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PWESCR - Women's Livelihoods
The Journal of Peasant Studies - March 2012 - The Human Rights Framework in Contemporary Agrarian Struggles
"The contribution by Sanchez highlights
how human rights helped a group of landless women to do something which had
been unthinkable before in Honduras: to organize as poor single mothers to
reclaim a piece of state land invoking the universal human right food. This
experience illustrates the emancipatory force that human rights can display for
poor women not only vis-a` -vis the state but also vis-a` - vis male dominated
peasant organizations."
Consider
Through a Gender Lens for Women's Equality, Empowerment, Human Rights
HOW ARE AGRARIAN, AGRICULTURE SMALL HOLDERS, PEASANTS,
& SOCIAL MOVEMENTS USING HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK?
Important demands of contemporary rural social movements, such as the food
sovereignty vision, have been increasingly framed as rights issues and by a
rights discourse: Food sovereignty1 is the right of peoples to healthy and
culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable
methods, and their right to define their own food and
agriculture systems. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that
guarantees just incomes to all peoples as well as the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It
ensures that the rights to use and manage
lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands
of those of us who produce food.......
The last three decades of neoliberal globalization have brought about deep
changes in the national and international legal frameworks related to agrarian
issues. First, the decision making arenas have moved to an important extent
from national parliaments and governments to international financial
institutions with de facto powers to impose policies upon national governments
as conditionalities to development loans and the like.......
The World Trade Organization (WTO) and their provisions on trade-related
aspects of intellectual property rights established a framework for trade
policies with a mandate to review national policies in order to ensure coherence
with WTO rules and disciplines. Third, mandatory regulations related to labour,
social and environmental standards to be met by private actors and companies
and enforced by the state have started to be replaced by self regulatory and
voluntary schemes, e.g. corporate social responsability, with different forms
of multi-stakeholder monitoring of compliance.
Moreover, private business and corporations have set up their own shadow
systems of business -particularly in the financial world- which allow them to
evade social and environmental regulations and any public control (Hildyard
2008); and international investment protection regimes which strengthen the
legal value of individual contracts by making their noncompliance a breach of
international law, and giving investors the possibility to sue host governments
in arbitration mechanisms operating to a large extent under secrecy norms
(Peterson 2009).
All these three interrelated process have put in place corporate-friendly
regulatory frameworks which have dismantled state support and protection of
peasants, small-scale fishers, rural workers and other rural constituencies and
have effectively paved the way to dispossess them from their livelihoods in
favor of commercial interests (Borras et al. , 2008). People on the ground
increasingly face the challenge to defend themselves from powerful foreign
actors like transnational companies, foreign states and international institutions.
As the case of the Mubende community shows, grassroots communities are
recurring to the human rights framework to address the responsibility of foreign
companies involved in human rights violations like forced evictions and the
obligations of the home states of these companies to regulate the behaviour of
their companies abroad. The international nature of the human rights framework
facilitates for local communities networking with transnational advocacy
networks and accessing international relevant policy fora which might have an
impact in their local struggle......
Peoples' organizations are using the UN Human Rights System and the
regional human rights systems to denounce actual violations of human rights such
as widespread forced evictions and non-implementation of agrarian reform policies
in contexts of hunger and policies causing systematic
violations as well.
The contribution by Sanchez
highlights how human rights helped a group of landless women to do something
which had been unthinkable before in Honduras: to organize as poor single
mothers to reclaim a piece of state land invoking the universal human right
food. This experience illustrates the emancipatory force that human rights can
display for poor women not only vis-a` -vis the state but also vis-a` - vis
male dominated peasant organizations.
Monitoring bodies of the ICESCR, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteurs on the Rights to Food5, Housing and Human Rights Defenders, and the Advisory Committee to the Human Rights Council have been particularly receptive to these complaints. The UN Human Rights System has been extremely important in underlining the legitimacy of the claims raised by poor agrarian movements.......
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