Honoured in the breach? Development assistance and human rights.

• Author: Waring, Marilyn

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 28

On questions of human rights, the political bodies of the United Nations and nation-State donors frequently override claims of domestic jurisdiction where sovereignty might be invoked. But consider the following case studies.

* On 22 July 1998, the Emergency Relief Coordinator on United Nations humanitarian policy in Afghanistan cited a discriminatory human fights regime among reasons for the United Nations to restrict its activities to life-saving assistance only. Four days earlier, the European Commission had suspended funding of all assistance in the Kabul area.

* An entire village was surrounded by machine-gun-toting men in the national military uniform. Every resident was transported with a few possessions to a 'development project' where, within a few years, they would be more desperate, destitute, hungry and without infrastructural support than they had ever been in the home that their families had known for hundreds of years. This "international aid" programme was euphemistically called "transmigration" where donors were complicit in transgression of fundamental rights "to liberty of movement and of freedom to choose his residency".

* Young girls had been recruited for training in a bilateral textile venture. The development project specified that they would spend three months (unpaid) in training and then be offered permanent positions. After two years, the only permanent positions were those of the male tailors, cutters, marketers and the boss. Every three months, another group of girls was recruited, the trainees discharged and the production continued its rounds of "servitude" and exploitation.

* Picture the single largest development project in a nation, expected to run for 25 years in the agricultural sector. Every major multilateral donor in the region, and every bilateral with an ongoing country programme, was involved. The country had equality guarantees for women in its constitution and had signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) without reservation. All data profile showed that women were overwhelmingly the majority of agricultural workers in every sector. The project was into its third year. The project leader did not know that women had no access to land ownership, and never...