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From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

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FROM POVERTY TO POWERa responsibility <strong>to</strong> respect, protect, and fulfil the rights of ‘rightsholders’.Rights therefore are naturally bound up with notions ofcitizenship, participation, and power.Rights alone are not enough, however. In the words of Indianeconomist Amartya Sen, individuals need capabilities – rights and theability <strong>to</strong> exercise them – an ability that is undermined when peopleare poor, illiterate, destitute, sick, lack vital information, or live in fearof violence. Having the ‘right’ <strong>to</strong> go <strong>to</strong> school is of no use <strong>to</strong> girls if thepressure of domestic tasks, prejudice in the home or community, orcoming last in line at family meal-times means that they must spendtheir days hungry, carrying water, cleaning, or looking after youngersiblings. Capabilities determine what people can do, and who they canbe. 6 The ability <strong>to</strong> achieve material security through productivelabour is a crucial aspect of such capabilities.All rights are necessarily related <strong>to</strong> responsibilities, constitutingthe web of moral connections and obligations that binds society<strong>to</strong>gether. All people, however poor, have responsibilities <strong>to</strong>wards theircommunities, but powerful individuals and organisations, notablygovernments, bear a particular burden of responsibility if we are <strong>to</strong>build a society based on equity and fairness.THE ROOTS OF RIGHTSThe idea that all people are of equal dignity and worth, and havenatural rights, developed in Western Europe in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries as a <strong>to</strong>ol <strong>to</strong> protect individuals from the arbitrarypower of the state. Some authors speak of two ‘human rightsrevolutions’: the first around the period of the US Declaration ofIndependence (1776) and the French Declaration on the Rights ofMan and the Citizen (1789); the second linked with the post-SecondWorld War era of globalisation with the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights (1948) which, for the first time in his<strong>to</strong>ry, acknowledgedhuman rights as a global responsibility. 7 That second revolutionis still under way, as human rights frameworks expand with newtreaties that address gender, ethnicity, and the rights of children.It forms the basis of the emerging system of global governance andinternational law (see Part 5).24

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