D. Current Practices of Integrating Development and Human Rights
Except for certain NGO activities, human rights and development work are
usually carried out in different spheres and within different institutional
frameworks. Human rights policy is debated at large international conferences
and interpreted and monitored by the United Nation’s Human Rights
Commission; the regional human rights commissions and courts in America,
Europe, and Africa; national courts and human rights institutions; and many
state bureaucracies, most often under the ministries of justice.
Development policies are formulated and implemented by completely
different institutions. On the international level, this is the realm of special
UN organizations like the UNDP and the World Bank. On the national
level, this function is carried out by state officials (most often in the foreign
ministry) interacting with corresponding state institutions in developing
countries. It is obvious that the central themes for these bureaucracies, such
as growth, distribution, effective resource allocation, sustainable development,
agricultural development, and lately decentralization and good
governance only overlap to a certain degree with those of the human rights
institutions. It is also clear that the professional background of “developers,”
their traditions and education, are primarily within economics, sociology,
and political science plus the cross-cutting social science disciplines, while
the “human rights defenders” are primarily jurists.
Finally, the quality criteria and the professional ethics within the two
areas have been different. The development worker measures quality in
terms of effective and goal-oriented transfer of resources and increasing
social welfare (sometimes defined as “well-being”) or in terms of independence
and global equality, while the human rights worker measures quality
in terms of the establishment and incorporation of human rights norms and
legal rules in a given culture. Also here, however, there is an increasing
convergence as political participation and social processes of change gain
greater acceptance in both spheres.