Category: Human Rights

Food Systems Governance

How to explain that despite growth in food production, many are still lacking of adequate food? This is a classic question that has been investigated by many leading lights from various disciplines, including the Noble Laureate Amartya Sen in his groundbreaking research in the 1970s. But challenges remain and this is the focus of the new volume edited by Amanda Kennedy and Jonathan Liljeblad from University of New England Australia. The title of this book is Food Systems Governance: Challenges for justice, equality and human rights. Their starting point is law, and what is the role of law to form the pivot around which these issues are addressed in society in the form of food governance mechanisms. Accordingly the chapters in this book address a range of issues in food governance revolving around questions of justice, fairness, equality and human rights.

I am honoured to have been given the opportunity to contribute to this exciting publication. My chapter entitled ‘Transnational Legal Processes of the Right to Food: Lessons Learned from Papua, Indonesia’, discusses whether and how the growing network between transnational actors that advocate the right to food delivers political change, in the sense that they challenge order the power in society. The paper is based on the paper I presented during the Conference under a similar title, held in Beijing China, May 2014.

Development Human Rights

The Global South

The latest issue of the Third Quarterly is dedicated to examine a phenomenon called: the Global South. This special edition is currently free to download and divided into three themes: Ideas and shifting power relations, International peace and security, Human rights and development. As stated in the introduction, the focus of this volume is about ‘then’ and ‘now’. The nine individual articles contribute towards improving our understanding and bridge-building in different ways – sometimes by making the differences clearer, sometimes by probing how we could conceivably move beyond them, sometimes by calling into question the shibboleths of international cooperation.

Some of the chapters are:

‘Idea-shift’: how ideas from the rest are reshaping global order, Amitav Acharya
The revolt against the West: intervention and sovereignty, Adekeye Adebajo
Normative human rights cascades, North and South, Bertrand G. Ramcharan
Managing the global commons: common good or common sink? Nico Schrijver
Developing countries and the right to development: a retrospective and prospective African view, Fantu Cheru
Economic growth, the UN and the Global South: an unfulfilled promise, Pallavi Roy

Food Security Human Rights Indonesia

Who owns the right to food?

Post author By Irene Hadiprayitno
Post date April 12, 2016
No Comments on Who owns the right to food?

The journal of Third World Quarterly recently published my article entitled: “Who owns the right to food? Interlegality and competing interests in agricultural modernisation in Papua, Indonesia”.

The article dicusses the extent to which the competing as well as conjoined interests of actors involved in agricultural modernisation are reconfiguring the right to food. Agricultural modernisation provides such a context to study the interplay between global and local levels and between various legal and normative frameworks, as well as how the right to food is promoted or jeopardised in these interactions. The focus here is twofold: first, it is on existing norms linked to the wider understanding of the right to food; and second, on the diverse interests supported by the state, corporations and civil society organisations, particularly indigenous rights movements.

Human Rights

A Political Race

In a recent interview, Stephen Hopgood raises an interesting question: how politically effective is human rights to a normative progress? Although human rights are globally spread, one could easily argue that they at the same time stand on a shaky ground. There are various views on gender equality for example, there are also many aspects that determine the autonomy of indigenous peoples over their lands. In such fields, is claiming for human rights in its normative nature politically feasible?

Not an easy question to answer. Many have tried to. Normative lawyers might refer to the minimum core obligations. Others might refer to philosophical and historical basis for justice. But in realities these things often do not matter as much as in legal and abstract opinions. For many different reasons. Majority of the population might not consider it as important to promote gender equality, to respect LGBT rights, or to abolish death penalty. The government sees it as its obligation to convert native land into productive agricultural plantations, or to move people so dams or transportation infrastructures can be built. Obviously, there are many norms, rules and customs in the field, as much as there are many interests and agendas.

Does this imply a normative inadequacy of human rights? Another complex issue. To some extent, there are still strong western views in the ways human rights are constructed and challenged. Critiques on how ASEAN juxtaposes human rights and human responsiblity in one single authoritative document represent how certain standards should be maintained for human rights to work. Yet, many authors have successfully mustered the relevance of global south in the making of human rights. Although one should also bear in mind that the processes and outcomes of these endeavours are not altering the western influence in constructing and challenging rights.

Assessing normative inadequacy implies also an examination of the scope and jurisdiction of the human rights norms. Again, this is a contested territory, but one certain thing is that it is impossible to predict what each model of norms codification can deliver. Legal binding documents can have the same impacts as non-legal binding documents. The latter can face comparable drawbacks as the first one. Similarly, one can not simply gauge the extent to which monitoring-based system, penalties, or statistically based indicators can benefit or jeopardize rights holders.

Indeed, it is not easy to asses the political effectiveness of human rights in the race of normative progress.

Governance Human Rights

Human Rights and Sustainability

Post author By Irene Hadiprayitno
Post date March 14, 2016
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To live in dignity, all human being needs a healthy environment. A safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment is thus integral to the full enjoyment of a wide range of human rights, including the rights to life, health, food, water and sanitation. Increasingly, the intertwine between human rights and the environment is being acknowledged and recognised.

Routledge series of Sustainability recently publish an edited volume entitled Human Rights and Sustainability: Moral responsibilities for the future. The editors of this book, Gerhard Bos, Marcus Düwell, develop the idea of environmental obligations as long-term responsibilities in the context of human rights. The book proposes that human rights require recognition that, in the face of unsustainable conduct, future human persons are exposed and vulnerable. In doing so, the authors explore the obstacles for long-term responsibilities that human rights law provides at the level of international and national law, and scrutinise the question of whether lifestyle restrictions are enforceable in view of liberties human rights.

Some chapters that might be of interest are:

International Human Rights and Duties to Future Generations: The Role of an International Constitution. Stephen Riley
A Chain of Status: Long-term Responsibility in the Context of Human Rights. Gerhard Bos
Human Rights as a Normative Guideline for Climate Policy. Michael Reder and Lukas Köhler
On Current Food Consumption and Future Generations: Is There a Moral Need to Change our Food Consumption in Order to Safeguard the Human Rights of Future Generations? Franck L.B. Meijboom
The Institutional Representation of Future Generations. Sandor Fulop

On a similar subject, a recent edition of the Oslo Law Review contains a publication on Legal Pluralism, Human Rights and the Idea of Climate Justice, by Aled Dilwyn Fisher. The article can be downloaded here.

Approaching the subject from a governance perspective, a chapter published by Laura Horn entitled Human Rights and International Environmental Governance is certainly worth reading. The chapter considers the failure of the international legal system to provide adequate mechanisms for global environmental governance. It also discusses some proposals for change to environmental government from existing institutions, by focusing on a possibility for an international human rights to a healthy environment.