From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

2 POWER AND POLITICS I HAVE RIGHTS, THEREFORE I AMProgress in human rights became one of the hallmarks of thesecond half of the twentieth century, with the spread of democracyand decolonisation leading to a massive expansion in the proportionof the world’s population that exercised some degree of say in theorganisation of society. The advent of mass literacy and improvementsin health meanwhile strengthened their ability to exercise thoserights.Human rights can be grouped into three distinct generations:civil and political, or so-called ‘negative’ rights such as freedom fromtorture, which the state must guarantee; economic, social, and cultural,or ‘positive rights’, such as the right to education, which the state mustfinance and actively promote; and finally collective rights, such asself-determination, which the state must respect. Most recently, theUN has tried to extend the notion of rights to non-state actors suchas corporations. 8From universal franchise and the abolition of slavery onwards,new forms of rights have initially been viewed by those in positions ofpower as unreasonable or unjustified, but have slowly been absorbedinto the mainstream consensus. The latest candidates are the culturallycontentious issues of equal rights for women and for children.For many years after the UN Declaration, the rhetoric of humanrights was reduced to a weapon in the propaganda battles of the ColdWar. As the economist J.K. Galbraith once joked, ‘Under capitalism,man exploits man. Under socialism, it is the other way around.’Neither side had much time for human rights. The West pointedthe finger at socialist countries for denying civil and political rights.The East criticised the capitalist countries for their failure to secureeconomic and social rights for all citizens and for supporting crueldictators such as Zaire’s Mobuto Sese Seko or Chile’s AugustoPinochet. There was little active interaction between the worlds ofrights and development.The end of the Cold War brought convergence, with manydevelopment practitioners combining the two disciplines into whatbecame known as a ‘rights-based approach’ to development. Byreuniting economic and social rights with political and civil rights,this approach aimed to build a comprehensive vision of a new, just,and viable ‘social contract’ between state and citizen. 925