Closing speech to the Valladolid Human Rights Congress
Thanks to Manuel Gonzalez Lopez, Coordinator of the Congress and to the Instituto Universitario de Historia Simancas. Thanks to the Gobierono de la Junta de Castilla y Léon, Consejeria de Cultura y a l’Universidad de Valldolid. I am honoured to have been asked to make the closing speech at this Congress. This speech was published in the collection Los desafíos de los derechos humanos hoy, Rafael de Asís, Elena Maza Zorrilla, Dykinson, 2008
Honourable delegates, dear friends and colleagues, The subject of Human Rights is vast and you have just spent many hours together examining the state of the question. I regret I was not able to be with you and that I am arriving at the end, to give the final speech at a Congress I have not been able to attend due to prior obligations. So I ask your forgiveness in advance for any points in my talk which may seem to you perhaps irrelevant, or perhaps too obvious to mention. I hope that I may still be able to add something to your reflections before you leave Valladolid and return to your work as defenders of human rights in many settings. Let me please begin with a brief historical introduction. In the year 2006, it seems all but impossible to recreate the atmosphere which reigned world-wide after the Second World War and the determination of the survivors of that war to create a better world. Their hope was to create an international framework which could guarantee peace and prosperity to all people and prevent future conflicts. These founding fathers--along with a very few founding mothers--hoped not just for reconstruction of the war-torn nations but for a new global legal regime which could, through a better organisation of the world and through common standards outlaw any such devastating future conflicts. Let me now very briefly remind you of the efforts made to organise the post-war world. The blueprints were drawn up by a great generation of practical idealists or, we might say, constructive utopians. They may seem at first to have nothing to do with Human Rights, the subject of this Congress, but I hope to show that our international institutions and the macro-economic arrangements we make have in fact a huge influence on this subject. More than four years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the historic and long Bretton Woods Conference took place in New Hampshire during the summer of 1944, while the war was still going on. The purpose of this Conference was to set up post-war international institutions which could help to ensure the peace. One was the World Bank, the other was the International Monetary Fund; together they are still often known as the Bretton Woods Institutions. There was a plan for a third institution, the International Trade Organisation which was never established. This is a great shame and I’ll come back to the subject of trade later on. One of the major causes of the Second World War that everyone recognised was economic competition and especially trade competition during the 1930s when the Great Depression had struck the world. All countries were trying to undersell the others using what were called “beggar my neighbour” policies of devaluations and dumping. The treatment of Germany after World War I, particularly the financial outflows due to repayment of its war debts, had also helped to bring Hitler to power. Everyone also recognised that these mistakes must not be repeated. So the idea of the post-World War II institutions was, first, to reconstruct war-torn Europe, including Germany--this was the task of the World Bank, whose formal name is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Second, the idea was to make sure that even countries suffering balance of payment problems could stay in the international trading system. For this to be possible, they would receive short-term loans from the International Monetary Fund. Both the Bank and the IMF were the brain-children of John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, who had also planned an International Trade Organisation. The charter of the ITO would have give rights to workers and to the countries just then beginning to emerge from colonisation. It would have integrated on far more favourable terms these former colonies and the other countries of the South that came to be known collectively as the third world. Unfortunately, this ITO was never set up. These international institutions and also the United Nations were ratified by 1945. The Bretton Woods institutions had real powers and real missions and these were to be hugely increased, in a very negative way, from the late 1970s onwards. The United Nations did not have the same powers, even though it had great moral prestige and every newly emerging country in the world wanted to join the original 51 member countries. In 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was drafted in 1948 and was ratified by the General Assembly on 10 December of that year. But nothing could prevent the fundamental ambiguity of a would-be legal instrument emerging from an international body with few legal powers or enforcement mechanisms. This is why, for nearly 60 years now, people like us have tried to make this 1948 document--as well as the two protocols of 1966--a worldwide standard for behaviour. Success has, of course, been mixed, but I can’t think of anyone who would seriously claim that the world would be better off without the UDHR. We need idealism and standards of decency perhaps more than ever before, particularly at a time when the country where this human rights instrument was signed in June 1945 is now one of the greatest violators of its principles. Many people who are not familiar with the actual Declaration of 1948 are under the impression that Human Rights are purely a matter of individual rights and personal freedoms. These are important elements, of course, and we need constantly to be reminded of the dignity and worth of the individual, and of the need to outlaw torture, slavery and all forms of discrimination. The first twenty or so Articles of the UDHR set out these rights in detail and I am sure that the people present at this Congress are extremely familiar with all these articles. In this talk, I want to stress, however, the more collective rights, the rights which can only be realised when a particular type of social, economic and political organisation is in place. Although individual governments may be able to protect and ensure many human rights, I would argue that some of them require far more than merely national attention. Many rights which figure in the UDHR, cannot, I would argue, exist without a just international economic order. Article 22 recognises this when it points out the need for “international cooperation” in order to realise economic, social and cultural rights. Article 28 returns to the point: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised.” There is no ambiguity here at all: the international order must act as guarantor of whatever individual rights are set forth in the previous articles of the UDHR. Just to finish citing the Declaration itself, let me remind you of Article 25, which states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services and the right to security in the even of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control”. I will argue that without a just international order, it is quite impossible to guarantee any of these rights for hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Without a just international order, we will be writing off perhaps by now the majority of humanity. I am also going to argue that through our economic choices, and the international order we have tolerated so far, we are frequently guaranteeing exactly the opposite of human rights. I claim, in fact, that neo-liberal globalisation is leading and will lead to increased violation of human rights. I will not spend much time defining terms; I hope most people will understand what I mean by neo-liberal globalisation. It is essentially a system to ensure that capital, goods and services benefit from freedom of movement but people do not; that large corporations are free to invest and produce where they like; that financial markets can operate freely across all national boundaries no matter how many crises and human disasters financial speculation may cause. The neo`-liberal economic order is one of stunning inequalities and we have overwhelming documentary proof of this point. Inequalities might not matter so much if everyone, even at that bottom of society, were moving upwards, even though a tiny minority at the top made huge gains and moved much faster towards the highest peaks of wealth. But again, this is not the case. Do you know, for example, that there are about 8.7 million people in the world whose collective wealth available for investment in 2005 was more than 33 trillion dollars? As a point of comparison, the GNP of the United States or of the 25 European countries is about 10 trillion dollars. # The fortunes of this group of people at the top of society are growing fast, with India, Korea, Russia and South Africa showing the fastest growth in rich individuals. The organisation that publishes the World Wealth Report expects the collective wealth of people with more than $1 million to invest--this is over and above their houses--to reach $44 trillion by 2010. The neo-liberal order, based on market freedom, rewards the few disproportionately but it also takes away from the many. If we could see the incomes of poor people growing between 6-9 percent a year, like the fortunes of the most privileged, we could say that their economic, social and cultural rights would be achieved within a decade. This, of course, is not the case--in fact poor people are gradually being pushed further and furher towards the margins. UNCTAD among many other recognised agencies has documented these facts in detail and I do not have time to cite all the proof which anyone can find in fifteen minutes on the internet. Is this mass impoverishment due to an act of God? Is it the result of some innate disadvantage of the victims or their countries? Are the world’s poor too stupid or too lazy to deserve anything better? Or might our own policies in the North have something to do with their fate? I want to argue that we in the North in fact have a huge responsibility. Let me take an illustration which is presently an extremely sensitive subject in Spain: the subject of immigration. Recent estimates published in the Financial Times say that somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the people who leave Africa and try to reach the Canary Islands or other places in Europe never arrive. I think we can all agree that this loss of life constitutes a gross violation of human rights. But how many people here are prepared to recognise that we, or at least our governments, have done absolutely everything possible to force people to risk their lives in order to get to Europe? The North has truly done everything it could to make immigration the only viable solution for millions of people from the south and these policies have been enacted at least with our tacit consent. Now that immigration has become a front page, sensitive subject, these same governments, rather than change their policies, are responding to the crisis with the usual police and security measures. It is up to people like us who try to defend human rights to force them to look at the root causes. Why are so many people surprised at the number of immigrants prepared to take desperate risks? For the past several decades, we have reduced the options for people, particularly in Africa but also in Central and Latin America and parts of Asia. Let me list just some of the short-sighted policies that the North has pursued which have resulted in mass attempts to emigrate. Politically, we have refused to share power with the South, to give Southern governments a share in decisions. We have stifled third world political expressions groups like the non-aligned movement or the G-77 [which later numbered well over 100 countries]. From the 1970s in particular, these governments fought for a New International Economic Order and some enlightened thinkers like the authors of various UN documents or efforts like the “Brandt Report” seconded some of their demands. It looked for a time as if there might finally be a fairer distribution of power and resources in the world. Gradually, however, the most reactionary forces of the North got the situation back under their control. The United States was first among them, resorting to coups d’etat when necessary, like the one against Allende which put the fascist regime of General Pinochet in power. But much of the action against the South did not take a military direction. The debt trap was set in place. From 1982, which marked the first debt crisis in Mexico, dozens of countries were placed under structural adjustment policies designed by the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions had by then moved far, far away from the goals set for them at the Bretton Woods Conference--they had become the instruments of the extension of neo-liberal policies to the Southern hemisphere. The instruments of structural adjustment have often been described. They include high interest rates, export orientation, privatisation, ‘cost-recovery’ [fee-paying] including fees for schools and health care, higher prices for basic necessities like food, energy and water. All these policies caused chronic unemployment and hardship and they often resulted in riots--called by the people concerned “IMF riots” in which many people were killed, wounded or arrested. Human rights are massively violated by structural adjustment; this is well-known. It is proven in economic terms that these policies don’t work yet they are still continued. Even more revolting morally speaking is the fact that people who never received any benefit whatever from the money borrowed by their elites were obliged to pay it back with their blood, sweat and tears. In particular: --Loans to oppressive regimes are estimated at about $500 billion [including $22 billion to apartheid South Africa] --Loans on the books to LICs [low income countries] amount to $523 billion --Africa’s external debt has gone past the $300 billion mark [this includes N. Africa]. This sum is small by international standards but insuperable for Africa. --LDCs are paying back $100 million a day/ about $70.000 a minute. Africa is paying back about $25.000 a minute. --The Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] will take 100 years to achieve on current trend lines. --Despite many campaigns only about $30 billion worth of debt has been cancelled so far and only 19 countries have benefited. At least 65 countries need complete debt cancellation in order to have the slightest chance of meeting the MDG targets--which, let me remind you, fall short of full human rights for every one, since they only foresee reducing hunger by half, increasing school enrolment and health care but not making them universal and so on. Immigrants are necessary for their home countries. According to UN figures, they send back up to $200 billion a year to their families and villages. Who knows how many deaths would occur and how many governments would collapse without them? These governments have no reason to discourage immigration--on the contrary. Debt cancellation would create huge numbers of jobs in the LDCs as well as allowing for spending on health, education and other necessities. It would also contribute to job creation in the North, as countries began to be able to spend on other goods, rather than merely sterilising their incomes through interest payments. We in the North do not need the money repayed in debt service--in fact the debt serves as a means of political control--a kind of neo-colonialism which is much cheaper for the North, requires no army and no administration, and keeps the dependent governments in line. Debt cancellation would make a serious and positive impact on human rights everywhere as we know from a few cases like that of Tanzania which has received partial debt relief and immediately cancelled all school fees. School enrolment, especially of girls, has increased dramatically. People who aim to protect human rights should be by definition supporters of debt cancellation. Another way we have undermined human rights is by underpaying the products of Southern countries. One of the most perverse impacts of debt is the export syndrome. Countries must export in order to earn hard currency to pay interest on their debts and many of them produce the same small range of primary products--coffee, cocoa, tea, rubber and so on. This competition results in lower prices for everyone. Commodity prices have been declining since the 1970s. Lower prices paradoxically encourage overproduction because countries strive to keep their income stable by exporting even more. Subsidies in the North, e.g. US cotton subsidies--but there are also some subsidised cotton farmers in Spain, contribute to ruining small farmers. I have calculated that the average subsidy to one US cotton farmer for one year is about the same as 400 years of income for the average farmer from Mali or Burkina Faso. Yet at the most recent World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, the US refused to change its policies. Europe is just as bad on other commodities. Both the US and Europe dump their agricultural products on unprotected third world markets, with the result that thousands of small farmers are ruined every year and can no longer feed themselves and their families. Even when they can continue to farm, they are not much better off. For example, a Ugandan coffee farmer receives 14 cents a kilo for coffee beans; when the coffee finally arrives in a European supermarket, the consumer will pay about $25 a kilo for it. This is because the North keeps its tariffs low on raw materials but high when these raw material are processed into more elaborate goods. Poor countries cannot compete in processing their own commodities because they face high market barriers in the developed countries. Northern countries also dominate the trading system in other ways and have forced basically unfavourable agreements on the South. Regional trade agreements like NAFTA have decimated Mexican farmers as cheap industrially produced US corn has flooded Mexican markets. At least 350.000 Mexican peasants have lost their farms. Free trade is not going to benefit the poor and now even the World Bank has now admitted this: it says free trade may bring at best an increase of 1 % in the GDP of poor countries over the next 10 years. But with the virtual collapse of the WTO negotiations in the so-called “Doha Development Round”, Europe is going after even more lucrative trade agreements. It is trying to induce the ACP [African Caribbean Pacific] countries to open up government procurement--the market of government purchases represents at least 15 percent of GDP, even in poor countries. Europe’s overall aim is to open all markets, no matter how poor the country, to its transnational corporations. European and US trade policy is actually written by the largest commercial exporters and citizens have no say in the matter. There are dozens more examples of how trade agreements undermine livelihoods and human rights in poor countries. China is beginning to contribute to such violations. For example, since the end of the Multi-Fibre Agreement, China has been allowed to export huge quantities of cheap textiles all over the world. This competition has had a large although certainly not life-threatening impact in Europe. But in the South, the effect has been devastating. Textile industries in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia or El Salvador are unlikely to recover. In Morocco, the industry has already shed hundreds of thousands of jobs. These unemployed workers are going back to producing kif [a drug] or they are attempting to emigrate. Who can blame them? Let me give another example of how the present international order--or we might better say the lack of an order--causes massive violation of human rights. We have plenty of proof--for example, the International Labour Organisation counted over 90 serious financial crises between 1990 and 2002 alone. These are not mere questions for the financial pages--they mean that millions lose their jobs and their security. During the financial crisis of Mexico in the mid-1990s, 28.000 small businesses are estimated to have failed. In Indonesia, a few years later, 30.000 bank employees lost their jobs in a single week as banks closed down. In Argentina, the middle classes as well as the poor were hard-hit by the crisis which wiped out savings and pensions at the same time as jobs. Financial crises violate Article 25 of the UDHR which I quoted earlier. They destroy the “right to a standard of living adequate for […] health and well-being” and this has happened in dozens of countries to millions of victims. Now let me put to you a proposition which I believe to be true, and which is extremely bad news for defenders of human rights. I believe that neo-liberal financial globalisation has ushered in a new era of capitalism. Today, when nearly anything can be produced nearly anywhere, but people are not free to move the way capital and goods can; hundreds of millions of people are of literally no use to the system. They do not contribute to capitalist production which doesn’t need them. They are too poor to contribute to capitalist consumption because they can’t buy anything beyond the most basic necessities. The most convenient solution for the system would be that they disappear. This was the premise for my book called the Lugano Report. We now live in a world which doesn’t need such people, they are expendable. Some will fall by the wayside and fall victim to disease, hunger, conflict, HIV and so on. But more will remain than can be absorbed. They are and will continue to be the first victims of human rights violations of all kinds. Many of these people will try, as a last resort, to emigrate. I have taken the case of policies that lead to mass migrations because it seems to me to provide a set of arguments showing how the dominant countries have organised the world order biased against human rights in the poor and vulnerable countries. But in our own wealthy countries, human rights violations are also becoming more common. I do not even mean the violation of the political and civil rights of many Americans where the Constitution is being eroded by George Bush’s policies but about the poor, or about many of the two million people in US prisons. A large percentage are in jail for non-violent drug offences. I am talking about the more than 600.000 deaths in Iraq since the invasion of 2003. Perhaps some campaigners still feel uncomfortable in the political arena. I know, for example, that it has taken Amnesty International a very long time to extend its concerns from individual victims of violations to mass ones. Please do not misunderstand--I am in no way criticising the admirable work of Amnesty. It does still seem to me, however, that campaigners for human rights must also be campaigners for a more just world order. This week we have celebrated, if that is the word, Global Poverty Day and many groups in many places are thinking seriously about what we, as Northern citizens, can do about this scourge. I believe that we must broaden the scope of the concept of human rights so that we increase the numbers campaigning for changes in our own policies and for global justice. The time when human rights could be categorised as merely individual, with no bearing on major international political questions is in the past. I am convinced that global justice campaigners and human rights campaigners share ultimately the same aims and that we must work to bring our still diverse discourses closer together. I hope that both communities will be patient with each other and reach out to those who, so far, have too often marched to different drumbeats. I hope that we can all work to forge alliances. In today’s world, too many decisions are taken at levels where no democracy exists. This is true in the international sphere, dominated by transnational corporations and financial markets and by institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation. Almost no democracy exists at the European level, where the unelected Commission can do more or less what it pleases. If we want to force the notion of human rights on such entities which are interested only in greater power and greater profits, then we must be numerous--numerous and united. We must form alliances or risk never realising our aims. I hope we shall all meet again on the long road to justice. Thank you, Susan George
