A binary world

By Deborah Padfield

© Alastair Grant, AP

Which is more significant: the reasons for the disturbances of early August, or the responses to them? Both deserve analysis. Politicians have expounded on causes with scanty facts and scantier moral credentials. A prime minister with an indefinite number of homes, who believed it right to give Andy Coulson a "second chance", endorses throwing "some of these people out of their houses". That a family was served with an eviction notice before their son came to trial reveals the ease with which unknown precarians are condemned as "these people".

Who is responsible?

Cameron spoke of "criminality pure and simple", resisting any parallel with MPs' non-criminal abuses of the expenses system. The distinction is flaky. The expenses saga revealed MPs milking a lax system, complacently or shamelessly abusing its fluid rules. Interpretation of where criminality begins is not value-free. Eviction of perpetrators’ families is a way of "enforcing responsibility": responsibility lies with individuals, not with the system. Concerning expenses, Tory "grandee" Anthony Steen disagreed: "It is not a question of feeling we have done something wrong. It is just the system which is wrong" [Times, 17 May 2009]. That won’t do; grandees and hoodies must take responsibility.

Yet he had a point. We are influenced by social norms. Many rioters were possessed by the mob mentality which can overpower educated and uneducated alike; the MPs were not. But in this individualist culture, rioters, MPs and others are influenced by resentment against authorities which threaten their freedoms and by desire for what others desire. Rich people have ways of satisfying themselves. Others tend to be cruder, an easier target for moral outrage.

A changed debate

Reading select committee debates on the Localism, Welfare Reform and Legal Aid Bills and working at a Citizens Advice Bureau, I’ve concluded that campaigns by and on behalf of vulnerable people fall onto deaf ears. Citizens Advice uses evidence to show that timely advice and support save major financial and human costs. We churn in frustration at the short-sightedness of politicians who brush aside evidence with statements of insulting vacuity.

They are not short-sighted. Theirs is a different hymn-sheet. Many cuts and reforms are not primarily about saving money; were they so, evidence of not-far-downstream costs must influence policy.

Responsibility without resources

Individuals must take responsibility. Young men involved in riots must be stamped as the criminals they are. Failed parents may be rendered homeless. The responsibility-theme pervades reform of benefits and legal aid. Single parents, who must job-hunt when their child is seven and whose childcare support has been cut, should sit and read to their children (and presumably ensure that childcare providers do likewise). Job seekers without money for bus fares must get to interviews. Mentally ill people must gather their own evidence for Employment & Support Allowance assessments. People facing employment or benefit tribunals or child custody proceedings are to prepare and present their own cases. Tenants are, unaided, to force private landlords to fulfil their obligations.

These demands may sound reasonable to those with resources of time, know-how and confidence or money to buy them; even more reasonable to those uninterested in other worlds. But people live in those other worlds. In any case, government’s priority is not the reasonable but the "right". It is right for people to take responsibility for themselves and wrong for them to burden "hard-working families" or fail, like rioters' parents, to fulfil their responsibilities.

Responsibility goes with freedom and choice. Encouraging people into work, projects them into freedom. Abolition of legal aid lifts them out of dependence on experts. Theoretically true. The practical effect, though, will often be disempowerment.

Weakening parliament and judiciary

Parliamentary scrutiny of such actual effects is being minimised. Welfare Reform and Legal Aid committees were disquieted by not knowing the actual significance of many draft clauses. The powers of the Lord Chancellor further to cut legal aid will be broad, and shifting its administration into the Ministry of Justice will remove independent oversight from entitlement decisions. The judicial scrutiny of new legislation will also be affected.

Weakening individuals

Under-Secretary of State Djanogly told the Commons Legal Aid committee that "the common-law right of access to justice does not guarantee legal representation or equality of arms" [19 July]. Karl Turner MP spoke of government's "risible" alternatives to legal aid, from advice from Job Centre Plus on appealing its own decisions to mediation which, though valuable, often needs to be backed by legal advice and cannot be used in disputes with government departments. Surviving legal aid is to be channelled through telephone advice, which people in the poorest (DE) social classes are least likely to use. Quoting the Legal Action Group, Yvonne Fovargue MP commented that "if we actually want to create a system that stops the people who need it using the advice, this is the way to do it."

Poverty and insecurity are agents of disempowerment. The time-poor and over-stretched cannot keep up the fight indefinitely. People are ground down by unrelenting problems with insecure benefits, employment and tenancies. MPs Yvonne Fovargue and Andy Slaughter saw the cuts in legal aid as a way of pushing people off benefits. Many, unable to challenge decisions, will slip into an informal/illegal economy which renders all but the skilled criminal yet more vulnerable. According to Rachel Robinson of Liberty, many individuals will lose their practical ability to challenge decisions of public authorities, which "will, to some extent, change the relationship between the individual and the state" [14 July].

The undeserving poor

The double standards dividing hoodies from grandees are well-established. Few in the world of the haves, and no government department, would engage in legal action without skilled advice. Why is it different for the have-nots? The sub-text of the legal aid reforms seems to be that if the claim is just, a plain statement of fact will be decisive. This must rest in government's division between the deserving ("hard-working") and undeserving ("dependent") poor.

The binary vision has been skilfully presented. Divide and rule. Routinely, people receiving benefits tell me of their anger at government for tougher rules and their greater anger at the benefit fraudsters who provoked them. Amongst the poor, poverty is suspect.

Poverty is suspect; wealth is out of reach. Responsibility is demanded; resources for realising it are denied. Freedom is promised; like the freedom to enter the Ritz.

People riot; government condemns.

About the author:

Deborah Padfield is a benefits adviser at Cambridge Citizens Advice Bureau, specialising in work with people with severe and enduring mental health conditions, chronic pain and substance abuse. She has previously lived and worked with people with similar problems in the east end of London and is a former editor of The Friend, the Quaker weekly.

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Silencing the Masses: Wireless Communications Blackouts

Protester talks into a cellular phone in front of
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers
at the Civic Center station in San Francisco
© AP

By Anna Piekarzewski

The popular Blackberry messaging service as well as social networking sites Twitter and Facebook have come under fire for their role in facilitating the violence and looting that engulfed London last week. Speaking at an emergency session of Parliament, British Prime Minister David Cameron asked “whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality”. Tory MP Louise Mensch has gone one step further, publicly voicing her support of social media blackouts during civil unrest.

Meanwhile, it seems that service providers in San Francisco have put this approach into practice. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) authorities have released a statement admitting to temporarily disabling wireless service at several of its stations to ensure safety and maintain order after reports that cell phones would be used to organise a disruption on the BART system. The planned protests were in response to the July 3rd fatal shooting of Charles Hill by BART police.

These two scenarios are not identical, since as a private corporation BART claims that they should be able to exert full control over their infrastructure. Yet they both force us to consider whether disruptions of communications systems are justified in the name of public safety and security during times of unrest.

It is worthwhile to first examine the practical consequences of such a measure. Would suspending social media or wireless communications quell rioting and prevent violence? The recent uprising in Egypt where former President Mubarak attempted to suppress protests by obstructing internet service raises doubts as to the effectiveness of this tactic. While organising no doubt became more difficult, it was clear that this would not be enough to stop the momentum of revolution. In fact, switching off internet access may have strengthened the resolve of Egyptian people who could draw support from foreign authorities labelling the move as repressive, anti-democratic and despotic. Who is to say that cutting off access to social media during the London unrest would not have spurred greater violence in response to the state exerting such heavy-handed control? This backlash seems to be occurring in San Francisco, where cyber hacker group Anonymous has called for protests of the wireless disruption.

Beyond asking whether a service disruption would work, we must also ask what would be lost in the process. As Prime Minister Cameron himself acknowledged, the free flow of information can be used for both good and ill. Social media and wireless communication are important lifelines during crises, helping people locate loved ones or warn others about possible danger. Given the popularity of these services, they may be one of the most effective ways for authorities to get important information out to the public and could even be used to improve police response. Moreover, while some used messaging to coordinate looting, others took to Twitter and Facebook to organise clean-ups or raise funds for those affected by the violence. Perhaps best illustrating the multidimensional power of new media is the fact that MP Mensch herself turned to Twitter to broadcast her support for disrupting social media.

The particular focus on social media is itself questionable. While Twitter may reach a wider public audience, Blackberry messages remain between intended recipients, much like text messages. Is social media fundamentally more dangerous, requiring strict control, or did similar panic surround the introduction of other new communications technologies like telephones or e-mail?

Leaving aside the practicalities of how and whether communications services disruptions would work, we must ask whether such a measure could ever be justified. Many have called Cameron’s position hypocritical given his strong condemnation of the service disruptions in Egypt. Similar critiques have been levelled at BART authorities, with posts on Twitter using the label #muBARTek to draw the parallel. Whether such comparisons are fair is debatable, however they do raise the question of whether our state leaders would lose credibility critiquing repressive regimes if they themselves are encroaching on civil liberties.

The state has the responsibility to protect its citizens in times of distress, yet it must balance this need for order with upholding rights and liberties, not least freedom of expression and the right to information. As social media reveals its powerful potential for connecting people, we must guard against panicked calls to suppress what is not understood. While communications technologies may facilitate protests, they do not cause them. Perhaps the public would be better served by a state more willing to listen rather than one that wields silence as a weapon.

About the Author:

Anna Piekarzewski is a law student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and a past intern at the International Council on Human Rights Policy. Her current research interests include privacy, information technologies and civil liberties, particularly as they relate to criminal and national security law.

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Genderized Clientelism in Conditional Cash Transfers

By Christian Gruenberg

The overall management of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes is riddled with gender issues, especially given the central role of women as transfer recipients in the programmes, which are largely administered by male public officials. Women receive the cash transfers contingent upon compliance with health and educational responsibilities for them and their children. To receive their benefit, women must automatically build direct relationships with a diverse group of males who occupy different positions and functions in the CCT and state bureaucracy: programme operators, municipal officials, nurses, doctors, teachers, bank staff, etc.

In Argentina, for example, the household programme was not explicitly focused on women as recipients of the cash transfer (unlike other CCTs), but through the process of self-selection, women accounted for 75% to 80% of those registered in the programme. 32% of complaints received in the programme come from women who complain against males, and 24% of complaints received are women who complain against other women. Overall, the data in Table 1 suggest that women regularly found themselves in a subservient role to men with more power, resources and social status in the client–patron relationship.

TABLE 1. CCT Complaints in Argentina by Gender

The complainant	The denounced	Percentage (%)
Female	Male	32
Female	Female	24
Male	Male	14
Female	Institution(public/private)	10
Male	Female	6
Male	Male/female	6
Female	Male/female	2
Male	Institution(public/private)	2
Male/female	Male	2
Male/female	Male/female	1
Male/female	Female	1

Source: Gruenberg, C., Pereyra Iraola, V.,  "The Patronage in the Management of Social Poverty Reduction Program" (CIPPEC, 2009) public policy document, Analysis n.60.

The data in Table 1, supplemented by a qualitative analysis showing that complaints were made against forced participation in political events, personal services and requests for money (usually mediated by some form of gender-based violence), suggest that in patriarchal societies – where women inevitably have less power than men – the CCT may be transforming the traditional patron–client relations into genderized relations of domination.

The Mexican experience, however, shows that traditional subjects of clientelism (requests for money, personal services, etc.) are not always the ‘caciques’ (also known as ‘political broker’ in Argentina, ‘cabo electoral’ in Brazil, and ‘capitulero’ in Peru). In Mexico, the largest percentage (39%) of clientelism complaints made to the CCT programme are made about the health sector, followed by ‘vocals’ - beneficiaries elected to represent the interests of other beneficiaries and control education and health services (34%), the staff of the CCT programme (10%), municipal authorities (7%) and the education sector (5%) (Hevia and Gruenberg 2010).

This finding suggests that new CCT programme reforms to promote transparency, as well as the implementation of strict mechanisms for the objective selection of women participating in the programme, may be able to remove political intermediaries and to reduce traditional clientelistic manipulation. At the same time, reforms create opportunities for new power dynamics, such as in Mexico, where conditionalities related to health and education empowered doctors, teachers and other health and education workers to decide on the permanence of women in the programme, producing new clientelistic practices as an unintended effect.

In the institutional context, CCT programmes aim to stimulate demand for and control over health and education, through the pressure of mothers on the supply of public services. However, although this may seem benign, laudable even, the response of public services is romanticized, as if they were gender-neutral and free of misogyny and racism. Governments must take gender power relations into consideration in the design and implementation of CCT programmes and the delivery of social services, particularly if they are relying on women as primary drivers of accountability within CCT programmes (MacPherson 2008). In addition, the differences observed in gender-disaggregated data should be investigated, and reforms, standards, tools and guidelines should be developed to protect women’s human rights.

Further Reading: 

ICHRP (2009).
Corruption and Human Rights: Making the Connection

ICHRP (2010).
Integrating Human Rights in the Anti-Corruption Agenda : Challenges, Possibilities and Opportunities

World Health Organization (2009).
“Strategy for integrating gender analysis and actions into the work of WHO”.

• Gruenberg and Pereyra (2009). "The Patronage in the Management of Social Poverty Reduction Program". CIPPEC public policy document, Analysis n. 60.

• Hevia and Gruenberg (2010). "Continuidades y reformas en el sistema de atención ciudadana del Programa de Desarrollo Humano Oportunidades" (Continuity and System Reform Citizen Program Oportunities). Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 

• MacPherson (2008). “Invisible Agents: Women in Service Delivery Reforms”. IDS Bulletin, Vol. 38

About the Author:

Chris Gruenberg is a feminist lawyer. He studied law and public policy at the University of Buenos Aires, Universidad de Chile and Harvard. His work seeks to challenge the androcentric bias and hetero-patriarchal violence that characterises the design and implementation of public policies. He was also a lead writer and researcher on the ICHRP reports on corruption and human rights.

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Child Rights in Pakistan: A Call for Reform and Political Will

By Arshad Mahmood

The need to protect children in Pakistan has never been greater. With indicators like Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or child welfare benchmarks set under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Pakistan lags far behind in fulfilling our promises to our children. Last year’s floods only added to the already complex challenges of conflict, terrorism, the appalling state of the health and education sectors, and the lack of legislative initiatives. These failures of momentum combine with poor to non-implementation of existing laws.

To begin with, children in Pakistan continue to be affected by militancy. They have been the innocent victims of terrorist attacks carried out all across the country, such as when militants targeted school buses, killing and injuring many children. It is not just conflict that threatens Pakistani children, however. In Pakistan, child labour is on the rise. This is surprising since it is generally decreasing globally. Specifically, in Pakistan, child domestic labour is increasing.

While domestic labour might seem more tame than other abuses children could suffer (e.g., industrial labour, sex trafficking), some general cases over the last 18 months demonstrate how terrible of an abuse it is. Fifteen cases of death by torture of child domestic labourers were reported between January 2010 and the middle of 2011. Cases like the Shazia Masih case in Lahore have become popularized by the media, but other cases that involve torture that leads to lifelong disability or serious injuries are tracked by child rights groups. These numbers generally show Punjab as the province with the highest number of incidents, but the general increase in violence against children across Pakistan indicates the need for a federal response to this scourge.

Violence against children truly is widespread: at homes, in the streets, in institutions meant to protect children, and in the criminal justice system. Terrible incidents like the Sialkot lynching of two brothers or the rape of a 13-year-old girl in Wah Cantonment police station are some of the publicized examples of this increasing trend, but there are many other examples. These other cases involve indoctrination and use of children as suicide bombers, torture of child domestic labourers, and physical punishment of students, sometime with fatal results. The perpetrators of this violence are almost always adults in their role as guardians, teachers, relatives and even law enforcement personnel: the very people that children should be most safe with.

The Pakistani criminal justice system specifically is a challenge for children. Lack of a concerted government effort, due to absence of a statutory body for children, has resulted in failure to include international and national standards in the training curricula of judicial workers, police, prison officials, probation officers and related government agencies. These officials are generally unaware of their obligations toward children, and as a result, children face further hardships in criminal justice procedures.

Pakistan is now a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which obligates us to ensure that all inhabitants have equal civil and political rights. This is not the case for the people of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and this significantly impacts the rights of children in those regions. In the meantime, Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) administered in the FATA imposes draconian measures upon innocent women and children waiting in prisons under its collective responsibility clause. The issue of FCR must be resolved, which would require an amendment to Article 247 (Administration of Tribal Areas) of Pakistan’s Constitution in order to bring FATA into the mainstream.

In addition to the movement for Constitutional Amendment, concrete steps at the policy level must be taken to implement the Concluding Observations and Recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on Pakistan’s last Periodic Report. The report called for, among other steps, approval of a national child protection policy and related laws; increase in resource allocation for health, education and child protection; establishment of a national commission on the rights of children; and inclusion of child rights in the training curricula of all professional training colleges and academies.

We all need to work together to ensure that the rights of children enshrined in the Constitution, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Islamic injunctions are honored. The government and the parliament need to prioritize child rights and immediately pass all pending legislation. There should be proper budgetary allocation for all child-related initiatives, and a national commission should be established to work for the promotion and protection of the rights of the child and to ensure implementation of Pakistan’s national and international obligations. The plight of children in Pakistan can be improved on a sustainable basis by taking these initiatives. The key, however, is political will.

About the Author: 

Arshad Mahmood is the Executive Director of Pakistan’s Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC). Mr. Mahmood holds a Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics (LSE). Mr. Mahmood is also a member of the Child Rights Steering Committee established under the Federal Ombudsman Order 1983.

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We didn’t start the fire

© Dominic Lipinski, AP

By Carly Nyst

As the streets of London burn, politicians and pundits alike struggle to diagnose, through the clouds of smoke and piles of broken glass, the origin of this chaos. Shock is the order of the day, and from it stems genuine confusion and palpable fear. The media seems anxious to find the right box in which to place these unfamiliar events, and have been trying on a number of explanations for size – ethnic tensions, negligent police practices, high unemployment, general thuggery – without much success. Of course, efforts to analyse a crisis while the rocks are still being thrown are inevitably futile, even irresponsible. These riots are symptomatic of problems so big they cannot be pinpointed in isolation – deepening disadvantage, scarcity of opportunity, and increasing inequality.

The conditions of disadvantage, frustration and hopelessness in which too many Britons live were neither the creation nor the objective of Cameron’s Big Society and existed long before the global financial crisis hit. Yet, despite being completely removed from the origins of the crisis –Tottenham and the City are both 7 miles and yet a million miles apart – the poorest and most disadvantaged have suffered the most, and the austerity measures introduced in its aftermath have served only to exacerbate that, by perpetuating and deepening persistent inequality.

As discussed previously by Emile Parrotta, it is neither coincidental nor insignificant that the riots began in one of London’s poorest boroughs and spread quickly through areas challenged by unemployment, poverty, and marginalization. Research clearly demonstrates that disadvantaged communities are far more likely to be involved in rioting (McEneaney, Olzak and Shanahan 1996, p.590). This is not because people living in such communities have a preference for violence or nothing better to do but because they face insurmountable obstacles in having their voices heard otherwise.

The reality is that in British society – in all of our societies – there is structural dismissal of and disdain towards the poor and disadvantaged. In myriad ways, we ignore them, belittle them, segregate them, humiliate them. Without the education to provide sufficiently eloquent opinions, they are disregarded by their media; without the income to offer sufficiently rigorous political support, they are sidelined by their political representatives. Their communities are poorly serviced, under-resourced and plagued by unemployment. Because the poor and excluded experience far higher levels of engagement with the criminal justice system than the rest of society, disrespect and distrust is deeply entrenched in their interactions with police. In a devastating cycle of the-chicken-or-the-egg, the best nurses and teachers steer clear of the worst hospitals and schools; for many children, the first lesson they learn is the absence of hope.

As with other riots, such as those in Los Angeles in 1992, or those in Australian indigenous communities (there have been three in recent memory, each of them initially in response to the death of an Aboriginal man at the hands of police), the actions of London’s rioters can be viewed in a context in which the alternative was to continue to be “subjected to social and economic racism” and “accept their situation through the more acceptable and pitied role of the demoralised but pacified fringe-dweller.” (Birch 2004, p. 20) This is not to say that the rioters have been cognizant of this choice, or even of the underlying motivations for their outbursts – undeniably the violence and destruction has been levelled, for the most part, by youths who seem to have no greater objective than to break and steal things. Yet their behaviour need not be organized and disciplined in the conventional manner or in the sense of a revolutionary movement in order to symbolise a political struggle (Broadhurst 1997, p. 414). Their anger is directed, not randomly, but at the symbols of their oppression – of the state, of authority, of affluence.

One cannot defend the tactics of the rioters, whose actions have not only caused fear but have contributed to the destruction of livelihoods, perhaps even lives. However, one can seek to understand them, and in doing so begin to repair the fractures from which they stemmed. For too long, we have deprived many members of our societies of the respect which is an integral part of human dignity. We have taken away their voice, and now they speak with violence and fire.

The challenge, then, is to respond not with further exclusion, but inclusion; not by placing these riots in easily-labelled boxes, but by taking on the big issues, and with them the challenge of overhauling our societies. This implies a range of actions by a range of actors, including governments who must recognise the punitive effects of fiscal policies on the already deprived, and the media who must become more aware of their role in perpetuating negative stereotypes. Most of all, it demands a significant change in societal attitudes. After all, it is not that disadvantaged communities don’t have things to say; it is that we don’t listen to them.

Further Reading:

• Roderic Broadhurst (1997). “Aborigines and Crime in Australia.” 21 Crime and Justice 407.
• Tony Birch (2004). “Who Gives A Fuck About White Society Anymore?” 175 Overland.
• Elizabeth H. McEneaney, Susan Olzak, and Suzanne Shanahan (1996). “Poverty, Segregation and Race Riots: 1960 to 1993.” 61 American Sociological Review 4.

About the Author:

Carly Nyst is a human rights lawyer and research associate at the International Council on Human Rights Policy. She provides research assistance to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Currently, she is working on issues related to the penalisation of poverty and access to justice.

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Austerity, rage, rights and riots

by Emile Parrotta

The two major headlines on today’s BBC homepage point to widespread rioting in London, the EU’s largest and wealthiest city, and a Europe-wide share plunge. I suspect there is a connection. In the previous post, Paula Mendez Keil spoke of the ‘greying of Europe’ and its effect on the economic competitiveness of the continent. But what does all this have to do with human rights?

As soon as policymakers take a step back and survey the damage caused by both upheavals, they will be frantic to respond. In the UK, the result will doubtlessly be calls to strengthen the numbers and powers of the police. There has already been discussion of introducing the use of water cannon to suppress the violence. While these responses might maintain order in the short term, they do not look at the underlying causes of such unrest. This is the role of human rights. While those in the human rights community should not be seen to jump to the defence of the rioters, they should also be the first to ask the tough questions: How does severe income inequality affect access to basic goods, services and jobs in London? Are there other factors behind the desperation, anger and violence of the nation’s youth? Finally, what kind of policies should be implemented in response, aside from strengthening the police, in order to prevent this happening again?

In Europe and the wider world today stocks are continuing to plunge. The spectre of a double-dip recession has returned. Europe-wide austerity measures in response to the debt crisis have made spending cuts all the rage. The welfare state will be the first victim and while it is likely that austerity measures are hurting the economy, they hurt individuals most. Therefore there is a great risk that the present economic slowdown will ultimately damage Europe’s social rights protections. As the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and extreme poverty said recently, “unjustified reductions in expenditures devoted to implementing public services that are critical to the realization of economic, social and cultural rights will be in violation of human rights standards.” Furthermore, it is the already disadvantaged who are impacted most severely. Politicians need to realise that this degree of austerity, manifested in cuts to public services coupled with inequality and unemployment, inevitably breeds social unrest.

About the Author:

Emile Parrotta is a teacher of human rights and English based in Eastern Europe. He recently graduated from the London School of Economics with a masters in Human Rights.

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The Future of the European Union: between Fact and Fiction

by Paula Mendez Keil

In July, the 2011 Europaeum annual International Conference on The Futures of Europe: Which Way Towards 2030 gathered leading experts and policy makers from around Europe in the fields of economics, politics, sociology, history, and law. The premise was to discuss the viability of the European Union not only as a global player, but also as a region that is facing evermore pressing problems of economic and political integration. Among the challenges that were highlighted were the realities that challenge European integration, such as demography, nationalism, and the welfare state, and in turn their human rights implications.

Much of the dialogue at the conference centered around the demographic crisis of the region. The ‘graying of Europe,’ as it’s referred to, is affecting national job markets and the EU’s overall competitiveness in the global economy. As one of the regions with the lowest birth-rates in the world, decreasing mortality rates, and an ageing population overall, Europe is seeing itself regress into a more closed and less dynamic society. These trends have two very serious implications: a national brain-drain backlash effect and a push towards ‘positive migration’ policies. On the one hand, countries in the region are facing growing waves of emigration, particularly among the higher educated youth, who find themselves searching for research opportunities abroad that are usually better funded by governments such as the U.S. and Canada. On the other hand, there has been an upsurge in discriminatory migration policies, disguised under the notion of ‘positive migration’, which specifically target immigrants such as Latin-Americans in Spain, Muslims in France, Switzerland and Belgium, and the Roma in Italy. Some examples are increased labour and rental market barriers for immigrants, burqa and minaret bans, and systematic police raids of Roma or traveller settlements, all of which can be seen as grave infringements upon the human rights of marginalized and disadvantaged groups.

Throughout the conference there was a general consensus on the need for a new European narrative; shifting from a Eurocentric image of the region as the ‘last bastion’ for liberal political views, to a post-Western order characterized by a more realistic and cautious promotion of universal human rights, especially in light of the Arab Spring. Given this ideological thrust towards inclusiveness and tolerance, it is a sad reality that protectionism and defensive policies persist. The recent Norwegian terrorist attacks are a case in point, demonstrating how home-grown nationalism is leading down the beaten path of xenophobia and racism. Increasingly Europe faces growing tensions between utopias of cultural convergence and hard realities of exclusionary divergence. If human rights standards are the basis of a common European identity, how then can we explain the ever-growing intolerance bred by rampantly discriminatory policies? The history of humanity is remarkable for its very resilience and Europe will have to demonstrate its strength through progressive integration which respects the very same fundamentals it seeks to promote around the world.

About the Author:

Paula Mendez Keil is a 2011 Research Intern at the International Council on Human Rights Policy. She is currently completing a Master’s in International Affairs at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

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Justice systems: working for women?

by Kate Donald

The first major report from new body UN Women, Progress of the World’s Women: In Pursuit of Justice has been launched. The Progress reports (formerly produced by UNIFEM) are UN Women’s biennial global assessment of progress towards gender equality.

Undoubtedly, this year’s subject matter is of great importance. Access to justice, effective methods of redress and accountability mechanisms are preconditions for the full enjoyment of human rights. Unfortunately the justice system, which should be a key site for women to claim their rights, is often instead a sphere in which they face further marginalisation and discrimination. For those who don’t have time to read the full report, The Guardian has extracted some key statistics.

For example:

• 139 constitutions guarantee gender equality, 117 countries have equal pay laws, and 115 countries guarantee women's equal property rights

• globally, 53% of working women are in vulnerable employment and women are paid up to 30% less than men in some countries

• 125 countries outlaw domestic violence, but 127 countries do not explicitly criminalise rape within marriage

• around the world, 603 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not considered a crime and more than 2.6 billion live in countries where marital rape is not a criminal offence

• 61 countries severely restrict women's rights to abortion

• 50 countries have a lower legal age of marriage for women than for men

• Rwanda has the highest share of women in parliament (51%), followed by Sweden (45%). In the UK, only 21% of parliamentarians are women, and in the US that figure is down to 17%

The report also includes a chapter on Legal Pluralism, noting the importance of informal or non-state legal orders which are an important battleground for women struggling to claim their rights at the confluence of law, culture, ethnicity and tradition in many societies. UN Women drew on the research and findings of the ICHRP’s work on legal pluralism in the development of the report.

Further readings:

When Legal Worlds Overlap: Human Rights, State and Non-State Law

Full Report - Summary - Research briefing 

About the Author:

Kate Donald is Research Associate at the International Council on Human Rights Policy. She works on the ICHRP project on sexuality, health and human rights.

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