The end of the Cold War represented a seminal moment for the human rights movement. In less than three decades of active campaigning, non-governmental advocates had made human rights a common and powerful language and could claim no small part in the widespread attention to civil liberties and democratic reforms in countries throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. But if the expansion of freedom and democracy represented a victory for human rights, it has also served to underscore the dangers of equating civil and political rights with human dignity. The enduring and pervasive poverty suffered by close to two billion people across the globe stands as an inescapable rebuke to those ready to celebrate the “age of rights.”
The human rights movement has much to offer the struggle against poverty, but it must first move beyond its unnecessarily narrow vision of human rights. The domination of Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments has produced a model of human rights advocacy that is limited in two fundamental ways: first to civil liberties, and second to state action.2 While the first limitation has been widely criticized3 and an increasing number of NGOs are addressing economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), the singular focus on state actors endures. This focus fails to address the roots of many violations (particularly violations of ESCR) which increasingly lie beyond national borders.
This paper suggests a fuller interpretation of human rights obligations to make them more relevant and truer to international realities. Moving human rights beyond its state-centric paradigm will potentially serve two purposes. First, it will challenge the reigning neo-liberal extremism that infects much of the public discourse about development and poverty, providing a rhetoric and vision to suggest that entrenched poverty is neither inevitable nor acceptable. Second, it will provide a legal framework with which to begin holding these other actors more accountable for their role in creating and sustaining poverty.
The three most dominant sectors neglected by the state-centric vision of human rights are transnational corporations (TNCs), international financial institutions (IFIs), and third party states (3PS)4. This paper will outline the role of these other sectors in ESCR violations and the extent to which they are accountable to human rights instruments. The focus on impacts and accountability is meant to demonstrate both the importance and the legal basis for broadening human rights advocacy to address additional actors.
2 This paper will not address the many historical reasons for these biases in the movement, nor the pragmatic reasons that continue to restrain many advocates. For two recent commentaries on these trends, see Matua, Makau, Human Rights Ideology, 36 U.Va. Int’l L. J. 589 (1996); and Bolívar, Legia, Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales: Derribar Mitos, Enfrentar Retos, Tender Puentes: una Visión desde la (in)Experiencia de América Latina, in (Cançado, Antonio, ed.) Estudios Basicos de Derechos Humanos, vol. V (IIDH, 1996).
3 The interdependence and equal importance of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights is affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the twin Covenants the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). See e.g. Proclamation of Teheran, art. 13, UNGA Res. 32/130 (1977).
4 Third party states is meant to describe all other states beyond the one in question.