The Black Alliance for Peace just launched its North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. Ajamu Baraka and Margaret Kimberley discussed why this project is so necessary.
Margaret Kimberley: Thank you for joining me, Ajamu. Tell us about the launch of the North South Project for People-Centered Human Rights.
Ajamu Baraka: Thank you so much. Margaret, well, the Black Alliance for Peace tagline identifies this formation as one that centers a perspective informed by an understanding of human rights that transcends the traditional understanding of human rights grounded in the Western liberal tradition.
We refer to our perspective as a “People(s)- Centered Human Rights” (PCHR) framework. It centers the needs and aspirations of the people. It moves away from the limitations of a Western state-centered individualistic and legalistic approach dependent on texts, treaties and United Nations processes. Our analysis and engagement with this human rights tradition suggest to us that the orthodox western concept of human rights and most of the human rights architecture developed since the end of the second world war is today just about irrelevant, as the consequence of real lack of commitment to the liberal human rights tradition, as limited as that was. Basically, human rights became an instrument that’s been used quite adroitly by the most powerful states, not to protect the fundamental rights of individuals and collectives, but to provide a justification for intervention, for sanctions, for war, and therefore the idea itself has been associated with those kinds of oppressive practices. So we argue, and we say that if human rights are going to be in any way relevant to the masses of oppressed, colonized people, people exploited by the colonial capitalist system, it must be liberated from that system. It must become something that emanates out of the people, that’s informed by the needs of the people, and whose legitimacy emanates from the people.
So our project is a project to facilitate that understanding, to develop structures that will help us to make the break from the western dominated human rights concept, to build relationships with groups that are involved in social change work that can utilize a counter narrative to the limited human rights framework, a narrative that puts at the center not only the people, or puts at the center the ideal that wants to be able to realize, to fully realize our human rights, which means our human dignity.
Our mission, therefore, is to build an alternative human rights movement, a movement liberated from the liberal, legalistic, state-centered framework that emerged at the conclusion of World War II as “human rights.”
To do this, we have to have structures, accountability, but more importantly, we have to have structures that represent the needs of our people. We have to have structures that are not grounded in the current exploitative relationships. We have to have structures that transcend the current realities that most peoples and states are experiencing. So this People-Centered Human Rights Project is a radical break from the Western tradition, and the project itself is a project to help us develop that radical break, that radical perspective, a perspective that comes out of the Black radical human rights tradition, a tradition of struggle. And that’s what we are going to attempt to do, to build a project through educational activities and organizational support that will be relevant to the current, new realities of today.
MK: We’re discussing this because December 10 is International Human Rights Day. It commemorates the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed on December 10, 1948. If we had true human rights in this country, in the U.S. right now, what would be different? Can you give us some examples of how the lives of people would be different here if human rights, as you just explained them, were respected.
AB: Well, if the full range of human rights were actually respected, recognized and fulfilled, this would be a much different nation, and in fact one of the limitations of the traditional human rights framework is reflected also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that is, in that declaration, we have to remind people that this, this was a declaration that had no legal standing, even though it’s a consequence of a practice since 1948, it does have some degree of legal reference points, but the binding human rights covenants, that were supposed to be the primary framework for structuring human rights after 1945 were abandoned by the Western powers. They did not want to have any real legal constraints on their behavior, because they understood that they were going to engage in activity that would violate objective human rights. They knew that they were going to attempt to reimpose themselves in their colonies because it was the material basis of their economies and empires.
In the U.S. the apartheid system had not been dismantled and the authorities were not prepared to alter the racial dynamics in the country, especially in the South. So very few in the West had any real interest in human rights, especially when part of the human rights framework included a commitment to basic rights that define real human dignity, like the right to housing or the right to education, the right to health care, to be healthy, to be free of poverty, the right to have a socially productive job that allowed you to live at a level of human existence that supported your dignity, the right to food and to a clean environment, the right to participate effectively in all aspects of governing, including not just voting, but including the right to participate and to own the activities related to your material realities, that is the economic sphere. Also, all of these are seen as fundamental to human dignity and should be seen as human rights. If we were in a position to realize the full range of human rights, then of course, it would be a different world. We would have been able to avoid all of the attempts to recolonize populations. And we will probably have a different kind of economic system, a different global economic system, in place.
But I think the other part that needs to be talked about is the difference between the Western conception of human rights, the Western human rights framework, and the people-centered framework that the people-centered framework emanates from the people, and therefore the genesis of its legitimacy resides with the people, as opposed to the Western framework that is more reflective of the interests and activities of states and a much more developed sort of legal system and legal process where courts and lawyers are involved in the process. In fact, they become the center of the human rights experience.
For us, the human rights conventions and covenants, as important as they can be, also reflect limitations. Human beings are defining for themselves rights that are not necessarily explicitly reflected in those treaties, such as the human right to transportation. The right to transportation is related to the ability to realize a host of rights like the right to education, health and even life. If you can’t access transportation, then you are not able to get to doctors’ appointments or hospitals and in the case of Hurricane Katrina not having access to transportation cost the lives of poor Black people and others. New rights can come out of lived experiences, defined and fought for by the people, like the right to affordable and accessible transportation.
So, what are People(s)-Centered Human Rights?
They are “those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.”
They are not just a specific set of rights. PCHRs reflect a process informed by an ethical framework as opposed to a pre-figured list of items defined as representing human rights. This is one of the key differences between the liberal framework and PCHRs. The PCHR approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom-up.
The PCHR framework rejects the idea that human rights only emanate from legalistic texts negotiated by states.
The people themselves write their own laws, the same way in which there are some states that don’t have a written constitution, but yet they have certain principles and procedures that through tradition are adhered to and have a foundation. So for the people centered human rights framework, the foundation begins and ends with the people.
And when we talk about the people, the people aren’t some static idea, some static concept. What constitutes the people is created out of struggle, that the construction of a people is a historical process. It is a political process. And so the peoples’ who are in formation globally are ridding themselves of the constraints imposed on them by the Western colonial capitalist system. They are the ones that are redefining for themselves how they relate to one another. What types of structures they believe they want to build in order to fully realize their human dignity. They are the ones that are taking the lead. They are the ones that are experiencing and projecting human agency.
So these are different kinds of approaches to the ideal of human rights other than what is currently the predominant idea, which is again situated in the practices of lawyers and law and more concerned with what we refer to as civil and political rights, as opposed to economic, social and cultural rights.
MK: We are speaking of states, western states, who talk a lot about human rights, talk a lot about respect for human rights, who condemn those countries which they’ve declared as adversaries and always accuse them of violating human rights, but they do the same. For example, just in recent days, the Syrian state, which was under attack by the U.S. and other NATO nations for years, has collapsed. They have succeeded in creating great suffering for many years, people dying, people being displaced. And now that they have succeeded in their designs, they immediately say, this is a great thing, because the former state violated human rights. Of course, they, in this effort, violated human rights, and that’s just one example, the most recent example of how Western states use human rights as a cudgel to beat up their enemies and in doing so, violate people’s human rights themselves. So in short, there’s just a very clear and obvious hypocrisy that these states involve themselves in regarding human rights. What are your thoughts about that?
AB: Well, you’re absolutely correct, and that’s why there is a crisis of human rights right now that people have seen the cynical use of the concept of human rights by these powerful states to advance their own interests and in the process, to fundamentally violate the rights of millions of people, including the most fundamental right, which is the right to life.
And so the whole idea, the whole concept of human rights, has become a concept that many people have rejected because they see it as not being authentic. Well, we make the argument that that’s why a new approach is necessary, an approach in which the concept of human rights can be decolonized, if you will, and made relevant to people in struggle, people who are attempting to transform their realities. It becomes an alternative ethical framework that can guide how we engage in our struggles for liberation and transformation and how we in fact, restructure societies.
So this crisis of of human rights, most graphically demonstrated with the assault on Gaza, the situation in Syria is also another one, but the most graphic, I think that really helped to
to define the real crisis of that concept of human rights and humanitarian intervention, has been Gaza. Here we had a state backed by all of the states that claim to be committed to democratic and human rights, and they are all complicit in a genocide.
So concepts, for example, like humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect that were developed over the last two decades by the human rights community in the west and used to justify interventions, have disappeared in relation to the Palestinians. There has been no responsibility to protect Palestinian lives from the racist brutality and the savagery of the Israelis.
The lack of effective intervention to stop a genocide over more than 14 months has shown just how superficial, how phony the commitment to so-called human rights really is among western states. So that’s why this project is so timely, because people are turning away from the western concept, but they haven’t turned away from the idea of human dignity and human rights. They just didn’t have a framework to reattach themselves to.
This project is going to help to facilitate them reattaching to the highest levels of ethical ideas, ethical principles as they relates to the human beings and human dignity, and what we will define as the rights that human beings have and the kinds of responsibilities that states have to protect those rights and to eliminate that gap between the people themselves and their states. All of these things are informed by a new understanding, a new conception of human rights. So this is why this project is so fundamentally important at this particular historical conjuncture, that
the decline of the West and their imperial overreach has provided opportunities for us to advance on the side of the people, new ideas, potentially new structures that can help to facilitate the continued decline of these powers, and the shift of power away from these human rights violators to the people.
MK: What’s the most important thing you would like to convey, that is important for people to understand?
AB: That the full realization of human rights is going to require a fundamental restructuring in society. In other words, you can’t have full human rights within the continuation of the capitalist system, that the only way we’re going to be able to realize for human rights is when we are able, in some way, to construct non capitalist societies, societies moving toward socialism, that there is a fundamental connection between people-centered human rights and socialism, and we shouldn’t be shy about that or reluctant to make those connections, because if we don’t make those connections, then we end up performing a disservice to the people who are looking for ways to transform themselves and their realities. And this concept of people’s center human rights can be a very valuable concept in that process of people understanding how they need to move and what kinds of societies they need to build.
MK: And is there any information you can point people to where they can find out more about this project?
AB: Yes, that the project was launched on Human Rights Day, December 10 and they can go to the website of the Black Alliance for Peace, and there’s a page where you can read about the on the project, the mission, the principles, the objectives, and you can sign up to receive information on the project, information on ways to have conversations as we’re developing this process and this project collectively.
MK: Thank you.