Quarterly Bulletin

 Social Justice in many ways demands that human rights be respected and fulfilled. In Zambia and Malawi, as is the case in many parts of the world, human rights have continued to be abused, unfulfilled and their importance downplayed. In this article, Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and now President of the Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, gives perspectives on how we can uphold social justice using the human rights approach.

When I took up office as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in September 1997, I underestimated both the degree of the divides and the battles which would have to be fought. I knew them in an abstract way. I knew them from my studies, my reading, from following the arguments, but I did not fully understand the extent of the divides. I found that when I met ministers at the General Assembly and ambassadors in New York or Geneva, I was getting very mixed messages.

Ambassadors from this part of the world, what we call the West or the North, spoke about the importance, as High Commissioner, of being very strong in holding developing countries to accountability for civil and political rights, ensuring they have fair trials and are tackling torture.

But from the ministers and ambassadors of developing countries I heard, “Please don’t be like all the others, please have some regard for the areas of rights that we care about: rights to food, safe water, health, education.” But I also heard a subtext, “We will work on these rights and then maybe later we will give more serious attention to democratic accountability for civil and political rights.” That is a simplification, but the truth is that there was not in 1997, and there still is not in 2006, almost ten years later, any clear consensus internationally about what we mean by “international human rights.”

I speak to a lot of audiences about international human rights. I look at the people in front of me and know that they have different images in their minds. A good many people think of political prisoners, Amnesty, Guantanamo Bay, judges not being corrupt, individual countries like China or Cuba, depending on where you come from. In the countries in Africa which I concentrate on, if I mention international human rights to a grass-roots group, they do not see international human rights as an ally, in fact, they look at me with suspicion. “What will she say next; will she come out with the stick to beat us with, the western agenda of only going on about civil liberties?”

I see the relief when I come out with a strong agenda. People at the grass-roots want both civil and political rights and economic and social rights to be strong. They want to tackle government corruption, they want to tackle the lack of a fair trial and rule of law. They also want you to understand how important it is to tackle the other basic rights: to food, safe water, health and education.

Irish Aid, in its policy for development, is becoming stronger on economic, social and cultural rights, and on gender equality. The Scandinavians generally place a great emphasis on a rights-based approach to development, and on the importance of an integrated approach in development policy. But it does not really come home to roost; it is not applied. I was very aware of this because of the way in which the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has the responsibility to monitor implementations by all countries that have ratified the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, was very critical of most Western countries.

It was very critical of the modern Ireland. Ireland has not made economic and social rights part of Irish law. The same criticism was made of the UK in 2002. Canada got a very severe ticking off, and one of the countries with the most critical appraisal was Australia, even though there are some very good human rights people and very good thinking on economic and social issues in Australia.

In May 2000 I was sitting in my office and a small group of distinguished representatives of civil society from Brazil came to see me. They included human rights specialists, trade unions, faith-based groups, women’s groups; a broad range. They were very upset that Brazil had not submitted the report that was due to the Committee on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights. They knew because they had exchanged e-mails, looked up the internet references, and   followed the work of the Committee itself. In the absence of the government submitting a report, that civil society network had got together and compiled a very detailed alternative report of Brazil’s failure to fulfil its requirements under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

They met the Chair and the members of the Committee and while it was made very clear to them that they could not be given an official hearing, they were congratulated on the work that they had done. It left the Committee better able to put more pressure on Brazil to file its own official report.

When I travelled to Brazil shortly afterwards, I got off the plane with the report in my hand, I met the press, and instead of talking as I might have done, and did later, about the condition of prisons and torture, I highlighted initially that the civil society groups had drawn up this report on social and economic rights and asked where the government report was. Before I left Brazil, I had a firm commitment from the government. I informed them that they must work with civil society and see how far they could work together, so that they not only produced a government report but one that was accountable. The government did so and it built a bridge between the then minister for human rights, (who subsequently became the UN rapporteur on violence on children) and the civil society groups.

Apart from the justiciability of economic and social rights in some cases, there is also a broader accountability. These are tools for civil society; they apply in the developed and the developing countries. Interestingly, the United States, uniquely among advanced industrial countries, has not ratified the Covenant on Social and Economic Rights, for what are claimed to be constitutional reasons. Nor have they ratified the other instruments which invoke these rights; the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In the US at the moment there is a lot of discussion about economic and social rights below the radar. There are many groups raising these issues, there is a new energy just at the time when, almost five years after 9/11, civil and political rights have had such a battering.

There is an emerging vitality about economic and social rights. I am glad to say that groups such as Amnesty are involved in a whole range of small groups, and they are encouraging cities and states to adhere to these human rights instruments that the Federal Government has not adhered to. It really is very interesting.

In my work with colleagues in Realizing Rights we are currently looking at a fairer globalisation with a particular focus on Africa and African countries. Our work covers three areas. First, seeing how trade can work for development; second, working with Oxfam colleagues - as Honorary President of Oxfam - on Doha and Aid for Trade; and third, working with business to develop the role of the corporate sector. We are looking at the right to health as a human right, and at strengthening health systems. I hear criticism sometimes, that “Mary Robinson used to be involved with human rights and now she is involved with globalisation.” The view is that this does not really appear to be human rights, that it must be something else.

But having more of an emphasis on economic and social rights does not mean that you are not concerned with civil liberties, indeed the two become more closely integrated. The more we work on globalisation and economic and social rights, the more I know how important it is in a holistic way to emphasise participation, accountability and transparency, to tackle corruption, and to ensure that women’s rights are holistic, and part of the whole range of rights issues. Anything else is an artificial divide.

And I do keep my hand in with civil and political rights. When I go back to the US, I will participate in an eminent jurists panel (www.ejp.icj.org). There are eight of us on the panel looking at different   countries’   performance on civil and political rights since 9/11 and the dip in the standard of civil liberties in accordance with the international human rights instruments. I like to emphasize the reality that the Vienna conference proclaimed in 1993 and acknowledge the indivisibility and the interdependence of all human rights.

In 1996, the year before I took up office as High Commissioner, and when I was still very much focused on Ireland, a Democratic Audit was carried out on civil and political rights in the UK. It was published under the title, Three Pillars of Liberty. One of the people who spoke on that occasion is a good friend of mine, Philip Alsten. At the time, he asked, “Shouldn’t there be an audit on economic, social and cultural rights?” It has taken a decade, but it is still path-finding work.

The human rights community has to know that if we really want to take economic and social rights seriously then we must make them practical. We must show that they can be operational. We must show that they add value, particularly to development and particularly to the lives of the poorest and the most socially excluded.

We are very good at proclaiming, clarifying and affirming, we are great at the rhetoric, but we need to place more emphasis on what this will mean in practice. What will this mean in the poorest African countries, out in the rural areas where the rate of maternal mortality is high, child mortality is high, and there is no access to drugs and treatment? We are grappling with the need to be operational about a human right to health. It is a case of looking at the overall health pictures and asking, “What will it take to reduce those bad statistics?”

In talking about maternal mortality, it is not necessarily saying that the individual woman should have individual access to the highest attainable standard of health. In a human rights context we tend too much to think about the individual woman. If we thought about her having that right, how would she exercise it? How do you go about it? Actually, it is more difficult than that. It is more related to policy and being operational. It is saying in the context of, say, Tanzania: how do you apply human rights thinking to reducing the maternal mortality statistics? What is it that will make the difference? That is what my colleagues and I face in our initiative, and we are all either lawyers or development experts, not doctors. However, we do have links with very good doctors, -- anyone who we can rope in with a strong human rights perspective on the right to health at an operational practical level.

Professor Paul Hunt, the UN special rapporteur on the right to health wrote in a recent report to the General Assembly that what we are talking about in the poorest countries is access to a functioning health system for basic health procedures for everyone, whether they live in city areas, rural areas, the slums, no matter who they are, they must not be prevented from having access because of cost, distance, lack of drugs or lack of treatment. In these communities it is participation, local village participation, local community involvement, that we need to be working on.

In Realizing Rights, we are strategically placed to try to address, in practice, issues like maternal mortality and the vulnerability of woman and girls to HIV and AIDS, with a particular focus on Africa. Currently we are involved as a small partner in two projects, one of which involves parliamentarians in four countries, Botswana, Tanzania, Namibia and Kenya.

We have worked at tackling stigma and discrimination and ensuring that there is access to drugs and treatment, and to proper care for maternal mortality with a particular focus on women and girls. The reason is very simple: girls in sub-Saharan Africa are four times, sometimes six times, more vulnerable than boys to becoming HIV positive because of their lack of power. The position of women is not improving in Africa, they are at the bottom of the pile of priorities.

We want to get parliamentarians to work on it. I was a parliamentarian in Ireland for twenty years so I could anticipate what the answer would be, “we would love to do it but we have no resources.” Therefore, we provided two different resources: African graduate students of the University of Pretoria Human Rights Centre, working as full-time researchers in these four countries, looking at the law, the policy; and representatives of the international community of women living with AIDS (ICW).

These women are absolute experts as to what it is to live with AIDS, to surmount the barriers of discrimination, but they are very rarely asked to get involved in policy decisions. The parliamentarians learn a great deal by going into a village with an HIV positive woman who has come through it all. If somebody can talk about barriers because they have climbed over them, it makes a difference.

We are aware that tackling maternal mortality involves more than concentrating on doctors and nurses. If we can ensure that trained mid-level providers are at a level where they can carry out emergency obstetric care and roll out the ARVs, they are less likely to emigrate to rich countries. Donors like the UK and Ireland and Scandinavian countries are moving to a more sophisticated approach to development aid, putting emphasis on general budget support when working with governments in the poor countries.

In their National Health plans, donors are rightly saying that these governments should have the primary responsibility. That is also the human rights position. They have the responsibility to progressively realise, in their resources and without discrimination, the highest attainable standard of health.

The Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Fund for Immunising Children and the Gavi Fund,  are  realising  that  they too must work with the permanent health system. Foundations like the Gates Foundation have come to realise that you cannot just intervene on a certain portion of healthcare and do it well if the public health system of a country is broken. That tends to be the case in the poorest countries, certainly outside the capital city.

Even outside Accra, the capital of Ghana, where I was last March, we visited a clinic that had just one qualified nurse and thirteen assistant nurses for a population of 60,000. They were doing their best but they did not even have proper electricity, a proper fridge. They had multiple problems.

What I find in all of this practical work is that you never know whether you are going to be able to achieve the objectives but it helps enormously to frame it all around the right to health as a human right. It helps in advocacy terms. It helps that when you treat people at a grass-roots level that you are not only meeting their needs out of a compassionate need to do good, to be on television and to win awards! It is alerting them to the fact that they have an entitlement and that they must become more self-sufficient, that they must group together and be held accountable.

Quite often I hear those working in a medical context or a development context on the ground saying, “But you know we still have double standards, we don’t feel that the right to health is regarded as much as a fundamental human right as freedom from torture or the right to fair trial, freedom of religion or freedom of assembly. There is a mental block.” Interestingly, there is more of a healthy debate on economic and social rights now than at any time since I became particularly conscious of it as UN High Commissioner. It is almost as though some of the difficulties on the civil and political side have opened up a real possibility of discussion.

I tend, as you can tell, to talk a lot from a personal point of view of experiences that I have had. So when I am back in my native Ireland, or in France or Germany, I will say, “By the way, the UK has this audit of economic and social rights and has a publication that brings out how well the UK is or is not performing, how about Germany doing this? How about Ireland?”

In the US I sometimes refer to the work of Eleanor Roosevelt when chairing the commission which drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I remember her wonderful words, “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school  or  college  he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

I would add that human rights won’t matter in small places close to home unless they matter in the boardrooms of international companies, the cabinets of governments rich and poor, and above all in the kind of concerted and informed citizen action that ensures accountability.

Mary Robinson
New York
USA