Notes
Notes Chapter 1. NGOs and Freedom from Poverty 1. In June 2003, hundreds of human rights organizations and other NGOs came together to launch the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The world conferences in Vienna, Copenhagen, Johannesburg, and elsewhere also provided opportunities to discuss and support economic and social rights. 2. Within the UN, major development agencies such as the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Health Organization have agreed to a common understanding in adopting a human rights framework. This common understanding was outlined in a 2003 statement entitled, “The Human Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation: Toward a Common Understanding among UN Agencies,” available at http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ appeal/human_rights/UN_Common_understanding_RBA.pdf (accessed June 4, 2009). It called for all UN agencies to ground their programming in the principles outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 3. Private foundations in the United States that are now funding economic and social rights work include the Ford Foundation, the Samuel Rubin Foundation, the Otto Bremer Foundation, and the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation. 4. For a brief description of a few of these organizations, see the Appendix. 5. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), 3. 6. I distinguish three categories of organizational actors based on how they identify themselves and are labeled by other researchers and actors in the field. See, for example, Paul Nelson and Ellen Dorsey, New Rights Advocacy: Changing Strategies of Development and Human Rights NGOs (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008). Similar analytical distinctions between categories of actors are apparent in networks such as the ESCR-Net and the U.S. Human Rights Network. While these categories are useful analytically, we should remember that the boundaries between categories are often blurry, and a single organization can often comfortably fit within more than one category. Indeed, this study shows that as human rights groups increasingly address extreme poverty, and as social justice and humanitarian groups increasingly adopt human rights approaches, the boundaries between them are becoming even more empirically blurred. For a list of organizational members of ESCR-Net, 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 159 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 159 3/11/10 10:52:18 AM 3/11/10 10:52:18 AM 160 Notes to Pages 3–7 see http://www.escr-net.org/members/members_list.htm (accessed June 2009). For a list of members in the U.S. Human Rights Network, see http://www.ushrnetwork.org/ about_us/members (accessed June 2009). 7. Many social justice groups also provide goods and services to the poor, but this typically occurs in a local context, in contrast with humanitarian organizations’ more global reach. For me, by definition a social justice organization must go beyond providing services to incorporate lobbying, education, or other public advocacy strategies designed to foster social change. One coalition in the United States that has gathered these organizations together is the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC). For a list of PPEHRC’s members, see http://www.ppehrc.org (accessed June 2009). 8. As Peter Uvin notes, human rights work is “promoting human dignity through the development of claims that seek to empower excluded groups and that seek to create socially guaranteed improvements in policy.” See Uvin, Human Rights and Development (Bloomfield, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 2004), 63. 9. This definition is extrapolated from Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 13. 10. United Nations General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” adopted 10 Dec. 1948, GA Res. 217A (III), UN GAOR, 3d Sess. (Resolutions, pt. 1), at 71, art. 25(1), UN Doc. A/810 (1948). 11. United Nations General Assembly, “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” adopted 16 Dec. 1966, GA Res. 2200 (XXI), UN GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16, UN Doc. A/6316 (1966), 993 UNTS 3 (entered into force 3 Jan. 1976). 12. For subsistence social rights, see Ran Hirschl, “‘Negative’ Rights vs. ‘Positive’ Entitlements: A Comparative Study of Judicial Interpretations of Rights in an Emerging Neo-Liberal Economic Order,” Human Rights Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2000): 1083. For the right to an adequate standard of living, see Asbjorn Eide, “Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights,” in Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Textbook, ed. Asbjorn Eide, Catarina Krause, and Allan Rosas (London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1995), 31. For...
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