VII-b. What Is Human Rights Work?
When and how do state actors or non-state actors do human rights work? For example, when a couple takes in a foster child, are they doing human rights work? When a church runs a soup kitchen for the poor, is it acting as an agent of human rights? Can a Ministry of Health say that all of its effort is on health rights simply by virtue of the fact that it does health work? Is every physician a health rights worker? Some providers of human services insist that their work is about the realization of human rights, even when they know little about the global human rights apparatus.
Although many people describe almost any sort of work in support of social justice as human rights work, I find it useful to be something of a legal positivist. My position is that human rights work is about human rights law, either in terms of implementing that law or strengthening that law. Thus, as suggested in the preceding section (VII-a. Moral Responsibilities), moral responsibilities are one thing, and legal duties are another thing. While all duties under human rights law ultimately derive from moral concerns, not all moral concerns are enshrined in the law. Not all moral responsibilities are legal duties.
Many civil society organizations such as CARE or M�decins sans Fronti�res provide humanitarian assistance and are therefore sometimes described as human rights agencies. It is important to recognize that humanitarian assistance and advocacy for human rights are quite different. A number of CSOs do useful work in providing humanitarian assistance directly to the needy, but that is different from insisting that governments should provide assistance to the needy because it is their legal right. Not every effort at protecting human dignity or improving human well-being should be described as human rights work.
Similarly, it is sometimes suggested that specialized agencies of the United Nations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization are human rights bodies because they help to fulfill important human needs. However, their efforts have not been explicitly tied to codified human rights. Historically, international governmental agencies such as FAO and WHO have rarely explained their actions as being intended to fulfill specific, codified obligations under the law—although that is now changing under the new United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF).
If we were to accept that battling injustice or providing human services of any kind means doing human rights work, we would miss some important distinctions. Perhaps the claim that one is doing human rights work should be based on awareness and conscious use of the relevant human rights framework. Human rights work can then be identified by the fact that it makes explicit reference to human rights law. Thus, in this perspective, we would say that UNICEF began to function as a human rights agency when its Executive Board decided in 1991 that thereafter UNICEF's work would be based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Many other United Nations agencies are now beginning to reorient their efforts to a more explicit human rights approach. Thus, they too are beginning to become human rights agencies.
The question is important in clarifying the roles of civil society organizations. Human rights are statements about certain things should be done to protect and promote human dignity. Beyond that, human rights are also specifically about what governments should do to promote human dignity.
Consider what happens when churches set up soup kitchens for the poor. Such programs certainly help the poor, but they do nothing to assure that government fulfills its obligations to the poor. When the private sector provides services directly because the government fails to do so, it may in fact be relieving the government of its obligations.
In some cases civil society organizations may work cooperatively with government and serve as its agent, helping it to meet its obligations. This is very different from what happens when nongovermental organizations step in and, on their own initiative, provide services to fill voids due to government's omissions and failures. Such work certainly may be necessary. However, from a human rights perspective it is always important to press for clarification and fulfillment of the government's obligations to help meet basic needs.
It is useful to contrast the typical soup kitchen with the operation of the civil society organization, Food Not Bombs. It set up feeding programs for the poor in San Francisco in a way that highlighted the point that the government was not doing enough to make sure that people would be able to feed themselves. The Food Not Bombs people may or may not have been aware of the relevant international law, but they certainly were clear about the need to press government to fulfill its responsibilities to its people.
Civil society organizations may feel moral obligations to help care for the needy, and they may feel they should do so directly. Human rights, however, are mainly about the obligations of national governments. After all, it is national governments, not private individuals or civil society organizations, that sign and ratify the international human rights agreements in behalf of the states they represent. Thus, it seems reasonable to say that organizations that provide services directly, on their own initiative, are not doing human rights work. However, if they do that in collaboration with government in some way, they may be helping the government to fulfill its obligations. Certainly an organization that presses government to recognize and carry out its obligations with regard to human rights is doing human rights work.
Some civil society organizations place great emphasis on building self-reliance among the poor. While that certainly is of great importance, from a human rights point of view, it can go too far. If the emphasis is exclusively on building self-reliance, that may tend to relieve governments of their responsibilities. Indeed, governments' advocating local self-reliance sometimes can be their way of shirking responsibility. Just as exclusively top-down strategies of development are objectionable, so too are strategies based entirely on local self-reliance. Instead, there needs to be an appropriate balance, with both governments and local people carrying their appropriate burdens.
Similar points should be made about the roles of international agencies. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for example, plainly recognizes that the task of the UNHCR is not to take over the work of delivering services to refugees directly. Instead, UNHCR favors a rights-based approach that
. . . underlines the legal obligations of States to meet the basic needs of the most vulnerable individuals (including refugees), and ensures that the work of humanitarian agencies such as UNHCR provides support to States in fulfilling their responsibilities, rather than being a substitute for State action (or inaction) (Jessen-Pettersen 1999).
Thus the primary legal duty of non-state actors, whether within or outside the state, is to support states in meeting their obligations arising from particular human rights, and not to fulfill the rights through independent direct action.
Continue to VII-c. Levels of Government Obligation
Subsection VII-b last updated on September 26, 1999