[afro-nets] Food for a thought made more visible

[Claudio Schuftan <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

Food for a thought made more visible
------------------------------------

Human Rights Reader 101

NGOs: A network of protagonists (and denouncers of the slow pro-
gress being made) in human rights work?

1. Can the NGO Establishment overcome the North-South-divide or
is it just reproducing it at civil society level? NGOs have been
accused of being paternalistic and not-sufficiently-radical-in-
fostering-human-rights (HR). The heavy pressure from donors to
produce results and the brevity of Northern NGO projects have
pushed them to often become commercialized, delivery of ser-
vices-oriented and over-extended. The other side of the same
coin is that NGOs of the South are downgraded to mere implemen-
ters.

2. Is this a consequence of the fact that it is the educated ur-
ban middle-class that provides the decisive actors to these
civil society organizations? This fact is, of course, of great
socio-political significance. It may, in part, explain the in-
ternational community passiveness on embarking in decisive HR
work. One can only wonder, for instance, how many among the NGO
staff still see the causes of many a conflict at the religious
and ethnic level rather than at the economic and political
level.

3. It is thus not surprising that NGOs have implicit and/or ex-
plicit socio-political missions --despite them seeming to seek
the same (?) improved access to services, the same (?) reduc-
tions in poverty, the same (?) empowering of men, women and
children, the same (?) building of community solidarity and the
same (?) promotion of economic development. Different degrees of
success in meeting these goals has to be looked at from differ-
ent socio-political and HR perspectives. Results are not the
same across the board and some are meagre (or nil).

4. Be it as it may, a reformed NGO Establishment --functioning
with a focus re-missioned around the HR-based-approach-- is a
potential natural-social-avant-garde-actor-and-strategic-ally in
the long struggle for human (people's) rights and accountable
governance.

5. Re-missioned NGOs can increase the proportion of direct de-
mocracy being added to the representative-variety-of-democracy
which has shown a tendency of increasingly denying citizens
their right to decision.

6. From a HR-based perspective, civil society is to be seen as a
force able to rekindle long-lost citizen sovereignty (reversing
both 'power-abuse' and 'obedience-abuse' as per M. Foucault).
NGOs should thus ideally be the people's-mouthpiece-between-
elections since NGOs have the potential power to make demands
(that politicians take heed-of) by directly intervening in the
political process.

7. All this calls for consolidating a new legitimacy of NGOs in
the political arena (at the same time calling for a new order
and for the de-legitimization of an order that violates HR with
impunity). But this requires greater visibility; and the major-
ity of NGOs have problems with this. They are poor at, for in-
stance, writing effective press releases and/or fostering media
relationships, or doing more visible ethical and political lob-
bying. Designing effective media campaigns is important, because
it helps placing 'HR-as-news' in the context of competition with
other news (most often of lesser social relevance).

8. NGOs must not passively wait for abused claim-holders' and
non-compliant duty-bearers' HR-relevant-information to be of-
fered to them; they must take the initiative to investigate, ask
questions and insist on answers to pass on to the media. This is
a much neglected activity if NGOs honestly strive for direct
participation in the political process (challenging policies and
administrative bottlenecks); This is thus a call for NGOs to co-
operate with the critical investigative media (who rightly start
from the assumption that power can-be-and-is abused), and to set
out to expose such abuses.

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


--
Mostly taken from D+C Vol 31, July and Aug/Sept 2004 and In-
sights 51, Dec 04 (id21, IDS, Sussex).