establish policies that (i) allow people to ordinarily buy food and water on reasonable, non-discriminatory terms; (ii) assist those who can’t manage to acquire food or water on market terms, due to lack of income; and (iii) afford those vulnerable to food or water insecurity a remedy — judicial or not — in order to safeguard that right.
By the way, your comparison of the right to water with the right to due process is quite a propos: (i) in most countries access to justice is not ‘free’, with litigation costs being one of the main disincentives to sue; (ii) in those countries that provide legal assistance to persons without the means to pay for counsel themselves, access to said assistance is limited to ‘serious’ claims (defense in criminal matters, but not consumer protection, for instance).
Overall the “Human Rights” the UN should focus on are those negative human rights such as corruption, torture, and political freedom.
And how are these ‘entitlements’ any more straightforward to implement than the right to water?
I am here to comment on the right to water, not the more-interesting philosophical discussion on rights in general.
1) More people get water than any other “good” on this planet. That’s because water is the “ultimate constraint.” After water comes food, shelter, … freedom of speech, ipods, etc. My point is that it doesn’t make much sense to scold gov’ts about water when people already get it. Scold them about “freedom from torture” since there are many people who do not have that freedom.
2) What’s the UN’s role? Are they going to invade countries that do not provide water? Do they suspend countries for violating other “rights” — from torture, etc? No, so why is the UN involved?
3) I agree with Bill that the UN can talk big when there’s nothing easy to measure. In fact, it seems that the UN is MOST interested in talking big. If they wanted to make progress on water, they would have written a USEFUL MDG on it; see my post here: http://tinyurl.com/683rba.
Bottom Line: The UN has SOME capability to work on governance issues. Improved water quality will follow from that. Since water is a LOCAL issue, it will only improve with governance.
My point is that it doesn’t make much sense to scold gov’ts about water when people already get it.
If people already get it, then no problem. A problem emerges when the government doesn’t mind people going without water (as with privatization of water supply in Buenos Aires), or when it actively seeks, or supports those who seek, to deny waters to some social group (as in the Sudan).
Scold them about “freedom from torture” since there are many people who do not have that freedom.
Well, we can always scold governments for both.
2) What’s the UN’s role? Are they going to invade countries that do not provide water? Do they suspend countries for violating other “rights” — from torture, etc? No, so why is the UN involved?
Perhaps because the human rights standards against which national practices are compared are those collectively established in the UN?
This is like saying that if Congress can’t solve certain problems, then it should not be allowed to voice opinions on executive policies. The whole point of Congress is to have a forum for debate, and for normative standard-setting…
That is, incidentally, the role ‘toothless’ intergovernmental UN organs also play…
Getting countries to sign human rights treaties is a primary instrument used by the human rights advocacy community – presumably based on the belief that signing those treaties will lead to some benefits, including improvements of health and other social indicators.
The Lancet just published a paper which analyzed whether signing human rights treaties was associated with any improvements on the health or social indicators of a population. The findings: no association.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60231-2/abstract
In global health, my view of the experiences thus far is that focusing on expanding formal recognition of human rights, especially to health – does little good. And sometime does harm – see my previous posts on how it can, by accident or design, undermine approaches which allocate funding effectively (e.g. prioritization and targetting).
…the belief that signing those treaties will lead to some benefits, including improvements of health and other social indicators.
In a sense this is true. Human Rights advocates do hope that States will abide by their international commitments. At the same time, most of them also realize that most states do not uphold all their international commitments.
To them, I believe, the major advantage of having states ratify human rights treaties is (i) the capacity for enhanced scrutiny (possibility that monitoring bodies will assess compliance); and (ii) the increased universality of the standards set in the treaty (more countries recognize certain things as rights). The same reason why many people want other countries to enter the WTO: to submit more national policies to the scrutiny of the dispute settlement bodies.
I only have access to the Lancet article’s abstract, but here are my comments on that too:
Human-rights treaties indicate a country’s commitment to human rights.
Only in the sense that prior to ratification, they don’t even acknowledge the existence of certain rights. ‘Commitment to HR’ is measured in terms of compliance, real and effective adoption of measures to realize rights. Signing a treaty is just a first step. Unfortunately, for many countries the first step remains the only step for a long while.
Data for health (…) gathered from 170 countries, showed no consistent associations between ratification of human-rights treaties and health or social outcomes.
As far as I can tell, it doesn’t find a negative association either. So at best this result suggests that treaty ratification has no significant impact, as stated later in the abstract: “[t]he status of treaty ratification alone is not a good indicator of the realisation of the right to health.”
Which of course, is quite a trivial point. I guess that they would find the same if they tested the same hypothesis for ‘negative rights’. Most of the countries that have ratified the ICCPR haven’t improved their civil and political human rights records either. For those that have, ‘institutions’ and income might be better predictors of improvement than ratification status.
We suggest the need for stringent requirements for ratification of treaties, improved accountability mechanisms to monitor compliance of states with treaty obligations, and financial assistance to support the realisation of the right to health.
Amen to that!
Finally, you mention that the recognition of a right to health might ‘undermine effective allocation of scarce resources’. I believe your other post mentioned the issue of the ‘right’ to anti-retroviral treatment for AIDS patients impacting negatively on other health issues. Once again, there is nothing in the right to health that obliges states to prefer spending money on AIDS treatment, rather than polio immunization. AIDS treatment campaigners will certainly push for prioritizing their constituency, but it would not be a rights violation to allocate funds on a demonstrably better policy.
I guess the issue, in the end, is that there are no easy decision rules for preferring one policy arrangement over others, and multiple claims for priority can be based on human rights norms. As I’ve said before, this is not a human rights problem per se, but a political one.
In such cases, economists can continue to provide suggestions on the ‘most effective’ allocations of resources(*), and human rights advocates can continue to remind that the decision-making process should be democratic, that outcomes should not be discriminatory, and that actors should be accountable for both planning and implementation. There is no conflict between our different approaches.
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(*) Of course, I figure, from reading Easterly’s work (and that of others), that it is not simple to find these optimal allocations. What counts as effective in a certain context will depend, invariably, on the objective being pursued, the resources available, and the political realities on the ground. Moreover, I believe that even between economists there is a fierce competition of ideas on what constitutes best practices in different sectors…
I notice that most posters here supporting “positive” rights are essentially saying that they are rights just because they or the UN says so. They aren’t actually addressing your criticism in any substantial way.
Calling poverty a “human rights violation” cheapens the impact of *real* rights violations.
And I strongly suspect that the ultimate purpose of calling the needs of the poor “rights” is simply a way to disguise an agenda that wants to violate real rights of the “haves” who have done nothing to cause the poor to be needy. If they don’t succeed at elevating the needs of the poor to the level of “rights”, then they will lose the argument that society should take property from innocent third parties to fund those needs, because they then can’t point to a “right” being violated in order to justify violating the property rights of innocent third parties.
I tend to agree with April’s post -and in particular her previous- and is admittedly ambivalent towards the application of rights-based approaches. Like I mentioned before, ‘claims-based’ would make a lot more sense to me … speaking from the ground.
I do think, however, that it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that the UN’s Human Rights-based approaches on ground are still in their making. The Human Rights-based approach to water that you mention is at the moment a fussy term which usually requires one or more paragraphs for a less than satisfying definition which even tend to include a long section about what it does not imply …. happening to be the ‘unlimited amount of water available for free’ that you seem to imply.
From what I have gathered, a HRBA to water is about advocating, securing and accompanying people’s claim to equality of opportunity related to water as a prerequisite for human life and aspiration.
Best wishes
Wishes he could edit .. but can’t .. so.
My point being: while the use of ‘Human Rights’ may be semantically misplaced (or a fallacy as an economist like yourself would probably have it
), it doesn’t necessarily need implying a ‘hard headed’ insistence on equal outcome.
I know it’s not that satisfying but, nevertheless, worth keeping in mind.
Calling poverty a “human rights violation” cheapens the impact of *real* rights violations.
How so? Is it impossible to criticize all human rights violations? Doesn’t the US media regularly carry stories about failing education and illegal wire-tapping? About failures of the prison system and about law enforcement force’s abuse of power? Why should we care only about one of these issues, and not all of them?
And to suggest that denouncing avoidable deaths of infants ‘cheapens’ the impact of ‘real’ rights violations like religious persecution is a bit callous don’t you think?
And I strongly suspect that the ultimate purpose of calling the needs of the poor “rights” is simply a way to disguise an agenda that wants to violate real rights of the “haves”
Every constitutional arrangement that includes a bill of rights is a redistribution mechanism. Not only those that favor economic and social rights.
The opposition to ‘poverty as a human rights violation’ seems to ignore this fact. They tend to forget that even among ‘classical liberties/rights’ trade-offs are done every day, and that this is a consequence of scarcity, a permanent feature of life, and not of the existence of rights (social conventions). Even if we considered a functioning judiciary, and adequate law enforcement as mere ‘aspirations’, rather than ‘rights’, they would still cost money, and difficult decisions would have to be made, regularly, in order to find optimal allocations of resources.
Calling health, water, food or education rights does not mean that each of them thereby trumps other rights as a destination for public funds. Nor does it give states powers to redistribute wealth on a greater scale. And it certainly doesn’t tell us how to prioritize or target scarce funds.
Calling them rights tells us that those rights are not ‘optional’, in absolute terms, that their implementation cannot be postponed until it becomes politically expedient, or until scarcity is no longer a constraint (ie, never). it tells us that what action can be taken must be taken. It also says that people have ‘claim’ to these goods, they can demand that their entitlement be respected or fulfilled by government. This, of course, does not solve or ignore scarcity problems. As with other rights, we have to live in a world of finite resources, time-constrained, and deciding under uncertainty.
I just wanted to thank Bill and all of you again for this discussion. I think it’s an important one and good points have been raised by all sides.
I will say that from my perspective as someone who works with grassroots communities around the world, this seems to be a problem primarily in the U.S. When I talk to Europeans about economic and social rights, I find that they get it rather intuitively. And in Asia, where I lived for several years, those activists highlighting Civil and Political rights violations in Mindanao or in the Northeast of India are often the same people campaigning against water privatization, for example, or demanding increased funding for public hospitals.
I’m not sure why many Americans tend to see human rights purely in terms of freedom from fear, especially given that it was an American, FDR, who posited the “four freedoms” – including freedom from want – on which the UDHR is based.
Matthias, your argument is nothing but flat denail. You respond to the argument that there is a distinction between negative rights and positive “rights” by just saying that they are the same and therefore there is no distinction. You aren’t actually addressing the substance of the criticism. And then when that fails to work, you then resort to cheap ad-hominems by calling your opponents “callous”.
And no, not all rights are redistributive. How, exactly, is a right to free practice of religion “redistributive”? Or freedom of speech? Or the right to petition the government for redress of greivances? Or the right to not be forced to testify against oneself?
You also seem to have a problem distinguishing rights from the means that society employs to ensure them.
You say “calling health, food water…rights does not mean that each of them trumps other rights as a destination for public funds”. But then what good does it do to call them “rights”?
You seem to be stuck with talking points that you haven’t really thought through.
Sameer, I think your perspective that “Europeans get economic and social rights” is merely a circular argument. You’re saying that Americans and Europeans disagree, but since Europeans agree with you then Americans must be wrong. That’s not very useful.
I have a problem with groups that spend their time advocating for or against this or that, but not *doing* anything. Personally, I prefer to donate to charities that actually *use* their funds to build schools, hospitals, clean water systems, etc, rather than spending donation money advocating that someone else pay for it and do it.
Perhaps the question might be put another way.
If the UN did not exist, would it make the slightest difference to anybody anywhere as far as the likelihood of them getting improved outcomes in any of the areas referred to?
ef if the money now going to the UN went to NGOs specifically targetting certain areas – eg Amnesty Int or any of the water supplying NGOs, would we see a better, worse, or no change set of outcomes.