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Abstract
The article aims to describe how the measurement and monitoring of human rights have been changed and weakened by the neoliberal resistance to social rights. In so doing, the study describes the political and ideological context which stimulated the broad conception of human rights included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It then focuses on the ideological turn which occurred over the 1970s from welfare democracy to neoliberal democracy and the neoliberal approach to human rights. Based on a neo-Gramscian approach, the study considers political and ideological reasons as key in explaining both the rise and fall of social rights and the changes in their measurement. As a case in point, the article analyses the work of the UN in measuring and monitoring human rights. In spite of the use by the UN committees of indicators and guidelines aimed at measuring and monitoring the progressive realization of all human rights, results show that the reluctance of many states to implement social and economic rights makes UN efforts ineffective. Both states’ reluctance and instruments’ ineffectiveness can be ascribed to the neoliberal delegitimization of social rights, which is likely to persist in spite of the recent economic crisis.
Notes on contributor
Diego Giannone is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Sciences ‘Jean Monnet' of the Second University of Naples, Italy, where he teaches ‘International Political Relations' and ‘Political Science and Political Philosophy'. His recent publications include ‘Suspending Democracy? The Governance of the EU's Political and Economic Crisis as a Process of Neoliberal Restructuring', in The European Union in Crisis: Explorations in Representation and Democratic Legitimacy, ed. K. Demetriou (Springer International Publishing, 2015), 101–19, and ‘The Political and Ideological Dimension of the Measurement of Freedom of Information. Assessing the Interplay between Neoliberalism and the Freedom of the Press Index', International Communication Gazette 76, no. 6 (2014): 505–27.
Notes
1 Todd Landman, ‘Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice, and Policy’, Human Rights Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2005): 906–31.
2 As Antonio Cassese pointed out, it was only by the firm will of the Soviet and Latin-American countries that economic, social and cultural rights were included in the declaration. Antonio Cassese, I Diritti Umani Oggi (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2005).
3 United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, preamble.
4 Cassese, I Diritti Umani.
5 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944); John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Palgrave, 1936).
6 The first chair of the Commission was Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the American president, who oversaw the drafting of the UDHR. For a brilliant reconstruction of the spirit of that time, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
7 This approach was widely supported by others in the United States and elsewhere in the West. Several articles supporting the inclusion of economic and social rights by the US and other Western scholars and statesmen are in the special issue entitled ‘Essential Human Rights' of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 243, January 1946.
8 William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (London: HMSO, 1942).
9 Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘The March into Socialism’, The American Economic Review 40, no. 2 (1950): 446–56.
10 Ingo Schmidt, ‘It's the Economy, Stupid! Theoretical Reflections on Third Way Social Democracy’, in Social Democracy after the Cold War, ed. Bryan Evans and Ingo Schmidt (Edmonton: AU Press, Athabasca University, 2012), 13–44.
11 Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).
12 Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014).
13 Theodor Lowi, The Personal President. Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
14 Schmidt, ‘It's the Economy’, 23.
15 Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
16 Robert Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
17 Ibid.
18 Berman, The Primacy of Politics, 6.
19 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 257.
20 Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévi, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
21 James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973).
22 Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
23 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1976).
24 David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 610 (2007): 26.
25 Ibid, 23.
26 Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State.
27 Bruce Kogut and J. Muir Macpherson, ‘The Decision to Privatize: Economists and the Construction of Ideas and Policies', in The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy, ed. Beth A. Simmons, Frank Dobbin, and Geoffrey Garrett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105.
28 Stephanie L. Mudge, ‘What Is Neo-Liberalism?’, Socio-Economic Review 6, no. 4 (2008): 703–31.
29 Mudge, ‘What Is Neo-Liberalism?’
30 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
31 Robert Lensink, Structural Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: Longman, 1996).
32 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
33 Mudge, ‘What Is Neo-Liberalism?’
34 Ibid., 707.
35 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
36 Crozier et al., The Crisis of Democracy, 8.
37 Ibid, 12.
38 Ibid, 13.
39 Ibid., 113–14.
40 Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, 123.
41 Sheri Berman, ‘The Primacy of Economics versus the Primacy of Politics: Understanding the Ideological Dynamics of the Twentieth Century’, Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 3 (2009): 561–78.
42 Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction’, 24. The citation is from: http://www.montpelerin.org/mpsabout.cfm.
43 Samuel Brittan, ‘The Economic Contradictions of Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science 5, no. 2 (1975): 159.
44 Joseph Shaanan, Economic Freedom and the American Dream (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
45 Diego Giannone, ‘Political and Ideological Aspects in the Measurement of Democracy: the Freedom House Case’, Democratization 17, no. 1 (2010): 68–97.
46 Harry Scoble and Laurie Wiseberg, ‘Problems of Comparative Research in Human Rights', in Global Human Rights: Public Policies, Comparative Measures and NGO Strategies, ed. Ved Nanda, James Scarritt, and George Shepherd (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981), 147–71.
47 Koen De Feyter, Human Rights in the Age of the Market (London: Zed Books, 2005), 29.
48 Ibid, 28.
49 Michael Stohl, David Carleton, and Steven E. Johnson, ‘Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Assistance from Nixon to Carter’, Journal of Peace Research 21, no. 3 (September 1984): 216.
50 Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Towards Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3 fn.
51 Stohl et al., ‘Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Assistance’.
52 Tina Wallace, ‘NGO Dilemmas: Trojan Horses for Global Neoliberalism?’, Socialist Register 40 (2004): 204.
53 For instance, only in 2001 did Amnesty International start monitoring social and economic rights. In 2007 The Economist, one of the leading promoters of neoliberal tenets, condemned such a decision ‘to follow intellectual fashion’, and reaffirmed that only civil and political rights are true human rights (see: http://www.economist.com/node/8888856).
54 Wallace shows that NGOs increasingly rely on Northern official donor funding and that most of their campaigns are limited to specific aspects of the neoliberal agenda, while there is almost no deep questioning of the roots of that paradigm. Moreover, the tools of aid management, which are developed in the North, are so universally accepted that they have become carriers of specific cultural values and understandings of change. In addition, the procedures for implementing and monitoring such change are based on the neoliberal concept of ‘new public management’. Wallace, ‘NGO Dilemmas: Trojan Horses for Global Neoliberalism?’
55 Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, ‘Moral Views of Market Society’, Annual Review of Sociology 33, no. 1 (2007): 304.
56 Nicole Stremlau, ‘Towards a New Approach to Evaluation’, in Measures of Press Freedom and Media Contributions to Development. Evaluating the Evaluators, ed. Monroe E. Price, Susan Abbott, and Libby Morgan (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 192.
57 S. Stevens, ed., Handbook of Experimental Psychology (New York: Wiley, 1951), 22.
58 Mitchell L. Stevens and Wendy N. Espeland, ‘Commensuration’, in Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, ed. Kimberly Kempf-Leonard (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 377.
59 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 365.
60 Wendy N. Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, ‘Commensuration as a Social Process', Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 323.
61 Gerardo L. Munck, Measuring Democracy. A Bridge between Scholarship and Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 10.
62 Nancy Thede, ‘Human Rights and Statistics: Some Reflections on the No-Man's-Land between Concept and Indicator’, Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 18, no. 2–3 (2001): 264 and 266.
63 Kevin E. Davis, Benedict Kingsbury, and Sally Engle Merry, ‘Introduction: Global Governance by Indicators', in Governance by Indicators. Global Power through Quantification and Rankings, ed. Kevin E. Davis, Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury, and Sally Engle Merry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–28.
64 Russell Lawrence Barsh, ‘Measuring Human Rights: Problems of Methodology and Purpose’, Human Rights Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1993): 90.
65 Naila Kabeer, ‘The Conditions and Consequences of Choice: Reflections on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment’ (Discussion Paper no. 108. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1999), 2.
66 Walter Bryce Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98.
67 Thede, ‘Human Rights and Statistics', 263.
68 Espeland and Stevens, ‘Commensuration as a Social Process'.
69 Wendy Brown, ‘Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, in Edgework. Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 40.
70 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 3.
71 Enrico Giovannini, ‘The Role of Communication in Transforming Statistics into Knowledge’, in A Strategic Vision for Statistics Challenges for the Next 10 Years, Fourth ECB Conference on Statistics, April 24 and 25, 2008 (Frankfurt am Main: European Central Bank, 2008), 151.
72 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 68.
73 Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 2009), 141.
74 Diego Giannone, ‘The Political and Ideological Dimension of the Measurement of Freedom of Information. Assessing the Interplay between Neoliberalism and the Freedom of the Press Index’, International Communication Gazette 76, no. 6 (2014): 505–27.
75 Wallace, ‘NGO Dilemmas'.
76 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, Adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna on 25 June 1993, http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/vienna.aspx.
77 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Training Manual on Human Rights Monitoring (New York: United Nations, 2001), 10.
78 De Feyter, Human Rights in the Age of Market. Covenant is a more binding instrument than declaration. However, a state may decide to ratify the Covenant with reservations, or to sign and not to ratify it. In the latter case, the state is not fully bound by the Covenant until it is ratified.
79 Asbjørn Eide, ‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights', in Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook, ed. Asbjørn Eide, Catarina Krause, and Allan Rosas (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), 9–28.
80 Schmidt, ‘It's the Economy’, 13.
81 Todd Landman and Julia Häusermann, Map-making and Analysis of the Main International Initiatives on Developing Indicators on Democracy and Good Governance (2003), http://chenry.webhost.utexas.edu/global/coursemats/2006/aboutindicators/GovIndicatorsEssex2003.pdf.
82 While it was expected that the states which did not want to undertake the obligations arising from economic, social and cultural rights would be willing to ratify an instrument which contained only civil and political rights, in fact very few states have ratified only the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The number of countries ratifying the two treaties is pretty similar, as further evidence that even the ratification of the Covenant is not dreaded by the states. To date, the CCPR has been signed by 74 states and ratified by 168, while the CESCR has been signed by 70 countries and ratified by 162. The signing of the Treaty expresses only the intention to consider becoming a state party in the future, while the ratification expresses the will of the country to be legally bound to the Covenant (Cassese, 2005). The United States signed but did not ratify the CESCR, and China signed but did not ratify the CCPR.
83 There are two Optional Protocols to the Covenant. The First Optional Protocol establishes an individual complaints mechanism, allowing individuals to complain to the Human Rights Committee about violations of the Covenant. As of September 2014, the First Optional Protocol has been signed by 35 parties and ratified by 115. The Second Optional Protocol abolishes the death penalty; however, countries were permitted to make a reservation allowing for use of the death penalty for the most serious crimes of a military nature, committed during wartime. As of September 2014, the Second Optional Protocol has been signed by 37 parties and ratified by 81.
84 The creation of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1985 was simply not on the agenda of the UN until then for at least two reasons. Firstly, the Western states were clear in their view that they wished to create an international ‘Court’ or ‘Committee’ of human rights for the purpose of implementation, but were unwilling to extend the jurisdiction of such a body to economic, social and cultural rights. Secondly, the self-appointed ‘champions' of economic, social and cultural rights, the Soviet states, took the general view that implementation of human rights should take place by means of state action at the domestic level and that international ‘interference’ should be minimal.
85 United Nations, Compilation of Guidelines on the Form and Content of Reports to Be Submitted by States Parties to the International Human Rights Treaties, HRI/GEN/2/Rev.6, June 3, 2009: 16 (italics added).
86 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Part II, Art. 2.
87 As De Feyter pointed out: ‘The meaning of the provision has now been clarified in a number of general comments of the UN Committee on ESC Rights, the body that monitors state compliance with the Treaty. The committee has said that all the rights in the Covenant entail minimum core obligations to ensure the satisfaction of, at the very least, minimum essential levels of each of the rights: a state party in which any significant number of individuals is deprived of essential foodstuffs, of essential primary health care, of basic shelter and housing, or of the most basic forms of education, is prima facie failing to discharge its obligations under the Covenant’. De Feyter, Human Rights in the Age of the Market, 48.
88 As quoted in Eide, ‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights', 22.
89 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Handbook for National Human Rights Institutions (New York: United Nations, 2005).
90 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Guidelines on Treaty-Specific Documents to Be Submitted by States Parties under Articles 16 and 17 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, E/C.12/2008/2, March 24, 2009.
91 Ibid, 7.
92 Matthew Craven, ‘The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights', in Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook (see note 79), 462.
93 See, for instance, the differences of reports by countries such as China, Gabon, Sweden and Indonesia as to the quantity (number of pages, issues addressed) and quality of information provided (reports are available at: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/TBSearch.aspx?Lang=en&TreatyID=9&DocTypeID=29).
94 Martin Scheinin, ‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Legal Rights', in Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook (see note 79), 29–54.
95 ‘State obligations for economic and social rights were elaborated by a group of experts, convened by the International Commission of Jurists, in Limburg (the Netherlands) in June 1986. The outcome of the meeting is the so-called Limburg Principles, which is the best guide available to state obligations under the CESCR. Among them we find the following: although the full realization of the rights recognized in the Covenant is to be attained progressively, the application of some rights can be made justiciable immediately, while other rights can become justiciable over time’. Eide, ‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights', 25.
96 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Concluding Observations of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Italy, E/C.12/1/Add.103, December 14, 2004, 2.
97 A recent event is the ratification on February 5, 2013 of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the tenth state. That means that the Protocol entered into force on May 5, 2013. The main novelty is that the Protocol allows its parties to recognize the competence of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to consider complaints from individuals. While this is a step forward for the promotion of social rights, there are some limits on the role of the committee. The first is that the Optional Protocol applies only to the states parties. The second one is that each state is entitled to declare that it recognizes the competence of the committee to receive and consider communications to the effect that a state party claims that another state party is not fulfilling its obligations under the Covenant (Art. 10). In other words, each state party has the power to decide whether the committee can take into account the claims of other states parties on its compliance to the Covenant. The Optional Protocol was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 2008. It was opened for signature on September 24, 2009 and as of September 2014 has been signed by 45 parties and ratified by 16 states.
98 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean Paul Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009), 7, http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf.
99 Stremlau, ‘Towards a New Approach to Evaluation’, 196.
100 Thede, ‘Human Rights and Statistics'.
101 Eide, ‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights', 5.
102 Andrew D. McNitt, ‘Measuring Human Rights: Problems and Possibilities', Policy Studies Journal 15, no. 1 (1986): 80.
103 A typical example of the hegemonic role played by the neoliberal paradigm in shaping human rights discourse can be taken from the above-mentioned author, Andrew D. McNitt. After discussing the conflict between economic and political rights, he concludes: ‘We live in a conservative society which defines human rights in legal and political terms. Consequently if we hope to influence that society we also must adopt a similar restrictive definition' (ibid., 72). That conclusion is contrary to the theoretical perspective endorsed by the present article.
104 De Feyter, Human Rights in the Age of Market, 31.
105 Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 138.