Should Human Rights Law Play a Role in Development?
Many human rights advocates believe that development agencies—agencies that define their mission as providing economic and technical aid to impoverished countries should be required to respect and promote human rights law. This style of human right...
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/893131565615532666/Should-Human-Rights-Law-Play-a-Role-in-Development http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32228 |
| Summary: | Many human rights advocates believe that
development agencies—agencies that define their mission as
providing economic and technical aid to impoverished
countries should be required to respect and promote human
rights law. This style of human rights imperialism should be
resisted. While development agencies should obviously comply
with domestic law and try to promote good rather than bad
outcomes, there is no benefit in holding them to human
rights law. Human rights law was designed for states, not
for NGOs, and how it would be applied to NGOs is far from
obvious. Because of the ambiguity and vast scope of human
rights law, the practical effect of these proposals would be
to add another layer of bureaucracy to development projects
while subjecting those projects to scrutiny by lawyers with
little to guide them but their intuitive notions of right
and wrong. |
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