Cathal Doyle

Millennium Development Goals and human rights: in common cause or uneasy partners?

The concept of ‘universal human rights’, as framed in the second half of the twentieth century, was one of the most significant ideas of the last century. By emphasising the equal dignity and worth of all human beings, it challenged well-entrenched societal beliefs in intrinsically differentiated values for individuals based on their personal or group identity. Calling on the considerable tools of law, hitherto used more to exclude than to include, it sought to frame guarantees that would be available to all, irrespective of gender, ‘race’, ethnicity or any of the other individual or collective identifiers. However, this human rights regime, established to uphold these principles, has been ineffective in tackling a fundamental root of inequality, namely the inaccessibility of economic, social and cultural rights to a major section of humanity. Instead, owing primarily to a dominant political ideology that resisted the justiciability of these rights, the regime developed in a manner skewed towards the realisation of civil and political rights. Recent years have seen some progress in the human rights regime’s attempts to address this distortion. Economic social and cultural rights are once again claiming their central position as a fundamental element of a universal, indivisible and interdependent human rights framework. Progress has been made in some, albeit a few, countries in demonstrating their justiciability, and at the international level pressure is mounting for the adoption of an optional protocol allowing individuals and groups to make complaints in relation to the failure of States to meet their obligations under the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESR). In parallel, there has been much debate and discussion in relation to the human right to development. One of the significant outcomes emerging from this arena in the 1990s has been the conceptualisation of a Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA) to development and the requirement for the mainstreaming of human rights across all UN programmes and projects. Nevertheless, while allowing for these recent developments in the human rights arena, the task of addressing the situation of those whose enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights is severely constrained has primarily fallen to the development community. The human rights regime has, for the most part, had to content itself with playing a limited role in directing the course of the development agenda.