A Toolkit Orientation Programme on Rethinking Rights, Justice, and Development

Human Rights, Humanitarianism, Justice, Peace, Development, Marginality, Vulnerability, and Gender Equity etc. are the terms often used by the people engaged in human rights and humanitarian work. However, there is a need to understand their detailed meanings and various interpretations due to socio-political and cultural diversity amongst them. For example, the meaning of development for indigenous peoples is different from that of rural or urban people and even there from those of developing or developed countries. This module would explore relations and bridge these three divides:

1. Between rights, justice, development and dignity;
2. Between civil and political rights and the social and economic rights;
3. And, between human rights and humanitarianism

So, in order to understand these processes and bridge the divides this module would focus primarily on building conceptual knowledge of participants mainly on the issues of rights, justice and development and in the process also discuss related concepts of marginality, vulnerability etc. This module would also discuss the meanings and concepts of these terms enshrined in key national and international documents such as ICCPR, ICESCR, SAARC Social Charter, UN Guiding Principles on IDPs, CEDAW principles etc.

To illustrate the approach towards understanding the definitional and conceptual variations in the meaning of these terms below we provide an example of the concept of ‘Human Rights’.

At its most fundamental, a right is a claim on other persons that is acknowledged and perhaps reciprocated among the principals associated with that claim. Other interpretations consider the right as a sort of freedom of something or as the object of justice. One of the definitions of justice is in fact the obligation that the legal system has toward the individual or toward the collective to grant respect or execution to his/her/its right, ordinarily with no need of explicit claim. Rights can be divided into individual rights that are held by citizens as individuals (or corporations) recognised by the legal system, and collective rights, held by an ensemble of citizens or a subgroup of citizens who have a certain characteristic in common. Human Rights meaning has some degree of variance between its use in different local jurisdictions —difference in both meaning as well as in protocols for and styles of application and is affected by localising factors, such as ethnicity, nationality, and religious principles. So, it has been difficult to find a universally accepted definition of human rights even though member states of United Nations have agreed at some commonality in various international human rights instruments such as ICCPR, ICECSR, and UDHR. Some of the controversies regarding human rights are:

1. Are human rights political, moral or legal entities (or all three at the same time)?
2. Which rights should be defined as fundamental human rights? Is there or should there be a hierarchy of human rights?
3. Do human rights impede state sovereignty? What if the state itself has ratified international conventions?
4. Should human rights be used as a context for economic or military intervention? (Often leads to a worsening of the human rights situation in the target country)
5. Questions of cultural relativism—e.g. "Political participation is not a part of African culture. Who are you to say that we should have political participation?" These arguments can also be made on religious basis: e.g., "In our religion marriages have always been arranged; why should we not continue this practice?" Some arguments claim that human rights policies are a form of cultural imperialism in, which powerful countries dictate, which rights they consider most important to less powerful countries.
6. Who should hold the moral duty to uphold rights? For civil and political rights, the answer is the state but it is not quite so clear who should be responsible for promoting economic, social and cultural rights (do we have a global duty?).

Similarly, there are controversies and differences in meaning of terms such as justice, Justice, Peace, development, marginality and vulnerability, sustainable livelihood, gender, justice etc.