‘Putting development to rights’: why international development needs underpinning by human rights

2014’s Marlborough Brandt Lent Lecture (Wednesday, March 12) comes at a watershed moment in international development.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set in 2000 run out next year and work is underway, led by the United Nations, to prepare a new set of goals fit for the changing times of the next fifteen years of the twenty-first century.

This year’s lecturer is David Mepham, UK Director of the American-based non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch.  He believes passionately that it is essential to place human rights at the heart of development policy.

David Mepham told Marlborough News Online that although the MDGs had helped galvanise international action on development: “The neglect of human rights in the MDGs was a serious missed opportunity and has diminished the overall impact of these development efforts.”

His lecture is to be titled: Putting development to rights.

He believes that around the world much economic modernisation and development has both ignored and actually harmed many poor people – and further impoverished them. And demonstrably that is because their rights – human and social – have been overridden.

This he says is especially true of women, children, indigenous people, those with disabilities and ethnic minorities.

Mepham’s career has given him frontline views of the MDGs and their mix of success and missed targets.   Before joining Human Rights Watch (HRW) in April 2011, Mepham spent four years as the head of policy and advocacy for Save the Children UK.

Prior to that, he was associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and head of its international programme.  And from 1998 to 2002 he was a senior policy adviser in the UK’s Department for International Development.

At HRW Mepham is responsible for the organisation’s advocacy towards the UK government and parliamentarians (also known as ‘lobbying’) and for its dealings with the UK media.

A major part of that advocacy or lobbying is currently dealing with the MDG replacement strategy: “It is essential and urgent to show how the fuller integration of rights can contribute to improved development outcomes – promoting a form of development that is more inclusive, just, transparent, participatory and accountable, precisely because it is rights-respecting.”

Over the last few years in UK politics HR have been increasingly portrayed as inimical to national domestic interests in areas such as immigration, asylum and anti-terrorism laws. 

MNO asked David how this had affected his job at HRW:  “There is a serious disconnect in some parts of the UK media and in Parliament between human rights in domestic and foreign policy.”

“The same UK newspapers and politicians that denounce human rights violations in Syria, Libya or Zimbabwe – and propose tougher action to deal with them – can be scathing about the relevance or application of human rights law and principles to UK domestic policy.”

“Much of the criticism of the UK Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights is muddled, based on myth, distortion and anecdote rather than fact.  We seek to counter this.”

MNO also asked David whether, so many years after agreement on the ground breaking 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights might need some re-definition:

“A number of important human rights instruments have been agreed since the UDHR in 1948, not least the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.”

“More recently, agreements have been reached on the rights of women, people with disabilities and indigenous people. I see these developments as overwhelmingly positive.”

“Although I am aware of the argument about ‘rights inflation’, I don’t think we particularly need to redefine rights. I am also strongly opposed to scaling back the concept of rights to just civil and political rights.”

This year’s Marlborough Brandt Lent Lecture will be chaired by Lord Judd of Portsea who has been the director of both Voluntary Service Overseas and of Oxfam, is currently a patron of the Marlborough Brandt Group – and gave the first of these annual lectures in 1982.

Previous lecturers have included the Princess Royal (in 1988 as President of the Save the Children Fund), the Kinnocks (Glenys in 1993 and Neil in 2010), Archbishop George Carey (in1998) and, last year, Dambisa Moyo with her challenging  lecture ‘Why aid is not working’.

This year’s lecture is timely as regards the ending of the MDGs and touches on the political debate surrounding human rights that is important for us all.

The lecture is being held on Wednesday, 12 March 2014 at 8.00pm in the Theatre on the Hill at St John’s Academy.  Entry is free and there will be a retiring collection in aid of the Marlborough Brandt Group which organises the lectures.