AFRO-NETS> Food for an obscene thought

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Food for an obscene thought
---------------------------

Human Right Reader 35

'CHARITY IS OBSCENE FROM A HUMAN RIGHTS PERSPECTIVE' (Immanuel Kant)

1. In many communities, Human Rights (HR) values still need to be 
promoted from above, because they have not yet been internalized by 
unknowing, potential claim holders. This promotion from above is far 
removed from traditional charity approaches(*) to development though. 
[*: Charity is here seen as "love and the right feeling towards one's 
fellow human being"].

2. Ultimately, HR cannot be imposed; they must be sought/pursued from 
within, and only be supported from outside.

3. In our work, it is primarily the (majority) deprived/poor peo-
ple(**) who are the main holders of rights; our HR work with them is 
to have them empower themselves to claim their rights and to choose 
their own development path (i.e., circumstances and chance should no 
longer dominate their lives). [**: Poverty is here seen as a lack of 
choice and minimum control of resources].

4. HR are thus to be seen as what they really are, namely, the legal 
expression of our human dignity. Because of that, HR are universal; 
they are indivisible; and they are interdependent. There is nothing 
like 'basic rights'.

5. But HR do not yet feature explicitly(***) in the charters or mis-
sion statements of many international private voluntary organizations 
(importantly those NGOs traditionally involved in mostly charity-type 
work); we all need to become more vocal in demanding this be done. 
[***: Or may have been added lately without those organizations hav-
ing operationalized these principles in their field work yet].

6. Participation, you may not know, is a HR per-se; it should be 
treated as a necessary outcome of development work and has to become 
a necessary part of the process. Charity may share this concept, but 
definitely does not share the HR perspective that it is inescapable 
to directly address the basic/structural causes of rights violations 
(see below).

7. So, what is then involved in a truly participatory HR-based plan-
ning and programming? And who is to do it?

8. To start with, UN and bilateral agencies and NGOs with active pro-
grams in the field should already be applying HR-based programming --
with the participation of their respective constituencies! National 
governments should, ideally, follow suit as a way to concretize their 
commitment to HR (this can, therefore, at the same time, be a test of 
commitment).

9. Participatory HR-based planning has several recognized steps:

A. Participatory Causality Analysis: Before anything, communities 
must first recognize they have problems, and then characterize them; 
they must then collectively identify the causes of the same. (Without 
a reasonable consensus on the causes of the problems at hand, it is 
not likely that there will be a consensus later-on about how to solve 
the same). Any causality analysis is greatly helped by an explicit 
Conceptual Framework (e.g., the one UNICEF uses since 1990 for the 
causes of preventable ill-health, malnutrition and deaths). Planning 
in a HR context requires a full understanding of the causes at all 
levels (immediate, underlying and basic) with simultaneous attention 
being given to addressing the causes at different levels. Causes of 
problems related to the violation of people's rights that are identi-
fied with the help of the framework need to be analyzed for each vio-
lation at each level of causality; then, a quali- and quantitative 
relationships must be established among them. This is to be followed 
by reaching consensus regarding the most important determinants 
affecting the realization of those rights found to be violated. The 
Causality Analysis will thus produce a list of rights that are being 
violated together with the major causes of these violations.

B. Participatory Pattern Analysis: This step explores the relation-
ships between claim holders and duty bearers; these relationships 
form a pattern. The work to identify duty bearers for each particular 
right benefit from the earlier causality analysis in that one can 
identify duty bearers at different levels. One has to insist that, at 
this point, it is necessary to focus on priority problems to reduce 
the analysis to a limited set of claim-duty relationships that are 
likely to be the most critical in the given situation; if not lim-
ited, one risks ending up with a very large number of such relation-
ships that we will not be able to tackle and a number of actors too 
large to involve and support (i.e., the situation analysis should 
cover all rights while programming will address the most relevant 
violations first). Pattern Analysis thus arrives at a list of the 
most crucial claim-duty relationships for each particular set of 
rights violations selected.

C. Participatory Capacity Analysis: This next step is about analizing 
why duty bearers do not seem to be able (or capable) to perform their 
duties as is expected from them. It s about identifying their short-
comings and confronting them with such evidence. As pointed out in HR 
Reader 33, this analysis looks at the responsibility/authority/re-
sources components of capacity (or about how duty bearers should act, 
may act, and can act). The importance of two-way communication sys-
tems are to be recognized here so as to put resources to really work 
for the benefit of claim holders. Capacity Analysis thus ultimately 
identifies capacity gaps of each duty bearer for each identified 
rights violation to be redressed (also see HR Reader 33).

D. Participatory Selection of a Strategy and Best Actions: Here, ac-
tions are selected to help close capacity gaps identified in the pre-
vious step. This step thus results in a list of candidate actions or-
ganized into a draft strategy.

E. Partnership Analysis: At this point, discussions are held with key 
partners/strategic allies with the aim of reaching agreements on who 
will do what, how, where and when.

F. Programming: This final step aggregates all activities in the 
strategy into (a) program(s) and/or project(s). No general advice is 
sensible enough here to prescribe how best to do this. Groups in-
volved in the planning will have to learn from practice on how to 
best cluster activities for maximum results (by sector, by theme, by 
geographical location, by level of causality, etc).

10. As can be seen, HR are thus not to be treated as a 'separate' 
concern of development planning; they are an integral part of it. 
Without explicitly addressing HR, the problems of economic underde-
velopment and poverty will never be fully solved.(****)
[****:The principle of 'low cost - high impact' pursued in tradi-
tional development planning is merely utilitarian; in HR-based plan-
ning it must thus sometimes be rejected. Simply put, morality often 
leads to a different set of priorities than those of an economic 
analysis].

11. But, beware, the HR approach is not a magic panacea either. It 
will not see resources and policies and power instantly transferred 
to the poor and vulnerable... Keep in mind that --unlike the WTO-- 
the UN or any other international body have no practicable way of im-
posing punishment or fines on governments that violate or ignore 
their internationally sanctioned commitments to HR; we all need to 
contribute our grain of salt to help empower people to stop these 
violations.

[Mostly taken from Jonsson U., An approach to HR-based programming in 
UNICEF ESARO, SCN News No.20, pp.6-9, July 2000].

Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn

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