Gleaner In Focus: Are Jamaicans for justice? (15.08.10)

Ian Boyne, Gleaner Writer

The buzz words are 'justice' and 'human rights'. All over Jamaica there is the cry, "We want justice." Peter Tosh famously sang about "equal rights and justice". The human-rights lobby is the most vocal and trenchant of all lobbies in Jamaica, commanding a deference in the media and within the political class, far above its numerical strength.

But is the human-rights lobby taking a holistic view of human rights, and has the concept of justice been thoroughly thought through? Human-rights groups in the West have traditionally focused on what are called first-generation rights, involving civil and political liberties, leaving economic and broader social rights to be taken up by left-wing and progressive groups. But the time is long overdue for a more integrated view of human rights and justice but, happily, in the scholarly literature significant intellectual advances have been made in articulating a broader concept of human rights and justice.

The tour de force work, of course, was John Rawls' epochal book, A Theory of Justice. But, in recent years, more pointed attention has been given, more specifically, to the issue of poverty by Columbia University Political Science Professor Thomas Pogge. He has insisted that the issue of global poverty be put on the front burner of human-rights concerns. In his 2007 edited work, Freedom From Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor, he makes an eloquent case that our present global economic and political order is inherently inimical to human rights and justice.

Primary focus

He systematically assails all the excuses given why we need only concern ourselves as a primary focus with whether states are torturing, murdering, unjustly incarcerating and violating people's right of association and freedom of movement or oppressing them because of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

Human rights have to involve more than ensuring that people have the right to elect which set of oppressors will rule them for the next few years or whether they can publish or read whatever they want. In short, human rights must involve more than civil and political liberties.

There are some persons who are involved in Western human-rights organisations, including those in Jamaica, who would be alarmed at the full implication of human rights and justice. For a coherent view of human rights could clash radically with our bourgeois conception of how this society and world ought to be organised and how its economics and politics should function.

Look at the objective facts about the world in which we live. Ask yourself, where is the justice? The world's 500 richest people have a combined income greater than the poorest 416 million in the world. Some 2.2 billion people live on less than US$2 a day, accounting for just five per cent of global income. The richest 20 per cent account for 75 per cent of the world's income. The $7 billion needed annually over the next few years to provide 2.6 billion people with access to clean water is less than what Europeans spend on perfume and less than Americans spend on elective surgery!

Lack of essentials

That $7 billion would save 4,000 lives each day. For every $1 developed countries spend on aid, they allocate, even in this post-Cold War era, $10 to military expenditure. Two billion people lack access to essential medicines; over one billion do not have adequate shelter; two billion lack electricity; nearly 800 million are illiterate and nearly 950 million are chronically undernourished.

Approximately 18 million die annually - 50,000 a day because of poverty-related causes such as poor drinking water and inadequate nutrition. The world was stunned by the human loss and suffering caused by the Asian tsunami a few years ago, which claimed 300,000 lives. Says the 2005 edition of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP's) Human Development Report:"The tsunami was a highly visible, unpredictable and largely unpreventable tragedy." But, the report notes, poignantly, "Every hour more than 1,200 children die - away from the glare of media attention. This is equivalent to three tsunamis a month, every month, hitting the world's most vulnerable citizens - its children."

Should human-rights activists be properly concerned about these matters and such gross disparities in the world's 'development'? How meaningful - or complete - are civil liberties and political rights if one is deprived of the economic and social means to fully utilise them? The traditionally jaundiced view of human rights must be challenged - and is being challenged in a most intellectually robust way. The brilliant Indian philosopher-economist and Nobel Prize winning scholar, Amartya Sen last year published his magnum opus titled The Idea of Justice, a nearly 500-page intellectual delight.

Sen notes Thomas Hobbes' famous statement of 1651 that life was "short, nasty and brutish", adding: "I am afraid it is still a good starting point for a theory of justice today, since the lives of so many people across the world have exactly those dire features, despite the substantial material progress of others." If human rights is to be more than merely "bawling on paper", as the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote, it must embody economic rights.

What is very interesting and noteworthy is that this matter of economic rights is not a Johnny-come-lately concept, alien to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified by the United Nations as far back as 1948. An understanding of class society and Marxist critique of capitalism would explain why human-rights activists in the West have latched on to a few narrow rights in their advocacy, ignoring other equally fundamental rights.

But right there in that Universal Declaration of Human Rights we find the following words: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care (Article 25)." It also says, "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration can be fully realised." It is abundantly clear that our present international economic and political order is distinctly injurious to the human rights of the vast majority who are consigned to poverty, marginalisation and dehumanisation.

A most grotesque recent example of this was the global financial crisis caused by the greed, recklessness and caprice of a few in the richest country in the world. This crisis significantly reduced global gross domestic product, threw hundreds of millions back into poverty and tens of million on the unemployment scrap heap.

It savaged the incomes and prospects of multiple millions in developing countries which have to disproportionately face the burdens of adjustments while the wealthy people who caused the crash were bailed out by their rich capitalist governments. It was socialism for the bankers and more poverty and degradation for the poor.

This is a legitimate concern of those in the human rights and justice movement. Thirty thousand children are dying every day because of poverty. Fifteen million children die of malnutrition every year. The gross domestic product of the United States (US) is more than $13 trillion. US government foreign aid amounts to about 0.2 per cent of the federal budget - two-tenths of one per cent!

What is the responsibility of the economically powerful nations of the world to those disadvantaged by the present global-economic structures? Absolutely none, shouts prominent human rights armchair activist and talk-show host Wilmot Perkins. Developing countries must stop talking "damn nonsense" about the deve-loped countries owing them anything and "get to work" by "creating opportunity". This is the pronouncement of one of the high priests of the human rights movement in Jamaica!

Basic freedom

It is interesting that even Franklin D. Roosevelt, former president of the United States, in his famous Four Freedoms speech of January, 1941, identified the third basic freedom as "the freedom from want which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world". That is significant, showing the long history of an integrated view of human rights. The human-rights movement in the West has become more narrow in its focus for ideological and class reasons, and hardened its position during the Cold War when, admittedly, communist repression and right-wing authoritarianism held sway in many countries.

It is time to get back to that integrated view of human rights and justice.

Some of the lawyers and other human-rights activists who focus narrowly on civil liberties do so because a broader focus would threaten their class interests. Besides, there is no political groundswell here for this broader focus as the two parties are sold on neoliberal capitalism.

Enforcing economic rights is, of course, problematic. Economic rights assume those who hold duties with respect to those rights. So you run into what scholars call "the feasibility issue". This was a major reason Bentham was sceptical about the concept of human rights centuries ago. Rights must have legal force and who should be held responsible for the many people who are poor? What about those poor through their own carelessness and folly - do they still have a 'right' to food, proper shelter etc? The issues are not unproblematic - but that's no reason we must not pursue them rigorously.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com .