VOL 20 NO 157 REGD NO DA 1589 | Dhaka, Friday, April 12 2013

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Quest for development also a human right

Published : Friday, 12 April 2013 M S Siddiqui Bangladesh has made a strong headway in terms of life expectancy, number of children at schools, incidence of disease, empowerment of woman and so on for the last two decades. The country has done a much better job than anyone might have expected, given its relatively weak long-term economic growth, and could even serve as a model for others. The economy is growing by about 6.0 per cent and it is in the list of economies g rowing fast. The current spell of countrywide political unrest that already has caused an adverse effect on the economy might dash the hopes of Bangladesh to become a middle-income country, fear analysts. Huge public assets have been damaged only through vandalism and arson attacks, according to preliminary estimates. Loss of private property could also be much higher. The damaged public property includes a power sub-station, trains, railway tracks, public and service vehicles. Private vehicles and establishments were also smashed or set on fire indiscriminately. The economic activities came to a standstill and production, export and import have slowed down. The poor people living on daily income have no food and no work. The remarkable development will come to a halt if these political unrest continues for longer period. The political programme in terms of hartals are claimed to be democratic rights of political parties. Bangladesh seems to be defining democracy and human rights in its own language and culture. The question being raised today is whether citizens have rights of development and whether the democratic rights can hinder those of economic development. Human rights as a discipline has concerned itself with the outcome of development for some time. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is not legally binding, sets out rights to food, shelter,

education and various other goods which are the agreed desirable outcomes of development process. In the past, human rights issues have typically been analysed from the perspective of separate academic disciplines. Philosophers have focused on foundational issues in ethics, and lawyers on questions of international legal obligation, while both disciplinary perspectives have tended to neglect the institutional, economic and structural processes that impact individual freedoms and human rights. Meanwhile, in traditional economics, welfare frameworks - unsuitable for thinking about human freedom and human rights - have dominated the landscape, and economists have often failed to incorporate the ideas of freedom and rights into their theoretical and empirical work. In the recent past, development, democracy, and human rights have become hegemonic political ideals. The economic development, democracy, and human rights are having inter-dependence and synergy. The interpretations of the relationship between human rights and development are influenced by a narrow view of human rights as consisting only of civil and political rights, such as the rights to freedom of speech and due process of law. Even where a broader set of rights, including those to health, education or food, is recognized, these are considered more inspirational and less concrete or real than civil and political rights. In many countries, the national development plan is the principal policy framework for development, usually understood narrowly as economic development. The replacement of a commodities-based definition with a rights-based one of development denotes a shift in values from the satisfaction of needs or preferences to the realisation of rights not only to production of commodity in demand. The rights-based approach to development describes situations not simply in terms of human needs, or of developmental requirements, but in terms of the society's obligation to respond to the inalienable rights of individuals. It empowers people to demand justice as a right. Historically, development has been concerned primarily with economic growth. Social equity concerns came into the development discourse in the 1970s, and human development in the 1990s. In the past, dominant approaches have often characterised development in terms of GDP (gross domestic product) per capita; food security in terms of food availability; and poverty in terms of income deprivation. Emphasis was placed on economic efficiency - with no explicit role being given to fundamental freedoms, individual agency and human rights. The right to development has highlighted a number of issues and challenges that are likely to grow in importance, as the process of integrating human rights and development concerns. It raises the political priority of protecting and promoting economic, social and cultural rights at par with civil and political rights. A few decades ago, most states justified routine violations of human rights not only by appealing to national security ignoring the personal security and cultural relativism as opposed

to universal human rights but also by appealing to the higher imperatives of development and democracy as opposed to the interests of particular individuals and groups. By contrast, in postCold War international society, arguments of inter-dependence are the norm. But plans have increasingly encompassed legislative changes, as recognition has grown of the importance of the rule of law to institution-building and economic progress. For example, a recent United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) policy statement asserts that "human rights and sustainable human development are inter-dependent and mutually reinforcing." Definitions of development are now almost as diverse, and perhaps even more contentious, than definitions of democracy. The liberal democratic welfare states of developed economies are attractive models for much of the rest of the world because of the particular balance they have struck between the competing demands of democratic participation, market efficiency, and internationally recognized human rights. Professor Amartya Sen has hypothesized that 'most cases of starvation and famines across the world arise not from people being deprived of things to which they are entitled, but from people not being entitled, in the prevailing legal system of institutional rights, to adequate means for survival'. His empirical work suggests that in many famines in which millions of people have died, there was no overall decline in food availability, and starvation occurred as a consequence of shifts in entitlements resulting from exercising rights that were legitimate in legal terms. Amartya Sen has focused international attention on the significance of fundamental human freedoms and human rights for development theory and practice. The UN General Assembly proclaimed development as a human right in its 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development. The relationship between the processes of economic development and international human rights standards has been one of parallel and rarely intersecting tracks of international action. In the last decade of the 20th century, development thinking shifted from a growth-oriented model to the concept of human development as a process of enhancing human capabilities, and the intrinsic links between development and human rights began to be more readily acknowledged. Specifically, it has been proposed that if strategies of development and policies to implement human rights are united, they reinforce one another in processes of synergy and improvement of the human condition. Such is the premise of the Declaration on the Rights to Development, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1986. The majority of UN bodies have stated a commitment to a rights-based approach to development that defines progress in terms of the fulfillment of social, political, economic, cultural and civil rights. The UNDP's Human Development Reports are based on Prof Sen's approach and characterise human development in terms of the expansion of valuable human capabilities. The Human Development Index captures the importance of three critical human capabilities - achieving knowledge, longevity and a decent standard of living. The Gender-

Related Development Index captures gender-based inequalities in the achievement of these capabilities, while the Human Poverty Index captures deprivations (where 'living standard' is characterised in terms of access to safe water, health services and birth-weight). The World Bank's World Development Report also adopts a multidimensional concept of poverty. It attempts to go beyond the analysis of achieved functioning and to accommodate the ideas of individual agency and rights by emphasizing that poverty is more than inadequate income and human development - it is also vulnerability and lack of voice, power and representation. The first generation consisted of civil and political rights conceived as freedom from state abuse. The second generation consisted of economic, social, and cultural rights, claims made against exploiters and oppressors. The third generation consisted of solidarity rights belonging to people and covering global concerns like development, environment, humanitarian assistance, peace, communication, and common heritage. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Right to Development (RTD) was introduced as one of several rights belonging to a 'third generation' of human rights. A general priority has been given to guaranteeing individual freedoms in eighteenth century revolutionary struggles of Europe and North America, to advancing social justice in nineteenthand twentieth-century struggles against economic exploitation, and to assigning rights and obligations to the principal agents able to advance global public goods in the late twentieth century. On closer scrutiny, the basic aspirations at the root of the claims of all three 'generations' are not historically determined. People suffering repression and oppression have aspired for fair and equitable treatment for millennia. Liberation from slavery and colonialism-based on premises similar to those of the so-called third generation rights-was expressed in terms later reflected in human rights language. Religious freedom was a human rights concern well before the mid-20th century separation of civil and political rights from economic, social, and cultural rights. Nevertheless, the formal articulation of the RTD in the form of texts using the human rights terminology is a phenomenon of the late 20th century, beginning early 1970s. The 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action called the RTD, a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights. The RTD has also been given prominence in the mandate of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the General Assembly required the High Commissioner to establish a new branch whose primary responsibilities would include the promotion and protection of the right to development. The right is regularly mentioned in declarations of international conferences and summits and in the annual resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights. Bangladesh has not yet adopted the concept developed in 1980 regarding right to development and development as human right. Politicians democratic right of hartal is in collision with human and economic rights of citizens. Citizens have a right to demand legal restriction and

guideline for political and human rights in line with RTD. shah@banglachemical.com