Lecture Notes (1)
Human Rights and Development
At the Information and Communication University (ICU)
Social Work Program
By
Confucious Mweene, BSW,
MPhil Dev. Studies
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Human Rights An Overview
Currently there are huge debates around human rights
Debates arise from the belief that human rights are important
Especially in an economically globalized world today where
individualism, greed and great appetite for getting rich are seen
as the most important things in life
In such a world, According to Jim Ife (2008) in his book titled
“Human Rights and Social Work: Towards a Rights Based
Practice” where moral positions are declining, human rights
provides an alternative moral reference point for those who
would seek to reaffirm the values of humanity.
This is particularly so in those professions that seek to provide
human services – and, appropriately so for Social Work
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Overview
There is therefore great emphasis in contemporary discourse
that in a morally decaying society, human rights become
imperative and in the social work profession can provide that
moral basis for practice at the various levels of intervention i.e.
– Day to day work with clients – individuals, families and groups
– Community development
– Policy advocacy and activism
It is in this sense, its thrust towards human rights, that
compels social work to be viewed as a Human Rights
Profession.
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Jim Ife (2008) argues that -Many authors suggest that the idea
of human rights is largely a product of Enlightenment thinking
and is therefore inevitably contextualized within an essentially
western and modernist framework.
This has led to the criticism that human rights thinking and
rhetoric are simply another manifestation of colonialist western
domination, and to the suggestion that the concept of human
rights should not be used (Aziz 1999).
Question is What is it that we have not copied
– democracy, justice, freedom, equality and human dignity – all
these have western historical roots
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Overview
We however cant discard debate around human rights due to
the argument that it is an exclusively western concept.
Although the term Human Rights may not be explicitly used,
notions of human rights are embedded in all the major religious
traditions and can be found in many different cultural (Jim Ife
2008)
Jim Ife (2008) further points out that Ideas of human dignity and
worth, ideas that all people should be treated according to
certain basic standards, ideas that people should be protected
from what is frequently termed ‘human rights abuse’, and ideas
of respect for the rights of others are not confined to the
western intellectual tradition.
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Critique of Human Rights
It is therefore important to note that human rights are anchored
around the moral imperative for a more just, peaceful and
sustainable world.
And this been prevalent in many religious and cultural traditions
beyond the more recent Enlightenment Thinking of the western
world.
The degree and emphasis of these ideals in the different
traditions is the question of cultural relativism
In a Human Rights Based Social Work Practice therefore,
Cultural Relativism requires application through critical thinking
perspectives
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Critique cont
The Human Rights Discourse is also criticized from two other
perspectives;
– One is that claims of human rights can be frivolous or selfish (Jim 2008):
people will claim something as a ‘human right’ when in fact they are simply
expressing a simple selfish 'want’; for example people might claim the
right to own a car, the right to take a luxury cruise, the right to smoke
in a restaurant, the right to watch a video on an aircraft. Thus human
rights become nothing more than a new language for consumerism and
self-indulgence.
– The other criticism is that claims of human rights can conflict with each
other and therefore one is left with the problem of reconciling competing
claims, for example the right of freedom of expression as opposed to
the right to protection from libel or slander
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Social Work – A general perspective in light
of rights based approach
While Social Work is generally a unified profession, there are some
slight differences in terms of emphasis of what connotes social work in
different parts of the world today.
In some societies, most notably Australia and North America, ‘social
worker’ implies a fairly narrowly defined group of workers who have
high professional qualifications, and excludes many others working in
the human service field.
In other societies the term has a much wider application, covering
human service workers from a variety of backgrounds, with varying
levels of educational qualifications.
In United Kingdom, social work has been seen as the implementation
of the policies of the welfare state through the provision of statutory
services, with relatively little role in community development or social
change.
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Generalist view of social work
In other societies, however, such as in Latin America ‘social
work’ has much more radical or activist connotations: it is
concerned with bringing about social change, progressive
movements for social justice and human rights, and opposition
to prevalent forms of bureaucratic and political domination.
In some contexts, such as the United States, individualized
therapeutic roles for social workers are dominant
While in other contexts, particularly in ‘the developing world’ or
‘the south’, social work has a much stronger community
development orientation.
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Challenges of the generality of
Social Work across regions
It can be argued therefore that Social Work therefore bears
some cultural, social and political relativism
It is increasingly becoming inevitable to construct social work
differently depending on location
This has considerable benefits for social work as it allows for a
diversity of interests and practices.
The challenge however is that readers of the social work
literature will be seeking to apply that literature in different
contexts where their idea of social work is contested.
It is also a recipe for ambiguity and misunderstanding when
social workers meet across cultural and national boundaries.
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Generalist view of Social Work
For purposes of this course and in search for a Human Rights
Based Practice social work shall be constructed and understood
in its broadest sense and to include all those working in the social
services or community development, including those seeking
social change.
The moral imperative for observance of Human Rights shall then
be the unifying factor around the various regional
interpretation/perceptions of social work
Social work itself is a not seen as a neutral, objective or ‘value-
free’ activity, but rather as work which is grounded in values and
which makes no apology for adopting partisan stances on a range
of questions
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Value laden profession
In formulating this value base, the idea of human rights is often
implicit, through phrases such as ‘the inherent worth of the
individual’, the ‘right to self-determination’, and so on.
Such statements serve to locate human rights
Professional codes of ethics also tend to imply some
commitment to an idea of human rights, since it is often from an
implied human rights position that the ethics of social work are
derived
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Discursive Approach to Human
Rights
A positivist notion of rights implies that human rights somehow
‘exist’ in an objective form and can be identified, ‘discovered’,
and empirically measured or verified
This is reminiscent of what is contained in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights – Rights are known, packaged
and efforts should be made towards achieving those rights
Refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
Human Rights however should also be seen as discursive
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Human Rights are Discursive
For example while it is argued that human rights apply to all
human beings there are other classes of people who are
regularly excluded from our construction of humanity’, and
hence from being ascribed human rights,
One obvious category is children, who are not seen as having
the same rights as adults, even though many of those rights
(such as the right to vote) are commonly labelled ‘human rights’.
People with intellectual disabilities, prisoners, refugees By
excluding them from categories of people to whom we ascribe
human rights, we are thereby excluding them from our category
of ‘human’,
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What then are Human Rights
Understanding human rights as discursive means that
human rights are not fixed or static
and therefore in that sense they cannot be fully defined
It is maybe easier to define what is meant when talk about
Human Rights Discourse or what should count as Human
Rights and what does not
By human rights we generally mean those rights which we
claim belong to all people, regardless of national origin, race,
culture, age, sex, or anything else.
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What are Human Rights
Such rights are therefore universal and apply to everyone,
everywhere, while more specific and circumscribed rights will
only apply to certain people in certain circumstances.
A human rights perspective, clearly implies that where there is
a conflict, human rights have priority over other claims of right,
in other words specific rights, claimed only for certain
individuals or groups, cannot be allowed to contravene the
fundamental human rights which belong to everyone.
It is important to note that many claims for non-universal rights
are made by the powerful, rather than the powerless
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What Human Rights are not
The powerless are largely concerned with claiming the
universal rights that others take for granted, but in many
instances the powerful claim specific and privileged additional
‘rights’, such as the right to manage, the right to bear arms, the
right to maximise profits at whatever social and environmental
cost the right to exploit, and the right to unlimited ownership of
private property.
These rights can not be universal because it would be difficult
for everyone to exercise them
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What Human Rights are not
Some claims of specific rights, however, are very different, and
are not made by the privileged and the powerful.
The claims of disadvantaged groups, for example the rights of
women, the rights of children, the rights of refugees, and so on,
cannot be dismissed so readily; to do so is to trivialize
important issues of social justice and to reinforce discourses of
oppression – must be seen as human rights
In many cases they are simply claims for human rights that are
denied to particular groups; people e.g. with disabilities,. may find it
especially difficult to obtain employment, and hence the right to meaningful
work (recognized as a universal human right) takes on extra significance for
people with disabilities and is included as part of a statement of their specific
‘rights’.
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Human Rights
In this case the right itself is no different from the right of other members
of the population, but the point is that oppressive structures and
discourses mean that it is hard for this particular group to exercise that
right, and hence special provision needs to be made.
This of course raises the question of how we define what is necessary
for realizing one’s full humanity. Is the claim of a gun owner, for
example, that the right to bear arms is necessary for him/her to realize
full humanity, sufficient to qualify the ‘right to bear arms’ as a human
right for that person? Rapists who claim that it is only in the act of
committing rape that they can realize their own humanity may make a
similar claim.
Such claims clearly conflict with the human rights of others, and a
human rights perspective cannot allow as legitimate a claim for human
rights that violates other people’s human rights.
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Human Rights must universal, indivisible,
inalienable, and inabrogable
When human rights are discussed, they are commonly referred
to as universal, indivisible, inalienable, and inabrogable
universality implies that human rights apply to all human
beings
indivisibility implies that human rights come as a package –
one cannot pick and choose, accepting some and rejecting
others
inalienable implies that they cannot be taken away from
someone.
inabrogable implies that one cannot voluntarily give up one’s
human rights or trade them for additional privileges – human
rights are not to be idly dispensed with.
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In Conclusion
To make a claim on the basis of human rights the following
criteria must be met,
– Realisation of the claimed right is necessary for a person or group to be
able to achieve their full humanity, in common with others.
– The claimed right is seen either as applying to all of humanity, and is
something that the person or group claiming the right wishes to apply to all
people anywhere, or as applying to people from specific disadvantaged or
marginalised groups for whom realisation of that right is essential to their
achieving their full human potential.
– There is substantial universal consensus on the legitimacy of the claimed
right; it cannot be called a ‘human right’ unless there is widespread support
for it across cultural and other divides.
– It is possible for the claimed right to be effectively realised for all legitimate
claimants. This excludes rights to things that are in limited supply, for
example the right to housing with a panoramic view, the right to own a TV channel, or the
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Conclusion cont
The claimed right does not contradict other human rights. This
would disallow as human rights the ‘right’ to bear arms, the
‘right’ to hold other people in slavery, a man’s ‘right’ to beat his
wife and children, the ‘right’ to excessive profits resulting in
poverty for others, and so on.
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