Should Human Rights Practice Be Rights-Based?
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Description
Human rights scholars and organizations often call on governments to adopt ‘human rights-based approaches’ (HRBAs) to a vast array of policy areas and challenges, from climate change to housing, poverty, development, humanitarian response, and health policy. HRBAs promote rights fulfilment as a core goal, call for the identification of rights and obligations along with their correlative rights-holders and duty-bearers, and advance the principles of participation, accountability, equality, and non-discrimination. Yet, curiously, human rights actors do not commonly describe their own human rights investigation and advocacy practice and methods as ‘rights based’. Perhaps this is because it seems self-evident that human rights practice itself would be based in the human rights approach. Assessment of the entitlements of rights-holders and the obligations of duty-bearers is of course at the core of much human rights work. But rights-based approaches require much more than that. They advocate for work to recognize and promote the universality, indivisibility, and interdependence of rights, and to advance equality and non-discrimination. Importantly, HRBAs also seek to promote a way of working in which organizations are accountable to those most directly affected by human rights abuse and advocacy—rights-holders— and in which rights-holders and other key stakeholders participate in, own, and are empowered by the human rights work itself, rather than re-victimized, objectified, or marginalized. The approach aims to recognize, centre, and grow the agency and power of rights-holders over the conditions affecting their lives. However, especially on the HRBA process principles and rights-holder participation and empowerment goals, the human rights field far too often falls short, and some commonly used human rights advocacy practices undermine these ideals. Were HRBAs adopted by human rights organizations, the face of human rights advocacy would change—often dramatically—as rights-holders would be empowered to claim their own rights, becoming advocates themselves, and advocates not directly affected by the abuse would be re-cast in roles of support and solidarity. In this chapter, we argue that the human rights-based approach has been exported to many fields without ever being sufficiently integrated within human rights advocacy practice. This assessment is offered in the spirit of ‘introspection and openness’: as both scholars and human rights practitioners, we agree with Philip Alston that the challenges facing human rights today require us to ‘urgently rethink many of [our] assumptions, re-evaluate [our] strategies, and broaden [our] outreach, while not giving up on the basic principles’. Indeed, it is necessary to turn those principles back on ourselves, and to undertake a reckoning with whether human rights work is itself sufficiently rights based. Motivated by the leadership of rights-holders we have worked with and cognizant of the urgent need to end top-down approaches to human rights, we offer this chapter as an invitation to further discussion. This chapter first briefly traces the development of the ‘rights-based approach’, explains its key principles, outlines its implementation in other fields of international practice, and sets out key critiques of the approach. We then examine the rights-based approach in human rights practice, focusing specifically on human rights work by outside advocates—that is, advocacy carried out by practitioners not based in the community experiencing the violations at issue. We find that, although it is difficult to generalize across an enormous and heterogenous field, there is little formal, explicit use of the HRBA among human rights organizations. The substantive rights-based principles, including those related to the indivisibility, interrelatedness, and universality of rights, do receive broad commitment in the human rights field, and their implementation, while inconsistent, has significantly improved in practice over the past decades. However, through examining critical human rights scholarship and contemporary practice, we find that although human rights organizations have increasingly asserted their commitment to the process principles of participation, empowerment, and accountability, in practice the human rights field far too often fails to measure up. Even worse, common human rights research and advocacy approaches used by professionalized international and national NGOs not based in the communities where they work can actually disempower rights-holders and local advocates, produce and objectify victims, and be top- down and poorly accountable to those directly affected by abuse. Although there are many examples to the contrary—especially among grassroots organizations, newer organizations, feminist groups, and those based the global South—we argue that it is common in the human rights field for NGOs to fail to sufficiently adhere to foundational human rights principles in their own working methods. In so doing, their work can have the effect of reproducing unjust power hierarchies, and, where work involves northern NGO interventions in the global South, can also contribute to maintaining colonial northern advocate-as-saviour, southern rights- holder- as- victim frameworks. We conclude with a challenge to those of us in the field and working as outside advocates to commit to a deeper exploration of what more active implementation of human rights-based approaches could look like, and a specific call to directly challenge the socio-economic and political structures that lead to human rights abuses and undermine the ability of rights-holders to claim their rights. We conclude with some questions that could guide human rights practitioners and scholars in examining the practices that may require reform, and to face the challenges inherent in using rights-based approaches.
Source Publication
The Struggle for Human Rights: Essays in Honour of Philip Alston
Source Editors/Authors
Nehal Bhuta, Florian Hoffmann, Sarah Knuckey, Frédéric Mégret, Margaret Satterthwaite
Publication Date
2021
Recommended Citation
Knuckey, Sarah and Satterthwaite, Margaret L., "Should Human Rights Practice Be Rights-Based?" (2021). Faculty Chapters. 1786.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1786
