INTRODUCTION
In 1995, the Human Rights Council of Australia (HRCA) published The
Rights Way to Development: Human Rights Approach to Development
Assistance.1
The authors presented a further development of these ideas at a
seminar at the Danish Centre for Human Rights in 1997, attended by people
from both development and human rights circles. The authors of the report
met with a mixed reception, receiving critique especially from those in
development quarters.
It is not so strange that the ideas put forward in The Rights Way to
Development about linking development and human rights did not win
broad approval is not so strange. The authors had chosen to disregard the
fact that the discipline of development was not originally based on rights
and had, without much reservation, considered development activities as
an integral part of human rights work. The stated “[d]evelopment exists
within a human rights framework. . . . Development should rightly be seen
as an integral part of human rights.”