By Marilyn Waring
On questions of human rights, the political
bodies of the United Nations and nation-State donors frequently override
claims of domestic jurisdiction where sovereignty might be invoked. But consider
the following case studies.
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On 22 July 1998, the Emergency Relief Coordinator on United Nations humanitarian
policy in Afghanistan cited a discriminatory human rights regime among reasons
for the United Nations to restrict its activities to life-saving assistance
only. Four days earlier, the European Commission had suspended funding of
all assistance in the Kabul area.
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An entire village was surrounded by machine-gun-toting men in the national
military uniform. Every resident was transported with a few possessions to
a 'development project' where, within a few years, they would be more desperate,
destitute, hungry and without infrastructural support than they had ever
been in the home that their families had known for hundreds of years. This
"international aid" programme was euphemistically called "transmigration"
where donors were complicit in transgression of fundamental rights "to liberty
of movement and of freedom to choose his residency".
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Young girls had been recruited for training in a bilateral textile venture.
The development project specified that they would spend three months (unpaid)
in training and then be offered permanent positions. After two years, the
only permanent positions were those of the male tailors, cutters, marketers
and the boss. Every three months, another group of girls was recruited, the
trainees discharged and the production continued its rounds of "servitude"
and exploitation.
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Picture the single largest development project in a nation, expected to run
for 25 years in the agricultural sector. Every major multilateral donor in
the region, and every bilateral with an ongoing country programme, was involved.
The country had equality guarantees for women in its constitution and had
signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW) without reservation. All data profile showed that women were
overwhelmingly the majority of agricultural workers in every sector. The
project was into its third year. The project leader did not know that women
had no access to land ownership, and never bothered to ask. The Government
certainly never bothered to tell him. When the consultant was asked what
he intended to do about a project so economically flawed, he responded that
to do anything would be to interfere in the domestic politics of the recipient
country.
The recipient State is an active agent in
fundamental breaches of Articles 2, 3 and 26 of the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and in a raft of breaches of CEDAW,
and every donor facilitates, accommodates, tolerates, justifies and excuses
these breaches. The donors, many of them signatories to the ICCPR Optional
Protocol, do not find such breaches sufficiently egregious to discontinue
their support of such conditions. Multilaterals protest that they are not
bound by human rights obligations, and that these situations are not horrendous
enough to be in the realm of "norms".
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About the
Author: |
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Dr. Marilyn Waring
is a former member of the New Zealand Parliament, a development consultant,
and an academic on the Albany Campus of Massey University in New Zealand.
Her e-mail address is M.J.
Waring@massey.ac.nz
Everyone is entitled
to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set
forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
—Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 28 |
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Number 4 1998
