Women, Development and Human Rights
Note Prepared for 8 - 10 November Experts Workshop
"Beijing + 5: Future Actions and Initiatives"
by Nadia Hijab
Writer and Development Consultant
on Human Rights and Human Development
5 November 1999
This note was prepared in response to the Division for the Advancement of Women's request for a "thought-provoking, concise input" to support the Beijing + 5 Workshop. It briefly reviews the growing understanding of why human rights are indeed indivisible, and the innovative way in which the five sets of rights are being integrated by activists in the field. It looks at the growing – yet still parallel - understanding of the multi-disciplinary nature of development, and at gender and other mainstreaming efforts by international organizations. It examines progress to date in merging the parallel rights and development tracks, and concludes with recommendations on the rights and development framework needed to achieve women’s human rights and sustainable human development.
1. Growing theoretical and operational understanding of the indivisibility of human rights
It is worth recalling that human rights were truly indivisible in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it was only in 1966 that two separate conventions were developed for civil and political rights on the one hand, and for economic, social and cultural rights on the other. After these two conventions went into force in 1976, two sets of rights took shape and diverged. Over the next decades, for a number of ideological reasons, more work went into developing the content of civil and political rights, and optional protocols were introduced so that individuals could claim violation of their civil and political rights. Far less work went into developing the content of economic, social and cultural rights. In effect, the former were defined as rights, whereas the latter were relegated to aspirations which would gradually be achieved through investment in development activities. It was seen as easier to be negative – to stop the state from harming individual freedoms - than to be positive, by introducing policies and programmes that promoted economic, social and cultural rights.
During the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, UN staff listed the five sets of rights in alphabetical order – civil, cultural, economic, political, and social - rather than divide them into two sets of rights. They saw this as symbolic of a move towards promoting the indivisibility of human rights. But shortly after Vienna, the old order re-established itself, and the international community fell back into the habit of referring to the two sets of rights, or, even worse, using the term human rights when they meant only civil and political rights. The very committee responsible for monitoring civil and political rights is known as the Committee for Human Rights.
Thus, until today, the term human rights continues to be used to refer to issues of civil and political rights. Most people - even, or perhaps especially, activists in areas of civil and political rights like free speech, right of association etc. - are guilty of misusing the term in this way. And, even worse, activists working on economic, social and cultural rights do not define themselves as human rights organization – not even those that deal with newly accepted rights like reproductive rights.
Why does this matter to the efforts to achieve and sustain equality, development and peace, and to implement actions agreed under the 12 areas of concern? For one thing, over a billion people, the majority of them women, still live in poverty after five decades of development. For another, a quarter of a century after the first women's conference, it is still possible to document thousands of acts of discrimination on gender as well as on other grounds that leave women exposed to violence, and deprived of education, health and opportunities for employment. It is now time to strengthen the movement that talks of development as a human right, and to enrich the content of economic, social and cultural rights to at least the same level as civil and political rights.
Using the framework of rights rather than simply referring to needs sets out more forcefully the obligations of the international and national community, and not only the obligations of the state, but also those of civil society. Using the language of human rights enriches the legal framework, and gives a sense of urgency to what until now have been seen as aspirations. In addition, people naturally respond to the concept of human dignity which is at the core of human rights, and they are willing to mobilize around those rights that matter to them. And the rights that matter to the poor and disadvantaged are economic, social and cultural rights.
There are four reasons why the time is ripe for a rights and development movement:
In other words, many national human rights activists are no longer debating whether economic, social, and cultural rights need to be given preference over civil and political rights, or vice versa. As South African activist Vincent Saldanha put it, "There is consensus that they need to be integrated, and so ensure not only that the state moves towards democracy, but also that the social and economic policies are in place to ensure and sustain democracy".
2. Growing Theoretical and Operational Understanding of Holistic Approaches to Development
During the global conferences of the 1990s, the term sustainable development was introduced at Rio in 1992, and the term people-centred sustainable development emerged from Copenhagen in 1996. Throughout the 1990s, the UNDP-inspired terms of human development and sustainable human development have also been widely used to refer to a form of development that is focused on people’s capabilities and opportunities, and that is economically, politically, socially, culturally, and environmentally sustainable. At the same time, development practitioners have received training on mainstreaming themes and areas into their specific areas of work - gender, environment, poverty, private sector, and others.
How successful has the development community been in implementing a holistic approach to development? It is worth looking at the efforts of UNDP - the UN's cross-sectoral development programme - in mainstreaming gender. After uneven progress since mainstreaming efforts began in 1987, UNDP introduced a new approach into the work of the organization in 1996. It launched a series of learning, consultation and briefing workshops, which, among other things urged practitioners to analyze all social inequalities, including gender, so as to underpin cross-thematic programming.
After two years, the approach was evaluated, and it was found that seven serious constraints still held up gender mainstreaming. (When I shared these conclusions with World Bank staff at a gender workshop in June of this year, there was both recognition and relief that other organizations faced similar problems). From my own experience in cross-thematic work at UNDP, I would underline the sixth constraint - compartmentalization of development issues - as being the most important. In spite of its best efforts, and lip service to the contrary, the development community still finds it easier to deal with specific themes and sectors than with an integrated approach to development that is gender-sensitive, people-centered and sustainable. Human beings are not one-dimensional, yet we have not been able to make development multi-dimensional.
I would say that, to date, the development community has been unable to develop methodologies to support multi-disciplinary policy making, planning, budgeting, or programming. It continues to support national plans of action on individual themes or sectors - children, women, poverty, environment, and so on - a dis-integration which reflects itself in programming, and in monitoring and reporting on progress. There are many valiant efforts to integrate development, for example a UNDP-UNIFEM workshop in June 1999 which focused on gender sensitive budgeting, as well as ways to budget that took environment and other themes into account.
Overall, however, the development community is still not in a position to respond to the Latin American president who, in 1995, brought together his social sector ministries into a super-ministry for human development, and then turned to the UN and asked for assistance in multi-sectoral programming.
3. Merging the Rights and Development Tracks: Progress to Date
In some ways, the human rights community is ahead of the development community in integrating the five sets of rights, perhaps because the underpinnings of human rights in the Universal Declaration were holistic. Humanity will gain immeasurably if the rights and development tracks merge, and if development activity is clearly seen to have as its objective the promotion of human rights. This will lend urgency to development efforts, ensure that attention is focused on policies that do indeed invest in people and give them an opportunity to achieve their rights, and provide the underpinnings for integrated development. What is the state of play in merging the two tracks?
Until the mid-1990s, there was a very clear distinction at the UN between the work of the UN Centre for Human Rights, which had responsibility for backstopping the instruments for human rights, and the rest of the UN system, which had the responsibility for providing technical assistance for development. Indeed, until Vienna, the UN development system carefully kept its distance from the rights system, to avoid accusations by its governing boards of interference in the internal affairs of member states. In most cases, development practitioners did not see human rights as relevant to their mandate. In fact, when various UN development organizations decided to adopt an integrated follow-up to the UN conferences of the 1990s, Vienna was conspicuous by its absence.
However, a momentum for change has built up. Particularly important in this regard has been the work of UNICEF, which introduced a human rights framework for its programme activities six years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which it had supported in 1990. One might argue that UNICEF had an easy task because it dealt with children – which do not threaten state interests – but in fact the shift to a human rights framework involved a good deal of investment in education of staff on human rights and in overcoming staff resistance. Today, there is a virtual circle on children's rights at UNICEF. The organization is involved in the human rights machinery that monitors the Convention's application. It works closely with the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which receives reports from states parties to the Convention on their efforts to promote it. These reports feed into UNICEF's national plans of action at the country level, and into its technical assistance programmes. Thus, its country programmes effectively become vehicles to promote the convention. The virtuous circle links human rights to technical assistance to promote human rights.
UNIFEM too has introduced a rights-based approach to its technical assistance. And recently at UNDP, after many years in the works, a memorandum of understanding was signed between UNDP and the Centre for Human Rights, and there is much closer collaboration between the two. Overall, the Centre for Human Rights has found a much warmer welcome in the development community during the latter part of the 1990s than at any time in the past. The changed atmosphere has been reinforced and supported by the frequent references to rights and to the 1993 Vienna Declaration in the conferences on population, the social summit, women, habitat and food, and by the growing acceptance of the concepts of reproductive rights, right to health, housing, and food, and women's human rights. Moreover, the UN Secretary General’s reform programme launched in 1996 made it very clear that human rights are a cross-cutting theme for all the UN’s work.
However, there is not yet a clear virtuous circle linking human rights and development instruments and mechanisms, including the rights of women, to technical assistance to promote these rights, as there is in the case of the rights of the child.
Also problematic, is the lack of an optional protocol for many of the economic, social and cultural rights, as exists for that on civil and political rights. According to the Canadian Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation, The lack of an optional protocol contributes to reducing socio-economic rights to the level of "aspirations" and undermining their "justiciability". CERA and other NGOs lobbied very hard to get the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to allow NGO presentations in 1993. CERA believes this decision began to transform the Committee's review process from a barely noticed, remote discussion between experts and government officials into an adjudicative review of compliance with fundamental human rights. This was at least one way to bring the rights of the violated into the debate until an optional protocol could be secured.
It is interesting that the Human Rights Committee, which it will be recalled deals with civil and political rights, covers many economic, social and cultural rights of concern to women in its reviews. So do some of the other committees monitoring human rights instruments, which is seen as a mainstreaming success. However, I would argue that this is as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution. There is a great deal of duplication and overlap in what the different committees have to say about women’s human rights. States – and individuals – have limited capacity and resources to monitor and implement. There is room for a more integrated approach to monitoring progress and supporting technical assistance to avoid waste of time and resources.
Meanwhile, the message given by the Platform of Action is not clear. Women’s human rights are one of 12 areas of concern. Rather, addressing the areas of concern should in and of itself be seen as promoting women’s human rights and operating within a human rights framework.
The time is ripe, therefore, to close the circle, first by integrating all five sets of rights, second by integrating the work of the rights and development communities, and third by placing women’s human rights firmly within this framework. Women are among the best placed groups to propel a holistic rights and development movement. The women's movement has always been informed by an understanding that the aim is not to integrate women into an unequal and unjust society, but rather that the struggle for women's human rights has to be accompanied by a struggle for overall human rights. It is sterile to integrate women into a parliament that has no power, or a labour force suffering from 50 % unemployment. The dream is of equality, development and peace for all, and not for some.
Moreover, several human rights activists are warning that the growing role of multinational corporations in setting the social agenda may overturn the precious gains and growing consensus on rights and development. It is becoming increasingly urgent to close the circle.
4. Recommendations
Recommendations will emerge during the course of this workshop. This note simply highlights some of the conclusions emerging from the above analysis.