‘BILLIONS OF people are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity. This is a human rights crisis”. The quotation from Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan’s foreword to its annual report signals a radical approach in which socio-economic rights need to be treated equally with political and legal ones if growing instability is to be avoided.
She argues that as recession meets repression we are sitting on a powder keg in which these three conditions are about to explode. Already protests have broken out in several states about their growing impact on everyday life for the world’s poor, while others fall prey to extremist politics and violence. Several major contemporary trends are tracked, such as the growing food crisis affecting populations stripped of social protection by structural adjustment policies over the last generation; the fact that most of the world’s population now lives in urban areas – one billion of them in slums; and the increased vulnerability of immigrant populations to attack as employment markets collapse, bearing in mind that the flow of remittances is twice the size of all development aid.
Ms Khan points up the contrast between these different categories of rights by calling on the United States to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and on China to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. She suggests the newly empowered Group of 20 industrialised and industrialising states could take the initiative by sending a clear signal that all such human rights are equally important. This is because neither economic recovery nor political stability will be sustained without them being fully recognised.
This is a good argument, strongly expressed. It gives a sharper focus to the regional and country-by-country sections of this report, which provide a valuable compendium of how human rights are faring. Counter-posing socio-economic and politico-legal rights is an artificial exercise because they are usually bound up closely with one another, especially by the brutal facts of contrasting poverty and wealth. That is why it makes sense to consider inequality, injustice, indignity, insecurity and instability together rather than apart. This report is a topical warning that unless this is realised more widely the world could be in for a turbulent time, perhaps much more so than many now envisage or expect.
Thus the deepening recession is not a time for human rights to be sidelined, but to be made more central.