 In
eastern Ecuador: how do you measure the damaging effects of the oil industry on the
economic rights of local inhabitants?
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César
Carrillo*:
“The right to life in Colombia”
What do
you think of the new tendency of many NGOs to include economic rights alongside their
demands for civil and political rights?
Many of them hadn’t previously considered us defenders of human rights, but they’re
looking at things differently now. In Colombia, trade unionists have fought hardest
for civil and political rights, as well as for economic rights. In our country, the
priority today is defending the right to life. Our union has organized activities
to expose the abuse many communities suffer and to defend the victims. We also campaign
against the government’s failure to address human rights violations.
Many people have been killed in these campaigns.
Trade unionists in today’s Colombia are heroes. More trade unionists are murdered
here than in any other country on earth. Figures compiled by the Workers’ Trade Union
(USO) show that 10,000 trade union members are directly under threat. Amnesty International
listed the murders of 112 trade unionists in Colombia last year and 93 more up to
August this year. More than 50 members of the USO alone have been killed in recent
years. In my view, this is because criticism of us has been distorted to link us
with the guerrillas, making us a target for the paramilitary. And the state doesn’t
do enough to protect us against these attacks.
Do you see any difference between violations of economic rights and human rights?
The most important rights for me are civil and political rights. Mine have been violated
because I’m prevented from carrying out my trade union work. Having said that, economic
rights are basic ones that enable people to lead a decent life. But, as I say, more
important than that is the right to life itself.
Interview
by Asbel López, UNESCO Courier journalist
* César
Carrillo was head of Colombia’s main oil industry union, the much-persecuted Unión
Sindical Obrera (Workers’ Trade Union, USO), from 1988 to 1995. He and 15 colleagues
were arrested in 1996, and Carrillo spent 18 months in prison. At the end of 1998,
following the murder of his lawyer, Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, he was forced into
exile after receiving death threats.
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Is
the economic divide a root cause of the September 11 attacks? For several years,
human rights organizations have made the fight against economic injustice a top priority
One after the other,
the major NGOs campaigning for civil and political rights rallied in the mid-1990s
to the banner of “economic rights.” Marching behind it was the long-established International
Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and its 105 national affiliates along with
Human Rights Watch and its supporters in the academic community.
Even more remarkably, the emergency medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders,
which has 2,000 volunteers worldwide, launched a campaign in 1996 for access to basic
medicines. And finally, Amnesty International and its one million members joined
this movement last August.
“We have to be consistent and relevant,” say these organizations to explain the move.
Governments have to be criticized for their failings in health and education policy,
transnational companies for their hypocrisy in doing business in places mired in
poverty, and international financial institutions for being blind to the social effects
of their programmes.
Beyond
the Cold War
Have
they been slow in waking up? Economic rights were legally enshrined in the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Adopted by the UN General Assembly
on December 16, 1966 (along with the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights), it came into effect 10 years later and has been signed by 141 countries.
Governments are expected to take steps to improve the living standards of their people
by ensuring adequate food, clothing and housing, the right to a job, training and
a “fair” wage, the right to join a trade union and go on strike, and the right to
health care and education.
For many years, the covenant was hampered by its ambitious reach and by the Cold
War. Communist countries hailed its principles, while the West remained primarily
interested in civil and political freedoms. Though they were dedicated to defending
all human rights, some organizations such as the FIDH in practice focused only on
civil rights.
“You have to remember that in the 1970s and 1980s, many dictatorships—communist,
Latin American, Asian and African—made defending civil rights an absolute priority
for us,” says FIDH executive director Antoine Bernard. The resurgence of economic
rights was one by-product of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and globalization. With
the spread of the market economy, multi-party political systems and technological
change, globalization has meant “growing wealth for some, but destitution and despair
for many,” says Pierre Sané, former secretary-general of Amnesty International,1
in the organization’s 2001 annual report.
Since the expansion of Amnesty’s mandate, its researchers and campaign directors
have felt more at ease. “Until now, we were calling the famine in Sudan the result
of the forcible movement of people in violation of their civil and political rights,”
says Amnesty researcher Bénédicte Goderiaux. “Now we can look at things
in a different way, such as whether people have access to food.”
Avoiding
platitudes
But
as Bernard points out, “it’s easier to fight for an opposition figure’s freedom than
for a change in a structural adjustment policy.” Freedom may be the same indivisible
principle the world over, but one cannot necessarily ask for the same level of access
to health care or employment in a rich country as in a poor one. “We have to be able
to set minimum standards,” says Joanne Csete, an expert on HIV/AIDS and children’s
rights researcher with Human Rights Watch. “That way even the poorest countries can
start applying them.”
Some campaigners are already overwhelmed by the vast range of economic rights and
some enquiry reports read like catalogues of complaint. Last June, Human Rights Watch
published a report on Kenyan children affected by AIDS. After a long section on the
impact of the epidemic in Africa, the report called on the Kenyan government to ensure
that all children of primary school-age attended school. “We’re trying to suggest
some practical steps to governments,” says Csete, who wrote the report, “but maybe
we’ve been over-optimistic in this case.”
“It
won’t be easy.
Figuring out the effect
of an economic
investment on human
rights is much harder
than working out
how it affects
the environment.”
In an effort
to avoid such platitudes, she says, Human Rights Watch has decided to focus on “situations
where arbitrary action by governments involves violation of economic and social rights.”
Amnesty has vowed to maintain its traditional moral authority by pinpointing individual
rights violations, without comment, then following them up with a thorough and impartial
investigation. “We’re going to try to establish if someone’s physical and mental
integrity has been violated through a denial of economic rights,” says Salil Tripathi,
who runs Amnesty’s economic relations and human rights campaign. “It won’t be easy.
Figuring out the effect of an economic investment on human rights is much harder
than working out how it affects the environment.”
For example, how do you measure the impact of sealing-off the Palestinian territories
on the economic and social rights of their inhabitants? The FIDH has tried to do
this. “We noted the tonnage of tomatoes exported from Gaza, before and during the
closure,” says Bernard. “Then we compared the figures and calculated how much income
the farmers and their families had lost.”
Another difficulty is that with the wider field of action, there are far more potential
targets. As well as heads of state, the usual subjects of reports and petitions,
there are now international financial institutions and multinational companies. But
these firms, which are private bodies, are in no way bound by UN covenants. “Company
bosses are human beings too,” says Amnesty spokesman Kamal Samari. “We can persuade
them that making profits doesn’t have to go hand in hand with a lack of morality.”
Drawing
up voluntary conduct codes
Long
before Amnesty embraced these extended goals, Sané was a pioneer of the new
approach. For four consecutive years, he went to the annual meeting of world economic
leaders in Davos (Switzerland) to plead the case for active support of human rights.
He also met the heads of oil companies and urged them to draw up voluntary codes
of conduct that would help the firms comply with certain moral limits.
Leading human rights organizations have chosen to work with multinational firms rather
than enter into a potentially costly confrontation. “We don’t draw up codes of conduct
ourselves, but if a firm asks our opinion, we emphasize two points,” says Tripathi.
“That implementation of the code should be verified regularly by an independent outsider—an
academic, NGO or firm of auditors—and that the code is applied at all levels of the
firm and in all its activities, not just at headquarters.”
Some companies, such as Shell, BP, Levi Strauss or Reebok, have adopted codes themselves.
But their behaviour has not always been in line with their promises, as Amnesty discovered
in the case of the Canadian oil firm Talisman Energy, which was operating in southern
Sudan amid a civil war. In May 2000, an Amnesty report, The Human Price of Oil, accused
government troops and their militias of “serious human rights violations” in the
region of the oilfields, including massacres of civilians and forced displacement
of people. The report noted that government troops were in charge of protecting Talisman’s
installations.
After this report and others, the company devised a code of conduct, appointed a
full-time human rights officer and said it would examine its “corporate social responsibility”
in a professionally audited annual report. Amnesty objected to the company’s 2000
report on grounds that it “underplayed the serious violations being perpetrated.”
Seeking
moral approval
Multinational
firms, eager to win any kind of good conduct tag, are reaching out to human rights
organizations. “They contact us regularly, saying they want our opinion, but they
really want to use us to get a stamp of moral approval,” says Bernard.
The most damning resources human rights organizations have for now are “free speech”
and exposing an offender to “public disgrace.” Bernard says these are just “symbolic
weapons, but they can damage the public reputation of a company or country.”
One result of the campaign has been to force the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
into changing its language and priorities. Since 1999, says the assistant director
of the IMF’s European office, Sergio Pereira Leite, “we’ve been stressing that social
expenditure, such as health and education, should be maintained in countries whose
balance of payments we’re trying to improve. We no longer talk about ‘structural
adjustment’ programmes but ‘poverty reduction and growth.’ Now it’s time for us to
expand our relationship with human rights organizations.”
Some bodies, such as the FIDH, would like a stronger instrument, such as an “international
economic tribunal” where victims, represented by human rights organizations, could
lodge complaints against governments and multinational firms for violating their
economic rights. The proposal has aroused great hostility, but those who believe
economic rights should be a matter of law point to the 1961 European Social Charter
adopted by the 41 member-states of the Council of Europe.
A committee of independent experts who monitor the Charter’s application hears complaints
from recognized NGOs. In 1998, Portugal was formally asked to put an end to child
labour and in 2001, Greece was criticized for laws that implied a version of forced
labour.
“The laws of business should not be considered as being above international agreements
on human rights,” says Sylvia Ostry, of Toronto University’s Munk Center for International
Studies. “The real test is probably going to be about access to anti-AIDS drugs.
South Africa and Brazil have already rejected international business rules on intellectual
property in the name of the basic human right to good health.”
1. Now UNESCO’s
assistant director-general for social and human sciences.
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