Human Rights and Development: Can This Dialogue Be More Productive?

This shared interest in human rights and development is not a mere coincidence: there is a great deal of overlap between these two areas. A more holistic concept of development, embedded in the Human Development Index (HDI), has been recently adopted by the United Nations. The HDI replaced the traditional focus on income per capita that guided much of the development efforts for decades. This index incorporates a concern with people's ability to live a long and healthy life and to be knowledgeable, building up on Amartya Sen's notion of development as freedom. As the 2000 Human Development Report acknowledges, "the basic idea of human development – that enriching the lives and freedoms of ordinary people is fundamental – has much in common with the concerns expressed by declarations of human rights. The promotion of human development and the fulfillment of human rights share, in many ways, a common motivation, and reflect a fundamental commitment to promoting the freedom, well-being and dignity of individuals in all societies."

Largely because of these common concerns and motivations, these areas also share some common challenges. For instance, both the human rights and the development enterprises have to deal with charges of Eurocentrism or Imperialism, i.e. accusations that their goals are the imposition of Western values upon non-Western societies.

Despite these overlaps, human rights and development have significant differ- ences, as Peter Uvin shows in his book, Human Rights and Development (Kumarian Press, 2004). For instance, the development enterprise has been better funded: by the mid 1990s, there were US$ 50 billion of funds allocated to development and less than 1 percent of that amount was allocated to human rights.

There are major differences in their approaches as well. While the Human Rights discourse has focused on legal arguments (state's international and legal obligations) to achieve many of its goals, the development discourse does not have that option. Those in the development field have nothing that resembles the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the 1966 Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In 1986, the UN adopted the Declaration on the Right to Development, stating that "the right to development is an inalienable human right", but as a resolution the document has no binding force.

Another important difference is that the development enterprise is more open to an incrementalist approach, i.e. it is more concerned with avoiding a break from the past. It accepts that reformers need to be mindful of social, political, cultural and economic constraints and work within the limits imposed by them. According to Uvin, "at the level of daily practice the development community has gone much farther in this direction of incremental change than has the human rights community."

Perhaps one reason for that is the fact that an incrementalist approach asks how to bring about change and its answer is with pragmatism. To a certain extent, it abandons claims of universality that are often present in the development discourse and even more often present in that of human rights. This reduces the politi- cal nature of the development enterprise (at least on appearance). It may also potentially explain, according to Uvin, the disparities in funding.

Due to these differences, some development efforts are con- ceived, designed, and pursued independently of those connected to human rights. But the opportunities offered to U of T law students have not reflected this. Despite providing students with a wealth of prospects for international work, our faculty has thus far focused only on human rights projects. We need to go beyond that. There should be more space for law students at U of T to work with development related projects that are not restricted to those offered by the IHRP or IHRC. For this reason, I have designed a project to increase the opportunities for students to get involved with law and development issues while in law school. The project will start in the fall of 2009 with a student-run website and a speakers' series.

Of course, my project is not meant to compartmentalize and disconnect human rights and development concerns and initiatives within the school. On the contrary, the common concerns and motivations of these two areas suggest that they can and should join efforts. As the 2000 Human Development Report suggests, the development enterprise can largely benefit from a human rights approach because "human development, if combined with the human rights perspective, can indicate the duties of others in society to enhance human development in one way or the other." By the same token, the human rights enterprise can benefit from a discussion on "how different policy choices will affect the prospects for fulfilling the right. Scarcity of resources and institutional constraints often require us to prioritize concern for securing different rights for the purposes of policy choice. Human development analysis helps us to see these choices in explicit and direct terms".