Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal, November 18th 2018
Western liberalism’s enduring sadistic confidence trick is to pretend their nations’ quasi-democratic development was not achieved by cruelly externalizing its barbaric costs onto the majority world via conquest, genocide and enslavement. A handy touchstone of liberal cynicism has been the fate of the Right to Development, first approved over thirty years ago, in a Declaration by the UN General Assembly in December 1986, and still locked in interminable ideological limbo. Many reasons explain its current ghostly status, haunting international human rights law yet forever denied a life of its own.
The Right to Development defends the principle of self-determination. It explicitly prioritizes the human person. It requires decisive government intervention. Its obligations are binding on everyone whose actions or omissions affect human rights. Self-evidently, just these principal characteristics alone make it radically unacceptable to Western corporate and liberal elites.
Defending self-determination stymies standard imperialist operating procedure, which encourages minority local opposition factions to call for foreign intervention in their countries’ affairs. Prioritizing the human person directly challenges capitalism’s drive for profit above all else. Requiring decisive State intervention contradicts the neoliberal imperative to minimize government and eliminate the public sector. Insisting all sectors of society defend and promote human rights negates the classical liberal interpretation that only States can violate human rights, privileging civil and political rights but deliberately marginalizing social and economic rights.
Precisely because the Right to Development is fundamental to a truly democratic international order it has been stuck on life support for thirty years by the Western imperial elites via the governments and NGO industrial complex they own, not quite dead, just vegetating harmlessly away. Currently, many of its provisions are embodied in some shape or form in the various instruments composing international human rights law. In practice, most countries either fail to comply with those provisions, like the rich country failure to apply 0.7% of national income to international development cooperation, or else, in the case of lower income countries, their compliance is defeated by continuing global economic crisis.
Recognizing the Right to Development would make its provisions actionable in international law, opening up new perspectives for the majority world to achieve justice against their rich country tormentors, whether in the form of States or of the corporate elites that control those States. But the Right for Development will never become established international law so long as Western corporate elites control the United Nations via the non-profit industrial complex, something well documented by Cory Morningstar. In both Africa and Latin America this is far from academic.
For Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua right now the intractable arguments around the Right to Development are directly relevant. In Nicaragua, the government has set out to challenge the liberal ideological monopoly of human rights which has allowed the UN and the Organization of American States, to ignore gross human rights violations by Venezuela’s murderous US backed fascist opposition ever since 2013 and Nicaragua’s US organized right-wing opposition during this year’s violent attempted coup. Over the last month Nicaragua’s authorities have held national consultations on a policy inititative to promote a culture of peace and reconciliation embodying much of the letter but more importantly the original spirit of the 1986 Declaration of the Right to Development.
The policy initiative defends self-determination and mandates the promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence facilitating equality and unity amid diversity, which is the fundamental precondition for any development process prioritizing the human person. The process is a carefully considered response to the minority Nicaraguan opposition’s endless campaign of virulent, mendacious hatred against not just the government of President Daniel Ortega but all the country’s 2 million plus Sandinistas. It also implicitly challenges the neoliberal UN bureaucracy, in particular the brazen social democrat center-right political bias of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Both Venezuela and Nicaragua have rejected grossly biased, prejudiced and unprofessional interventions of the UNOHCHR in their internal affairs covering up murderous, barbaric violence from the political opposition in those countries. In 2017, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza noted that the OHCHR covered up opposition violence recalling that “In four months… more than 820 state security personnel were wounded, including 73 gunshot wounds, and [there were] 913 attacks against hospitals, schools, food distribution centers, and human rights organizations” Nicaragua’s experience was identical. There the UN body covered up opposition violence killing 22 police officers and wounding 400 as well as provoking the deaths of around 200 Sandinista supporters and uninvolved bystanders.
In a recent interview, Nicaraguan human rights specialist, National Assembly deputy Carlos Emilio López, commented, “In 1993, with the approval of the Vienna Declaration of Human Rights, the subject of respect for human rights was re-conceptualized. For many years it was considered that only States should respect human rights but that understanding is already out of date. The reconceptualization of human rights is that States must respect human rights but companies, churches, organizations must all do so, social organizations, oligopolies, the media, people as individuals. In other words, we are all obliged to respect human rights, not only State institutions.”
It is no accident that López should make that point, directly derived from the Right to Development, since it was also in 1986 that the International Court of Justice condemned the US government for supporting proxy terrorist forces to attack Nicaragua. Like the Declaration of the Right to Development, that judgment too has been a dead letter ever since. The US government just ignored it. In effect international bodies collude with the US government and its allies when they engage in direct State terrorism or terrorism by proxy, perhaps most cynically in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Yemen. In Latin America the most obvious targets for many years have been Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as well as Haiti prior to the successful coup in 2004 and then via brutal UN military occupation.
Ever since 1986 UN practice has persistently obfuscated the profound change of focus originally heralded by the Declaration of the Right to Development. Charged with implementing it, the Western corporate elite dominated UN bureaucracy has persistently collaborated with the measure’s opponents to stall it. The OHCHR briefing notes hypocritically that a main difficulty has been the persistence of “human rights violations, racism, colonialism, occupation and aggression” when in the cases of Venezuela and Nicaragua the OHCHR itself has colluded with US organized, funded and trained terrorist aggression by blatantly favoring local right wing US proxies.
The UN OHCHR briefing on the Right to Development omits precisely its own bias, treating US and European government and corporate funded NGOs as “civil society” to be consulted, while purposefully excluding the voices and opinions of national labor unions, cooperatives and other majority popular organizations.
It lobbies in the most futile way for the impossible harmonization of corporate interests with the social and economic rights of the human person or environmental rights. An obvious example is the abuse of intellectual property rights and corporate investor protections imposed by neoliberal elites via anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian trade-in-your-sovereignty deals strong-armed into force via economic extortion with minimal or zero popular consultation. With such bad faith defenders, the Right to Development is unlikely ever to be implemented.