Globalization and the Future of Human Rights

With each new program or initiative we undertake, at whatever level, we need to ask questions about the benefits for promoting human rights and about the potentially negative effects on human rights. We also need to be mindful of the human rights commitments that governments have already made, and then be prepared to hold our leaders accountable. This applies as much to the governance of a village or local organization as it does to the governance of states or international organizations.

          I believe the future of human rights will depend, first and foremost, on whether countries themselves succeed in building their own national structures to ensure the protection of fundamental rights. These structures will need to respond to prevailing conditions and cultures, and in the process respect ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity. We know from experience that those societies where the domestic infrastructure reflects the state’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law—such as to a pluralistic and accountable parliament, an executive ultimately subject to the authority of elected representatives, and an independent, impartial judiciary— are also those societies best able to ensure respect for human rights and to achieve sustainable development.

          But we cannot expect to bridge the divides in our world without also being prepared to help the least developed countries to put in place or reform the building blocks of human rights protection. More assistance from the richest nations will be needed to see these governance capacities strengthened. As an alternative to pre-emptive security measures, this assistance may prove less costly, more welcome, and more effective.

          At the start of the new century, world leaders agreed a common agenda aimed at making globalization work for all people. These commitments, laid out in the UN Millennium Declaration and distilled in the UN Millennium Development Goals,5 include halving the number of people in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015; achieving universal primary education for boys and girls by 2015, and specific targets for promoting gender equality and empowerment of women; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a global partnership for development. That Agenda was costed in Monterrey at the Conference on Financing for Development as requiring an additional US$50 billion a year in global development spending. Compared with the cost of a medium-sized war, that figure should not daunt the international community.

          Implementing this common agenda will create a new globalization process based on shared values and shared commitments—a process that connects the promotion of human rights with the requirements of human development and the protection of security for all people.