PARTICIPATION IN HUMAN RIGHTS

DISCOURSEDALMACE, RAMONETTE B.

THE GLOBAL DISCOURSE OFHUMAN RIGHTS

the human rights discourse remains dominated by the voices of the privileged.

- it is rare for the disadvantaged, the powerless, and the victims of humanrights abuses to be heard in the debate.

- reflects the voices of lawyers, academics, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, philosophers, theologians, journalists and middle-class activists (Beetham 1999)

the human rights discourse remains a discourse of the powerful about the powerless.

- therefore becomes part of the discourse of domination and disempowerment.This must be of fundamental concernfor social workers and suggests some important priorities for social workpractice

Human rights are a special case, however. The exclusion of the disadvantaged from the human rights

discourse is itself a denial of human rights.- and so the human rights discourse, in its dominant privileged form, is self-contradictory. This contradiction in the dominant discursive framing of human rights has received very little attention, yet for social workers as human rights practitioners it must be of central concern.

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY

Democracy, like human rights, is a complex and contested concept (Held, 1987)

- positive value attached to the idea of democracy, or ‘rule of the people’,

- In classical Greek democracy, where the idea of democracy is commonly seen as having originated, women, children and slaves were omitted from the construction of ‘the people’ (Sinclair 1988);

- in modern democracies, too, not everyone is includedin the decision-making process – children do not have the right to vote, nor do aliens or ‘non-citizens’

- for many people, ‘democracy’ is a myth that hides the reality of their effective powerlessness.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACYthe role of the people is not to make democratic decisions but to elect or appoint representatives to a parliament or some other assembly, trusting those they have elected to make decisions of which they will approve.

The decision making power of the people is twice delegated, first to the politicians then to the civil service, and the input of the citizen is limited indeed.

E.g Canada, the United States of America and the United Kingdom

Representative democracy, has moved a long way from the romantic notion of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

The role of the individual citizen is minimal and has been furthereroded by the complexity and the mystification of modern government

(Martin & Schumann 1997).

Increasingly policy is defined, and accepted, as so complex that only trained experts can understand it, and hence ‘public’ policy is removed

from the realm of democratic debate and becomes the exclusive domain of the expert (Fay 1975; Rayner 1998; Held 1999).

E.g economics

Many decisions that are taken are reasonablyuncontroversial as well as highly technical, and most people wouldpresumably be happy not to be involved in them. However, the form ofrepresentative democracy characteristic of most self-styled ‘democracies’ isclearly disempowering and tokenistic, and as a result more participatorymodels have been proposed. And in the interests of human rights, such aquest is of considerable importance (Beetham 1999). Four common proposals can be termed citizens’ initiated referendums, deliberative democracy, electronic democracy and decentralised democracy.

citizens’ initiated referendumsThe idea of a citizens’ initiated referendum is that if a sufficient number ofcitizens were to sign a petition requesting such a referendum, it would haveto be put to the people and the result would be binding on the government.

Referendums have an obvious superficial appeal, as they clearly increase theability of ordinary people to be involved in the decision-making process.

They are used in a number of American states, and commonly in Switzerland.

deliberative democracythe idea that people can make a wise decision if they are given full access to all relevant information and the time to study and debate the issues in some depth, amounting to an extension of the jury system into the public policy arena.

Deliberative democracy concentrates on process; it suggests that it is in the integrity of the process and the opportunity for people to have genuine input into deliberative processes that effective democracy can be realised.

People are often prepared to accept a decisionthat goes against their particular preferences, as long as they can be satisfiedthat they have had an opportunity to have effective input (i.e. their voicehas been heard), and that the decision-making process has been open andFair.

The key element of deliberative democracy, however, is that citizens are enabled to be part of the process of studying alternatives, researching possible outcomes and formulating proposals; they are asked to contribute to the process rather than simply react to a proposal.

Electronic democracyseeks to use the power of the Internet to increase levels of citizen participation.

ADVANTAGES-Through the Internet, people who may never meet face to face are able to discuss issues and even

come to a consensus-More organised use of the Internet

to facilitate participatory democracy includes ongoing

discussion groups, computer voting on issues, blogging, and the use of websites to provide people with the

information necessary to make informed decisions –a kind of

virtual deliberative democracy.

DISADVANTAGES

computers are only available to a minority of the world’spopulation (and that is the most advantaged minority), so any democraticprocess that relies exclusively on the Internet will exclude the majority ofHumanity.

there are many others who, while they may have access toa computer, do not have the level of computer skills to make full and effectiveuse of the Internet.

electronic democracy will undoubtedlyfavour the voices of not merely the computer-literate but in particular thevoices of the computer-obsessives.

Decentralised democracySuggests that the most effective way to have people actively involved in decision-making over issues that directly affect them is to decentralise decision-making as much as possible, so that decisions are made in more local community-based structures which enable people to have much more direct input (Rayner 1998; Ife 2002)

This can be achieved through more accessible local government structures, with local governments taking increasing responsibility for a wide range of issues.

This has been a major thrust of community development theory and practice, which has seen the maximisation of citizen participation as one of its central aims.

There is a good deal of social work expertise in maximising participation at local community level, and this is importantin human rights-based social work, this form of practice is seen as contributing to an overall national or global strategy of encouraging local participation and decentralising decision-making wherever possible.

Human rights are global citizenship rightsHuman rights, as we have seen, are the consequence of some notion of

global citizenship, implying that we are all citizens of a global society and that despite our many cultural and other differences there is a shared humanity that we hold in common. If human rights are indeed global citizenship rights, one of the more important of these rights is the right to participation in the body politic, in this case at the global level. Yet there is little opportunity for formalised citizen input into global decisions. The opportunities do exist, however, in less formalised ways, using the more fluid structures of civil society.

What are the implications of the global democracy movement for social

workers?First, such participation helps to realise human rights:rights to participate fully as a citizen, rights of self-determination, and soOn.

second, given the discursive nature of human rights, such participationis actually necessary for there to be adequate debate about whatcount as human rights, in order to counter the elitist nature of the humanrights discourse already noted.

CONCLUSIONThe discursive nature of human rights emphasises the importance of thequestion of who participates in the human rights discourse. Hence the encouragement of more participatory forms of democracy, incorporatingthe voices of the marginalised and the victims of human rights abuse, is ofcentral concern. This is an essential component of human rights work, andif social workers are to be understood as human rights workers the aspectsof practice that deal with the encouragement of participatory democracy,whether at global or local level, become of primary importance. Socialworkers have particular skills and expertise in this arena, both throughcommunity development and also through the negotiation of human rightsdefinitions with clients.