Annual Conference of the Development Studies Association of Ireland (DSAI), 23 November 2017

Remarks delivered by
Andrew Gilmour, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights

It’s a great honour for me to be here today.  The topic I’ve been asked to speak about – the relationship between development and human rights – is one which the UN Office for Human Rights and I personally care a lot about.

Ireland has contributed significantly to building this relationship between two goals or concepts that too many people and governments see as being somehow separate, even though for us they are intrinsically linked.

Your former President and our former High Commissioner, Mary Robinson, played a pioneering role in bringing the two discourses together.  Her entire career was about using law and the international human rights system to bring positive social change, and the title of one of her books more or less says it in seven words: Human Rights and development: towards mutual reinforcement.

Two years ago, the then Irish Ambassador to the UN, David Donaghue, played a crucial role in negotiating the 2030 Agenda and ensuring that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were anchored in international human right standards.

While thinking about what I would say today, I looked up the Irish Aid website and saw the following: “The promotion and protection of universal human rights are at the heart of Ireland’s foreign policy.  Through our aid programme we are assisting poor communities to realise their rights.”  Also, “good governance and the protection of human rights are central to poverty reduction.”  And “the enjoyment of all human rights – civil, cultural, economic, political and social – is essential for development”.  Those three statements sum up Ireland’s approach to the linkage, and the UN Human Rights Office’s too.  They are truisms, indeed no-brainers.  But it is remarkable to me how many leaders in the world reject those cardinal precepts, and how many others – while not actively rejecting them – do so little to put them into effect.

Indeed, as the evidence for the truth of those dicta grows in weight, it almost seems as if resistance to it increases too – and this is part of the growing backlash against human rights.

To start with some relatively good news. The SDGs were a great improvement – in human rights terms – over the MDGs.  In the preamble, it says the core aim of the Sustainable Developement Goals (SDGs) is to “realise the human rights of all”, and it states that the 2030 Agenda is grounded in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights treaties.  Many of the SDGs themselves mirror economic and social rights of course, and Goal 16 reflects civil and political rights. International law is stressed, while the key theme “leaving no one behind” is an affirmation of equality and universality, and allows us all to point to when the rights of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in society are being ignored or trampled on.  Plus there is an emphasis on disaggregated data (unlike in the MDGs), which is essential for identifying gaps among the most vulnerable groups. 

The less good news is that many governments talk and behave as if human rights are at best a distraction from what they consider the more important work of development and security and, at worst, positively impede their work.

Secondly, while there’s been progress, the gap between development practitioners and human rights advocates doesn’t always seem to be diminishing – despite the innate compatibility between them. At times, it seems almost as if they are speaking different languages, perhaps even competing to see who can inflict the greater outrages on the English language.  Human rights people can talk in legalistic terms of “treaties” and “international human rights law” and “compliance with international humanitarian law”; while development practitioners talk in percentages and  statistics, “GDP growth rates”, “necessary trade-offs” – all very pragmatic, but often quite removed from peoples’ lives.

But competing obfuscatory jargon is one thing – carrying out development cooperation programmes (that may actively undermine human rights) is another. I will say more on both these negatives shortly. But before that, I want to talk about human rights and sustainability.

We all know that “sustainable”, as in sustainable development, first appeared in an environmental context.  But environmental sustainability – crucial though it is – is only part of what is required.  We argue that both for sustainable development and also sustainable peace (which is a new topic under growing discussion in New York, with a groundbreaking new report of the Secretary-General being finalized) what makes either development or peace truly sustainable is grounding them in human rights.

I recently challenged members of the Security Council – after some had objected to my remarks on human rights in African peace operations – if they could come up with one topic on their large agenda, or one internal conflict anywhere in the world, where human rights – or lack thereof – was not a root cause. The point being that it’s relatively easy for two warlords to sign a peace accord dividing up the spoils.  What makes any peace sustainable though is addressing the root causes and removing the inequalities, discrimination and persecution that caused the conflict in the first place.  Development too cannot be properly sustainable unless it is based on political and legal accountability, and on a social protection and economic system that ensures communities aren’t left behind but rather benefit from growth.

I would like to illustrate what I am talking about – the interconnectedness of the UN’s three pillars, i.e. peace and security, development and human rights – by referring to some countries I have visited in recent weeks.

In Mali, people in the country discussed their fears of extremist groups burning churches, banning music and wedding ceremonies (cultural rights), targeting girls’ schools (right to education), and scaring people from going to fields and places of work (rights to freedom of movement, to work, to food).  When people have few options, they are more tempted towards extremism (even if the extremists themselves have done a lot to narrow those options). Especially when you take into account – as happens in so many countries that are fighting terrorism – the human rights violations that are committed by the security forces, the primary victims of which tend to be innocent civilians and entire communities that get stigmatized.  In Iraq, the Sunnis felt this stigmatization, and the result was the creation first of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and then ISIL. In Mali it was first the Tuaregs, and now it is the Peul who are being arrested in large numbers, given a very rough time in detention, and in consequence are further radicalized.

It is worth noting that it is not just UN peacekeepers who have been seriously targeted in Mali by extremist and criminal gangs (150 killed in the past three years), but also the development agencies which are trying to reduce poverty, inequalities and extremism.  Mali is a major challenge in all three UN pillars – peace and security, development and human rights.

In Colombia, there’s finally a peace agreement after 50 years of conflict. But the peace process is threatened by a combination of rights and development issues, including impunity for past abuses, continued killings of human rights defenders, and also low levels of development in rural areas previously held by FARC, which means former fighters have no means of livelihood and are being pushed into criminal gangs. Colombia is a relatively wealthy country, but the benefits from development need to be more widely enjoyed. Sustainable peace in Colombia will be predicated on all human rights (including economic and social) being guaranteed for all Colombians.

My third example is Honduras, where I met the family of the murdered land rights activist, Berta Cáceres, killed last year as she was leading a campaign to protect the lands of her indigenous community against logging and other development projects, including a hydroelectric dam. These projects were being carried out without their consent and in a way that was not going to improve the lives of the local communities, but rather threatened their lives and livelihoods.  And there are other countries where punitive laws and special government agencies have been set up to protect investors’ interests against the rights of local communities. Corruption is a major impediment to the realization of human rights.

At times, therefore, it’s possible to see an apparent conflict between human rights and development, though this should not be the case.

The World Bank does great work in many places.  But CSOs, UN human rights mechanisms and OHCHR have repeatedly raised concerns about the negative impact of some development projects, when the rights and voices of people seem to have been disregarded in the name of some more abstract notion of development.

In Uzbekistan, an irrigation project financed by the World Bank was said to involve forced labour and child labour.  In Ethiopia and Kenya, projects by the World Bank have led to forced evictions of locals. These abuses could have been prevented if safeguards had been put in place. It is true that the World Bank’s “Articles of Agreement” of 1945 prohibit it from interfering in the political affairs of its members, requiring it to take only ‘economic factors’ into account in its lending decisions. But 1945 was of course before the development of the International Human Rights instruments (UDHR and the two Covenants) and subsequent treaties.  So these latter take precedence, and the World Bank’s Articles surely need updating – especially given that the clear-cut link between sustainable development and human rights (or put in another way, between development and the people who are actually supposed to benefit from development).

Who are the people who I referred to earlier who take issue with the statements I earlier read from Irishaid? We need to go back in history to fully understand.  In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged not only from the horrors of the total war and genocide of the 1940s, but also the deprivation and depression of the 1930s (with the understanding that economic insecurity had helped push people into nationalistic, extremist movements such as the Nazi Party) that led to the Second World War. 

This is why the 1945 UN Charter called for “higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development” as well as “universal respect for and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all” without discrimination. This is why the 1948 Universal Declaration places equal emphasis on civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, as well as “a social and international order” in which all rights could be realized. 

But – under Cold War tensions –  much of this comprehensive vision dissipated and human rights became divided into two schools.  It mirrored Isiah Berlin’s famous essay on “Two Concepts of Liberty”: negative and positive.  Negative freedom was seen as ‘freedom from’ external interference, while positive freedom was seen as the ‘freedom to’ do or to become something. 

In the West, negative freedom became seen as the type worth fighting for. According to this thinking, governments should not interfere – e.g. the State should not censor press or wrongfully imprison people.  On the other hand, the positive concept of liberty – positive human rights – called on States to take positive actions (for jobs, welfare, education, health). Especially on the right of the political spectrum, people maintained that positive rights were incompatible with negative rights, as they require high redistributive taxation to carry out these socio-economic goals and thus were violations of the right to property. And moreover, the feeling was that social and economic rights were somehow aspirational, optional and idealistic rather than feasible and mandatory.

Meanwhile, among the left in the West, the Communist powers and post-colonial countries, it was seen in a different way. As the first President of Senegal Léopold Senghor put it: “Human rights start with breakfast”.  Can a family really afford to care about other human rights, such as freedom of the press, if they are very hungry?

Mary Robinson described these arguments as providing “fodder for ideological assaults across the East-West, North-South divides”, as Western countries pushed civil and political rights while Communist and Non-Aligned countries focused on economic, social and cultural rights.

The conclusion of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights pulled it all together in saying that, “All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally, and in a fair manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.”

This may have seemed to settle the debate intellectually, but even now there are daily reminders of this at the UN, and it has become a factor in the current backlash against rights in general.  Some non-Western countries, when accused of violations, claim that they are merely doing what they have do to in terms of delivering security and development to their people.  And that criticism of their violations is false and based on an attempt to impose “Western”-based values systems of democracy and human rights, against the traditions and will of the people.

China’s position is especially interesting given its massive political and economic weight. It stresses the undeniable truth that development contributes to human rights.  Indeed of course it’s the case that prosperity helps people achieve higher standards of living.  But China is more sceptical that the linkage goes in reverse – i.e. that human rights help development.   Thus it substantially prioritizes the right to development and collective economic rights over individual civil and political rights; it also promotes a relativist and national (as opposed to universal) approach to human rights, based on each country’s unique history, culture, values and political system.  Since China has successfully brought hundreds of millions of its own citizens out of poverty, and is in the process of increasing its aid budget to other countries (aid that is not conditioned on human rights), it’s not always easy for countries to argue against China’s approach. 

The current backlash against human rights I have talked about takes many forms. I will list a few, not in any order:

1.   Reprisals in many countries against human rights defenders, including land rights activists and women human rights defenders.

2.   Civil society.   Many countries have passed harsh laws preventing the financing and functioning of NGOs.  Russia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Israel, Kenya, Turkey, Hungary and others are among those who have done this, making life difficult for human rights NGOs.

3.   Consistent attacks on UN officials dealing with human rights, cutting our budgets and placing obstacles in front of our work.  Just a few days ago Agnes Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who had raised the issue of the thousands of extra-judicial killings taking place in the Philippines of petty criminals, casual drug users and innocent passers-by, was publicly threatened by President Duterte (not long after he had encouraged his troops to rape village women - though “only” of three women each) that if he met her, he would slap her. 

4.   The backlash against women rights in many countries.  Women should apparently “know their place”, and not have control over their own bodies. We are particularly concerned about this. 

5.  Populist, chauvinistic, nationalism with the aim of fomenting hatred.  Scapegoating take many forms: against migrants, Muslims, Mexicans in the USA, Roma, Rohingya, gays, and other minorities, while talking of “illiberal democracy” and undermining the rule of law and institutions (e.g. attacks on the judiciary and “mainstream media” in the US, and in the UK by the tabloid press). Instead of addressing legitimate concerns and economic insecurities, many governments resort to scapegoating minorities, trying to suggest they are the source of society’s ills.  This is good neither for human rights, nor for SDG progress.

6.   Attempts to counter any criticism of human rights concerns by claiming such criticism is an infringement of the UN Charter in view of the principle of non-interference. Some governments also maintain that criticism of violations is used as an excuse to promote regime change.

7.  Lastly, the growing tendency to dismiss human rights as a luxury that can wait.  Await the great moment when a conflict has ended, security has been imposed, or development has been achieved. The feeling seems to be that individual or even community rights are expendable, mere eggs that need to be broken in order to concoct the national omelette of crushing terrorism, or providing electricity to urban areas.

So often the approach seems to be that of Strelnikov in the best scene of Doctor Zhivago.  Zhivago rebukes the Red Army Commander for burning a village accused of providing horses to the White Russian.  Zhivago tells him he’d got the wrong village.  Strelnikov shrugs and asks “What does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. The point’s made”.  Zhivago bitterly retorts, “your point, their village”.  My point is that this approach - pushed more or less literally by so many governments it seems - will bring neither sustainable peace nor sustainable development.  Human rights is not a luxury for later; on the contrary, it is an essential precondition both for peace and development.

At the UN World Summit in 2005, the phrase was coined that sums up the interconnectedness: “There can be no development without peace, no peace without development, and neither without respect for human rights”. This underpins what the UN system is striving for and what is meant by the “three pillar approach” (referring to the three pillars recognized in the UN Charter), which the Secretary-General rightly stresses. 

But there is one major problem with this: resources. The three pillars implies a certain equality, but the human rights pillar accounts for just 3% of the regular budget, meaning the other two pillars get 97%.  I needn’t tell you how unbalanced a three-legged stool would be if one was only 3 centimeters long, and the others were each 48.  But human rights don’t come free – nor can they be done on the cheap.

That is the first conclusion I wanted to leave you with. For the benefit of both sustainable development and peace, there will need to be a much greater investment in the human rights agenda: the capacity-building, monitoring, consultation processes that are required to promote and protect rights.

My second conclusion is that official development actors, like human rights actors, need to do even more to support civil society, given that so many Governments – including many that are primary recipients of development assistance – are squeezing NGOs and civil society partners so ruthlessly.

My third conclusion is that the development community and the human rights community need to communicate better with the wider world and also with each other. We need to work even more closely, especially on the SDGs.  I hope and believe development partners will increasingly base their policies on international human rights standards, including the principles of equality and non-discrimination.

Finally, the various human rights treaties and instruments provide a wealth of clear, legal and universal standards that stand above national laws and policies. And an even bigger corpus of information that comes from monitoring individual states on their progress, especially when it comes to the most marginalized groups in society, including women, racial minorities, persons with disabilities, and migrants. In our experience, this information is sadly undervalued. Many people are only dimly aware of it - but it is easily available and often very high quality.

If we are to have any hope in progressing towards our common goals of dignity and leaving no one behind, then making use of the human rights machinery that is already in place can be a powerful tool.

The “mutual reinforcing” that Mary Robinson referred to in her title between human rights and development has come a long way since she wrote her book with Phillipe Alston in 2005.  But there is far greater degree of collaboration which we can achieve together.

Thank you very much for allowing me to make that case today, to such a distinguished group of practitioners.