When Rights Are Wrong
Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: Op-Ed
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By Tony Saudek, MPP2
Asking a lawyer to design a development project is not too different from asking an MPP to try a court case. Sure, we could probably hit a lot of the right rhetorical notes, but there are probably some important strategies that we wouldn't know to include, or some cornerstone legal theory whose absence would undermine our argument.
So you can imagine my frustration at being the only policy person at the human rights and development NGO at which I interned this past summer in Ghana. Everyone else was a lawyer.
Founded as a legal aid clinic, the NGO has seen its fortunes buoyed by the new popularity of rights-based development among donors and practitioners. This new and at times amorphous approach emphasizes
the notion that, at the very least, government development projects shouldn't stand in to the way of people's social and economic rights (like basic health and education) as well as their traditional political rights.
There is no question that need is great and that injustice is pervasive, so why not view the fulfillment of this need as a right? For many NGOs, this is a no-brainer, especially if it will bring in grant money. No matter that rights-based development may, like many theories, mean different things to different people. But there are reasons to be wary of this new fusion of human rights and development.
For one, rights are fundamentally a legal endeavor. Amnesty International depends on national and international laws to make credible claims against human rights violators. Likewise, groups that pursue rights-based development generally make legal claims of entitlement for basic standards of health and education in poor communities, hence all the lawyers at the NGO at which I worked.
But the solution to complex development problems can never just be new laws. Take the example of AIDS prevalence among monogamous wives. My NGO received a grant to address this problem, and immediately the staff formulated an approach around a woman's rights in marriage. A married woman, they said, has the right to abstain from sex with her husband. But declaring this right doesn't bring us much closer to making it actionable. For most women, it would be social and economic suicide to press charges against their husbands for marital rape.
Asking a lawyer to design a development project is not too different from asking an MPP to try a court case. Sure, we could probably hit a lot of the right rhetorical notes, but there are probably some important strategies that we wouldn't know to include, or some cornerstone legal theory whose absence would undermine our argument.
So you can imagine my frustration at being the only policy person at the human rights and development NGO at which I interned this past summer in Ghana. Everyone else was a lawyer.
Founded as a legal aid clinic, the NGO has seen its fortunes buoyed by the new popularity of rights-based development among donors and practitioners. This new and at times amorphous approach emphasizes
the notion that, at the very least, government development projects shouldn't stand in to the way of people's social and economic rights (like basic health and education) as well as their traditional political rights.
There is no question that need is great and that injustice is pervasive, so why not view the fulfillment of this need as a right? For many NGOs, this is a no-brainer, especially if it will bring in grant money. No matter that rights-based development may, like many theories, mean different things to different people. But there are reasons to be wary of this new fusion of human rights and development.
For one, rights are fundamentally a legal endeavor. Amnesty International depends on national and international laws to make credible claims against human rights violators. Likewise, groups that pursue rights-based development generally make legal claims of entitlement for basic standards of health and education in poor communities, hence all the lawyers at the NGO at which I worked.
But the solution to complex development problems can never just be new laws. Take the example of AIDS prevalence among monogamous wives. My NGO received a grant to address this problem, and immediately the staff formulated an approach around a woman's rights in marriage. A married woman, they said, has the right to abstain from sex with her husband. But declaring this right doesn't bring us much closer to making it actionable. For most women, it would be social and economic suicide to press charges against their husbands for marital rape.
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