HUMAN RIGHTS

Positive Policies in Asia and the Pacific Rim

PBRC’s second three-year cycle of research dealt with “positive human rights policies,” enlarging on a theme that was to dominate the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1998. PBRC proposed to supplement the current pessimistic appraisals of human rights conditions, which reported trends in abuses and violations, by adding more optimistic data about the rising access to human rights. We began by exploring the nature and extant of public and private policies that were improving people’s access to their rights, to balance observance of existing evidence of human wrongs.

Paradoxically, a discontinuity appeared between the acceptance of international agreements to avoid violating human rights and the adoption of independent national policies to affirm them. New international declarations and agreements on human rights kept cropping up every year or so, but an increasing number of countries were declining to ratify them. Asian countries were expressing deep-seated misgivings about the implications of such “western” approaches to protecting human rights. Even so, their actions belied their doubts, for in many countries that had not proclaimed a commitment to positive human rights, the government’s actions in that direction had been conspicuous and cumulative.

Unlike the great policies studied in PBRC’s first cycle, nearly all positive human rights policies were controversial in their own countries, even though usually they were applauded abroad. Positive human rights policies are not always admired at home, especially by those already enjoying privileged positions.

The range of policies adapted to enhance individual human rights ran the gamut of government action: setting up sites and services that could give people access to their rights; extending existing rights to new groups and individuals; recognizing new rights that were previously unacknowledged; making potential beneficiaries aware of their rights and the general public aware of wrongs in order to enlist popular cooperation in corrective action; combating elements hostile to the rights of disadvantaged groups; arbitrating among claimants to rights and privileges; and restoring lost rights. Yet in spite of the importance of the values they served, PBRC studies showed that such actions did not often require substantial new investments of public resources because they made use of existing processes, requiring little more than a change of focus.

The controversies that these policies aroused have revealed the conflicting and politically uncomfortable priorities they asserted. It was almost always the poor, the under-represented, the rural-based, the women, the aged, or the unpopular groups that gained the greatest advantage from positive human rights policies. One of the striking findings of this study was the regional differences in commitment to human rights policies of all kinds. In spite of its economic prosperity, Asia has not led Latin America or all other parts of the southern hemisphere in its commitment to international agreements or constitutional protections of human rights. But the record of its commitment was improving, partly because these countries were showing that their agenda for action was accompanied by a record of improvement.