On human rights and geopolitical equity

Irene León

10/06/2014

Opinión

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In order to consolidate the hemispheric commitments on human rights, reinforce the conditions for their realization and widen the reach for their fulfilment, the UNASUR countries have undertaken a process for strengthening the Inter-American System of Human Rights – IASHR – that includes, on the one hand, the consistency of content and methodology with the regional context, and on the other hand, universalization, that implies parity of the rules of the game for all the member countries.

Human rights, as devised in the second half of the past century, to uphold the dignity of the human person, have evolved conceptually in a significant way, inasmuch as the experience of “dignity”, in addition to the respect for individuality, can only became a reality with the coming together of a set of cultural and socioeconomic conditions, as well as forms of management of collective life.

From this perspective, which has been part of the universal conceptual background for several decades, civil and political rights – which were the leitmotif of hemispheric mechanisms – are now only a fraction of a broader universe of rights, whose new dimensions involve multiple intersections among a variety of conditions. New elements characterize the identification of subjects of individual rights, that now assert a mosaic of identities of class, ethnic, gender and sex identity, among others. At the same time, the subjects of collective rights face new scenarios and conditions, such those arising from globalization, expressed, for example, in the current reality of massive human mobility.

But there are also new elements in the spheres where power is exercised and in the emergence of renewed forces of domination, such as the transnational corporations and de facto powers that in most cases, are not subject to control by States. The power relations established by the corporate and financial sectors are an example of the extraterritorial character of a perspective that prioritizes the “rights” of capital over human rights and establishes corporate and national interests on a par.

In these power relations, the States of the South are barely third rate players, executors of roles assigned by extraterritorial powers, or intermediaries of “independent” relationships that corporations establish with “individuals”, as employees, consumers or others.

This kind of situation is also evident in the omnipresence of de facto powers that act as political censors concerning national decisions. This can involve media strategies and/or a combination between media and sustained belligerent actions, sometimes carried out by “anonymous” actors. Among these de facto powers are ultraconservative groups, which are also transnational in character, that put in check certain rights of women or of sexual diversity, often succeeding in imposing their agenda through extra-institutional mechanisms.

But if these examples provide some clue as to the transnational endeavours of the “new” powers, nothing exhibits more faithfully the recent scenarios of infringement of human rights as the evidence that results from the union between the control of communication systems, the “arms of massive vigilance” and “security”, where the monumental monopoly of communications infrastructure, of hardware and software, redounds in an unthinkable corporate control, exercised with impunity over persons, collectives and countries.

These same dynamics are found in the relations of geopolitical and geo-economic power, where the home countries of corporations obtain advantages to exert pressure, to influence, to impose their common interests, in order for their companies to establish their own criteria, maintain their own private security mechanisms, their own systems of hiring labour and other actions that are adverse to human rights and existing laws.

Nevertheless, in spite of the weight of the transnationals, and of the de facto forces in the new power relations, the establishment of a mechanism to ascertain responsibilities in the face of the violations of human rights that they commit is still pending.

States, as the sole guarantors of rights, can establish an institutional framework and rules of the game in the service of the universality of rights and the interests of peoples. Hence the proposal of UNASUR, under the leadership of Ecuador, to emphasize both sovereignty and the integral nature of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and developmental rights, underlining their interdependence and their indivisibility, in order to envision the need to update the conceptual perspective of human rights, renew methodologies for their implementation and multiply the scenarios that are apt for their fulfilment (1).

It is, then, a matter of each entity of the System of Human Rights complying with its attributes and doing what it has to do. To this end, according to the Ecuadorian proposal, the time has come to adjust the rules of the game to make them more transparent and equitable, without bias or sponsorship. These criteria apply as well to funding, that should remain within institutional channels, avoiding slipping towards the influence of money over thematic priorities or, worse still, the discretional bias in the location of problems in the better “financed” sectors, as has recently happened with the elastic conceptual umbrella of “freedom of expression”, under whose shadow one finds a range of detractions against countries undergoing a process of change.

On corroborating such inconsistencies, the UNASUR countries propose “to undertake a study on the different dimensions of the system of rapporteurs of the IACHR, in the framework of the principles of equality and indivisibility of human rights, with concrete proposals with respect to the balanced financing of these rapporteurships, including the creation of a Fund to receive extra-budgetary contributions, that must be assigned in accordance with a previously approved work programme.”

Along this same line is the aspiration that all countries should commit equally to fulfilment, with co-responsibility and universality, and ideally that the 32 members ratify and adhere to the American Convention on Human Rights (2) -- on hold for 45 years! –. At the same time, it has been proposed that the Headquarters of the Human Rights Commission should move to a country that has complied with this ratification. The present headquarters, the United States, has not done so, while Haiti, the candidate country, ratified it in 1977(3).

In synthesis, the proposal for updating the Inter-American System of Human Rights is simply recommending equality of treatment, respect for sovereignty, an integral vision of rights and keeping in tune with the times, in such matters as the hemispheric accession to the declaration of a territory of peace, as UNASUR, ALBA and CELAC have already done.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Irene León, Ecuadorian sociologist.

Notes

[1] IV Conferencia de Estados parte del Pacto de San José, Haití, May 2014, Declaración, http://cancilleria.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Declaraci%C3%B3n-Ha...

[2] http://www.oas.org/dil/esp/tratados_B-32_Convencion_Americana_sobre_Dere...

[3] http://www.cidh.org/countryrep/Haiti79sp/cap.1.htm

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