Eric Posner's op-ed "The case against human rights" in The Guardian is at first very convincing and therefore dangerous. He concludes with a silly cliché that human rights are a western imperialist import. This was debunked by Amartya Sen and many others. The parallels with development cooperation are too simplistic and wrong. Today the DevCo sector has human rights based approach (HRBA) at its core. This approach is not about grand proclamations but it represents a mode of thinking about people and their issues. It means all interventions should focus on human rights and their expansion and not on the physical output (number of wells, schools...). Because only if we address the question of why some people don't have access to certain goods or services, can our intervention be sustainable. Mentioning Ester Duflo is inappropriate, her innovation of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in DevCo is only a minor technical improvement, and overemphasizing it might lead us astray. For example, it is very effective to give poor people money. The so called direct cash transfers are becoming popular. But duh? In developed countries this is the function of social safety net and a result of implementation of various human rights. The problem of poorer countries is that they don't have enough resources (because of underdeveloped economy, corruption, bad tax collection and waste) to finance this safety net. Also they don't have enough resources and too weak middle class to approach the issues of human rights abuses (the threshold is much higher than in developed countries, but if you look at police killings in the USA one wonders...) . Duflo's and Lomborg's logic leads us to experiment with handouts and some exotic innovations but without addressing the underlying power/rights issues. They might select few poorer looking houses in some village in Kenya give them cash through mobile money m-pesa and observe some social indicators. But they abstract from the social dynamics of a particular village and distort the reality with non-systemic interventions. On contrary the HBRA tries to address the systemic issue of marginalization or inadequate access. So no human rights didn't fail us, we just didn't invest enough in them and let the lobbyists of autocrats and their talking heads tell us that this is a prodigious luxury. But is it? The whole economical success and nation branding rests on the perception of respect for human rights. Without it the country is fragile and will pay dearly in some point of time.
