Righting Development

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his brother Itzcuauhtli were among the thousands who descended on New York last week for the Development Summit at the United Nations, a couple of indigenous teens from Colorado, artist-activists sharing their eco-tinged brand of hip hop.

They joined many voices – from Mary Robinson to the Pope – calling on governments to act to ensure climate action and human rights become integral parts of the post-2015 development agenda.

The Martinez brothers’ message is pretty simple: “Young people are standing up all over the planet, because we see that climate change is a human rights issue.”

The brothers are not wrong. The consequences for much of the earth’s population of a warming planet are already being felt. That’s why responses to climate change and human rights need to be at the center of any approach to sustainable development.

Human rights bodies, scientists, governments, and civil society groups are already documenting the implications of climate change for human rights. Increasing temperatures and extreme weather events threaten people’s basic rights to water, food and health, especially in countries with limited resources and fragile ecosystems. For vulnerable populations and marginalized communities these events are often linked to the loss of lives, homes, and livelihoods.

After a strong push from civil society, governments have agreed to include both action on climate change and human rights in the post-2015 global development agenda. Goal 13 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for “urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.” That makes sense because development efforts need to protect rights from the effects of climate change, particularly the rights of the most vulnerable communities.

But this work has just begun. So far, the integration of climate action and human rights has been rhetorical. To move from words to action, governments should ensure human rights become a central element of the future climate change agreement to be adopted in Paris later this year.

 

 

 

 

 

So, after all the rhetoric and fanfare and marches and celebrity appearances, when the presidents and prime ministers have all gone home and the Sustainable Development Goals have been formally approved, what will have changed for the world’s three billion people living on less than $2.50 per day?

Whatever the limitations of the SDGs, the real challenge now is to support and promote their implementation. To succeed, progress needs to be scrutinized and governments held to account for the commitments they have made to the very communities and people whose lives they affect.

On this front, there are reasons for concern. The mechanisms for monitoring and reviewing the post-2015 agenda are “vague and entirely voluntary,” according to one expert closely involved with the process.

How could they be improved? Start by including a regular, global review of progress on SDGs similar to the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council in which every government has to present its human rights record for scrutiny by other governments every five years. That can be supplemented with comprehensive reporting by governments, civil society groups and the UN system to ensure the most complete and credible analysis of progress.

But just as importantly, holding governments to account depends on open participation by civil society – at the local, national, regional and international levels. As the recent report of the special rapporteur for human rights defenders noted, those “promoting and defending rights relating to land, the environment and corporate responsibility” are the most vulnerable to attacks, intimidation, forced disappearances and other threats. These are the very people working on issues of just and sustainable development. Human Rights Watch’s own work has found that the World Bank has “done little to prevent or dissuade governments from intimidating critics of the projects it funds, or monitor for reprisals.” 

For the SDGs to have a chance to reach their lofty targets, governments and major international institutions, including development donors, both need to recognize that a vibrant civil society, a free media, genuinely democratic political processes, and an independent judiciary are essential for the impoverished and marginalized to be able to demand accountability for progress made - and not made. Ultimately, development has to mean enhanced freedom – especially for those at greatest risk.  

 

The Internet has become like “the air we breathe.”   It’s where many of us work, communicate, collaborate and solve problems.  There was a time when Internet access was really more of a luxury than basic need, but no longer.

But more than half the world – 4 of the 7 billion people on the planet today - do not have Internet access and have never gone online. 

This digital divide has huge implications for hopes of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals being finalized at this week’s UN summit. How will global inequality be reduced if Internet access is not available to most people?  How is it feasible to make progress on inclusive participation in governance decisions if Internet access is denied to most?

Since, the ability to access and share information is central to the enjoyment of core civil and political rights, such as freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association, those without access to the internet, are at a huge disadvantage.

Internet access should also be recognized as an essential element in the right to education.  Those without Internet access lack a basic means of accessing information and communicating their ideas. Goal 4 of the SDGs – Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all –will fail if Internet access is not recognized as core to inclusive education.

Similarly, lack of Internet infrastructure and access bars many from participation in this global economic and problem solving activity.  Progress on Goal 8 of the SDGs – Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, and Goal 10 of the SDGs  - Reduce Inequality Between and within countries – is not possible, if access to the Internet is not prioritized.  In fact, failure to dramatically expand Internet access could lead to a widening inequality gap, not the narrowing envisioned in the SDGs.

So it’s time to start recognizing that progress on SDGs depends on vastly expanded Internet access.  The eradication of poverty, ending hunger, ensuring healthy lives, achieving gender equality, preventing climate change, and promoting peaceful and sustainable societies cannot be accomplished without dramatic expansion of information communication technology infrastructure.  Work related to all of these goals rests upon Internet access for those who are most affected by these problems, and whose involvement in solving these problems is essential. 

 

It’s a no-brainer to say sustainable economic development requires stability. In its 2011 development report, the World Bank warned that “a major episode of violence, unlike natural disasters or economic cycles, can wipe out an entire generation of economic progress.” Moreover, “repeated cycles of violence” exact “human, social, and economic costs that last for generations.”

India has made significant progress on universalization of primary education, one of the 10 millennium development goals, after enacting the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act in 2009. But the pursuit of these education goals also taught India and the world an important lesson: By focusing on enrollment alone, in an unequal society, it failed to ensure that children stay in school and receive quality education.

According to Indian government estimates, six million children are out of school – and more crucially, two out of five drop out before completing elementary schooling. Numbers are much higher for children from the disadvantaged Dalit (so-called untouchables), Muslim, and tribal communities. Ensuring access to education for children with disabilities remains a serious challenge. Discrimination against children from these most vulnerable communities, often first generation learners in their families, means the right-to-education law is failing those who need it the most. Lack of effective monitoring by authorities to check age-old prejudices by school staff means at worst, ill-treatment, and at best, neglect.

This month, India will commit to the new global development agenda for the next 15 years by endorsing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is an opportunity to set things right, for India to shift focus from enrollment to inclusive, equitable, and quality education as envisioned in Goal 4.

The government should commit to “zero discrimination” in classrooms, train teachers to focus on inclusive learning practices that are effective, and ensure greater participation of children from marginalized communities and healthy interaction among children from different backgrounds. At the same time, the authorities need to develop guidelines to better identify and respond to discrimination in schools.

Effective monitoring and accountability at both the domestic and the international level will be crucial to success. First there needs be better data collection on children who drop out, breaking it down by gender, social groups, and religious minorities among others. It needs a process to monitor and track children from enrollment to graduation and a consistent approach to identifying children who are out of school, have dropped out, or are at risk of dropping out.

Much is at stake here. The United Nations secretary-general has said “sustainable development begins with education.” The new agenda seeks to reduce inequality within and among countries and ensure equal opportunity for all. Here, India, which dominates the world’s poorest 10 percent, will have a critical role. Even as India’s wealth has risen in the last two decades, millions of families have been left behind. Unequal access to quality education perpetuates an impoverished underclass with sharply limited economic opportunity among other things. A country where a child spends her first years in school experiencing she is less worthy than others cannot hope to provide her equal access of opportunity when she grows up 15 years from now.

Faiso, a 34-year-old mother of nine, has been living in informal displaced people’s settlements in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, since the 2011 famine. In March this year, government forces violently evicted Faiso and her children – along with 20,000 other displaced people – from their settlement without warning.

When global leaders meet at the United Nations in New York later this week to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they’d do well to learn the harsh lesson on display in the Thai village of Lower Klity Creek: healthy and just development requires accountability.

Lower Klity Creek, in the jungle near Thailand’s border with Burma, is home to about 400 ethnic Karen people, most of whom are subsistence farmers. The area is one of the most heavily polluted industrial sites in Thailand. Eleven kilometers upstream is a former lead-processing factory that started processing ore from nearby mines in the mid-1960s and was ordered closed in 1998. But its toxic legacy remains.

To this day, residents of Lower Klity Creek continue to be exposed to toxic lead – as they have for decades. Many suffer symptoms of chronic lead poisoning, such as abdominal pain, headaches, fatigue, and mood changes. Some children have been born with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The slow-moving disaster in Lower Klity Creek shows what is at stake in the SDG’s pledge that no one be left behind. But it also reveals how important accountability is in ensuring that the promise is more than empty rhetoric.

Community members in Lower Klity Creek have advocated for years for the Thai government to address the poisonous residue from lead mining. They pursued a lawsuit in the courts, and on January 10, 2013, finally prevailed. For the first time in Thailand’s history, a high court ordered the government to protect the health of local residents by cleaning up a toxic site. But more than two years later, the joy of that victory has faded. The Pollution Control Department has commissioned more studies of contamination but is yet to begin a clean-up.

So as government leaders meet to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals, we should remember that setting the goals is the first – and easiest – step. Real transformation will require holding governments accountable when they violate the rights of their citizens. Without respect for human rights, the positive rhetoric in the UN’s halls may be unmatched in the communities bearing the brunt of environmental, social, and economic development will remain “out of balance.”  

“If the river takes our house it will be hard for you to get married – so it’s better if you get married now,” Azima B.’s parents told her, explaining why she had to marry at age 13. The family lives in rural Bangladesh, in the path of the Meghna River which is shifting course and eating away meters of land every year, taking houses and fields with it.

Bangladesh’s extreme vulnerability to natural disasters has been exacerbated by climate change. Combined with the country’s dense population, this means many poor families find their livelihoods, homes, and land under constant threat from flooding, river erosion, cyclones, and other disasters. Struggling to survive, these families cope however they can – and often their daughters pay the highest price. Girls are taken out of school because the family can’t afford education costs, and are married off so there is one less mouth to feed.

Bangladesh is not the only place where women and girls bear the brunt of climate change – this is a global phenomenon. Women are more vulnerable because they are poorer and more marginalized and because discriminatory gender roles make it harder for them to cope. Women are also contributing to solutions at a local and global level but their achievements are often overlooked. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 acknowledges this in passing with a call for improved management of climate change in least developed countries and small island developing states, “including focusing on women, youth and local and marginalized communities.”

But this is nowhere near enough. As they work to mitigate the impacts of climate change, all governments – rich and poor – should assess the harm to the rights of women and girls, and ensure they have access to adaptation tools and support. SDG indicators should detail how this should be done, and track governments’ successes – and failures – at protecting and promoting women and girls’ rights in the context of a changing and increasingly unpredictable climate.

Climate change is a women’s rights issue.

In hundreds of interviews with migrant domestic workers around the world over the past decade, I always ended our conversation by asking what their government could do to end abuses.

Many said a weekly day off should be legislated to give them a break from excessive workloads and 16-hour days. A common response was simply getting paid on time and in full – the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that employers cheat domestic workers in forced labor out of an astounding US$8 billion each year.

This week governments will gather in New York to adopt the “post-2015 agenda,” a laudable set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets to rid the world of persistent poverty, inequality, and violence. Goal 8 centers on economic growth, employment, and decent work, and is divided into 12 targets to focus funding and action.

My hopes were raised by the language of Target 8.8 to “Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment.” Migrant workers are at especially high risk of falling victim to  pervasive abuses such as unpaid wages, hazardous work, confinement to the workplace, inadequate housing and food, and in many cases, physical or sexual violence. Gaps in labor laws and restrictive labor migration policies trap them with abusive employers and give them few or no avenues for getting help.

But my hopes fell when I saw the suggested indicators to measure progress on Target 8.8 narrowly focused on occupational injuries and death and on the number of international labor treaties a government had ratified. Data on workplace injury is an important and worthy indicator, but also likely to have yawning gaps when it comes to the invisible workforce of undocumented migrants or those in informal sectors such as women working in private households.

Committing to uphold international labor treaties is an important step, but is a process indicator and ultimately, a poor proxy for tracking actual progress on the ground. The bigger question is how to ensure and measure implementation of these important standards.

Indeed, one of the least developed aspects of the entire post-2015 agenda is how it will be monitored and mechanisms for accountability. A group of human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have advocated for independent stakeholder reports and a role for civil society. Inputs and participation from experts, labor unions, and other workers’ organizations on Target 8.8 would provide crucial evidence and analysis on whether, for example, a government’s ratification of the ILO’s Domestic Worker Convention was actually translating into safer working environments for migrant domestic workers.

Such accountability is the minimum owed to workers, including migrant domestic workers, who have clear and concrete ideas of what governments should do to better protect their labor rights and end exploitation. 

“Do you really think my child can go to school?”

Nomsa, the mother of a 10-year-old boy with various disabilities, who lives in the rural town of Manguzi, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, was recounting how difficult it was to find a school that would take her son, Sandile. I asked her what the government had done to see to it that Sandile could go to school on an equal basis with his twin sister, who did not have disabilities. The answer: almost nothing.

In many countries, parents acknowledge the importance of education but ask themselves how they are going to make it happen. How are we going to send our children to a far-away school? How will we pay for everything? Who will guarantee them a place in a school? The last question morphs into a day-to-day struggle particularly for children forced to overcome multiple barriers before they even enter a classroom due to ethnic and gender discrimination, exclusion and inaccessibility due to their disabilities, or because, caught in a conflict or emergency zone, the very institutions where they should receive an education have been attacked by armed groups. Like Sandile, millions of school-aged children and adolescents continue to be left out.

Today, children and parents are still grappling with fundamental issues which should have long been tackled by governments.

As early as 2000, governments committed to implement the Millennium Development Goal on universal primary education, guaranteeing that all girls and boys would be enrolled in primary school by 2015. But many governments have still not adopted plans to make education free and available to all children. Paying for school – one of the biggest barriers still for many primary not just secondary-going children – continues to be a reality in many countries around the globe. 

Governments should have removed school fees for primary education as early as 1970, when many states began to accept new obligations to provide free and compulsory primary education, free from discrimination, or from 1990 onwards, when they signed up to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, accepting further obligations to guarantee education for all children.

The 2000-2015 period was crucial to show how governments could implement their international development commitments, while adhering to their human rights obligations. Some countries made impressive gains in primary school enrollments, but millions of children continue to be left out of primary schools and many adolescents have no secondary schools to go to.

This week, all governments will commit to a new 15-year global development framework, the Sustainable Development Goals, that specifically requires them to implement ten education targets, with a notable commitment to ensure that “all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education” by 2030. Governments should use this key milestone to announce how they will undertake the much needed legal and policy reforms, allocate the necessary resources, and make the national investments to show how they will get education right by 2030.

Last September in rural Haiti, I sat on a rock wall waiting for two adolescent girls – Eveline and Marie-Ange (pseudonyms). I was visiting their secondary school to talk about sanitation. First, they giggled and said they needed to run to the bathroom. They went as a pair, walking past the school, down a foot path to an unventilated, wooden structure containing a pit latrine with no slab.

When they returned, they told me that they always go in pairs, since the door doesn’t latch from the inside, someone needs to stand guard. The latrine smells, and they have to step through mud and urine. Sometimes the teachers keep the door locked so they pee in the surrounding bushes. There is nowhere to wash their hands. When they are menstruating, they miss class to run home to change their hygiene materials because the latrine is too small, too dirty, has no water, and isn’t private enough to rinse and change menstrual cloths or to dispose of pads.

Fifteen years ago, countries around the world pledged – as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or – to halve by 2015 the number of people without access to improved sanitation, defined as a facility that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact. Sadly, this is one of the goals showing the least progress as the MDGs wind down. Currently, there are 2.4 billion people without access to improved sanitation and nearly one billion who practice open defecation. Failure to meet this goal compromises a range of human rights, including the right to education for girls like Eveline and Marie-Ange who may miss school because of illnesses spread due to poor sanitation or because they can’t manage their menstruation well.

Countries are now finalizing a new set of goals – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – to replace the MDGs. Sanitation remains on the agenda, with the current draft including a target on “access to adequate and equitable sanitation … for all.”

The right to sanitation means everyone should have access to sanitation in all spheres of life – including at school. When the SDGs are approved, the hard work begins. Countries will need to work hard to overcome challenges, from infrastructure to political will. Importantly, the SDGs should include strong monitoring mechanisms so that progress is made on all goals and targets, including on sanitation.

Eveline, Marie-Ange, and all kids should have adequate sanitation in their schools so they can focus on learning, not on whether they can safely and privately relieve themselves.

 

As development has moved forward, people with disabilities have too often been left behind. How far behind? The unemployment rate of people with disabilities is a staggering 80-90 percent in most developing countries, according to a study by the International Labour Organization.

In northern Uganda, some women with disabilities told me they were not invited to join government-funded livelihood projects because of their disabilities. Others said that they were expelled from these livelihood projects over beliefs they could not contribute. There were no processes in place to monitor grants or ensure they weren’t discriminating against people with disabilities.

Employed people with disabilities also face discrimination, routinely work longer hours, and receive less pay. They are far more likely to work in the informal sector, with less security and limited opportunities for promotion.

This is not only an issue of the equal right to employment; the exclusion of people with disabilities from education, jobs, and healthcare generates significant economic costs to individuals, their families, and the wider society.

For example, one study in Bangladesh indicated the exclusion of people with disabilities from the labor market resulted in a total loss of US$891 million per year to the economy; income losses among adult caregivers was an additional $234 million per year. In Morocco, lost income due to exclusion of people with disabilities from work was estimated to result in a loss of more than $1 billion, or 2 percent of GDP.

Still, the perception remains that inclusive development is simply too expensive, especially in low- and middle-income countries. But growing evidence indicates this is not the case. For example, despite some initial costs for adapting the work place, there is evidence that employees with disabilities have lower rates of absenteeism, higher rates of retention, and performance on par or superior to those without disabilities. India’s largest timepiece manufacturer, Titan, reported their employees with disabilities had greater company loyalty and focus at work. They also had equivalent productivity levels and quality of work, compared with employees without disabilities.

If governments are serious about Sustainable Development Goal 8 – on promoting sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth – they should address the structural barriers that limit people with disabilities from employment, such as lack of accessible buildings and public transport, exclusion from education, and deep-seated stigma and discrimination about the capabilities of people with disabilities. Governments also have a responsibility to ensure that no new investments are used to build new barriers for people with disabilities.

The commitment of “leaving no one behind” should equally benefit the 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide, including 785 million of working age. The goal of economic growth will remain elusive if millions of people with disabilities continue to be left behind.

In a rights-respecting society, everyone should be equal before the law. But for many of the 1.2 billion people with disabilities around the world, that simply isn’t true – not as a matter of law, policy, or practice. Discriminatory laws and practices hold people with disabilities back, and any hope of reducing inequality globally requires tackling this issue head on.

In Tanzania, 15-year-old Fumo climbs deep into an unstable mining shaft to hoist up heavy bags of ore. In Kentucky, 10-year-old Lucio works in sweltering heat, cutting tobacco plants with a sharp knife. In Morocco, 11-year-old Hanan wakes before sunrise to begin an 18-hour day of cooking, cleaning, and childcare for her employer.

Around the world, 168 million children – nearly one in ten – are engaged in child labor. I’ve interviewed hundreds of these children, and seen how their work puts their health, their safety, and their education at risk. The new Sustainable Development Goals adopted this month at the United Nations set an ambitious goal – eliminating child labor in all its forms by 2025.

That’s a tall order.

Poor families that struggle to meet basic needs often feel they have no choice but to send their children to work. But over the long term, child labor only perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Children who enter the workforce at an early age end up with less education and lower earnings as adults and are more likely to send their own children to work.

This cycle can be broken. Between 2000 and 2012, child labor rates worldwide fell by one-third, as governments strengthened laws and implemented policies to boost school enrollment and mitigate the economic desperation of poor families that drives children to work. Governments have put more children in school by eliminating fees, improving school transportation, and providing school meals and other incentives for education. Programs pioneered in Latin America that provide poor families with monthly stipends – often known as “cash transfer programs” – have been another successful means to both increase school enrollment and reduce child labor. Strong legislative frameworks prohibiting child labor are also essential, accompanied by labor inspections, enforcement, and penalties for violators.

But the encouraging progress over the last dozen years won’t be enough to eliminate child labor by 2025 without stronger action. Governments should accelerate efforts, reaching out to the most vulnerable populations, ensuring robust enforcement of strong child labor laws, and providing alternative opportunities for children removed from hazardous jobs.

A decade may not seem like much time to end child labor, but ten years from now, the child workers I interviewed may have children of their own. This is our chance to give them a shot at a better future.   

 

What does 13 million look like? It is the approximate population of Tokyo. It is more than 130 times the capacity of FC Barcelona’s stadium, Europe’s largest. And, according to a 2012 EU-wide survey, it is the estimated number of women in the European Union who suffered physical violence in the previous 12 months.

Survey results also showed that one in three European women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence since age 15. Published last year, this data rattled the European public and policymakers. But it shouldn’t have: the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) has called violence against women a problem of “epidemic proportions,” and Europe is no exception. Research has long shown that no social or economic group is immune to violence against women, particularly domestic violence. Many in high-income countries, however, cling to the myth that it only happens “over there,” in places where conflict rages and poverty can’t hide.

Yet this is truly a myth: the WHO estimates that 25.4% of women in the European region experience violence from intimate partners. Such violence is often brutal. In Hungary, “Elvira” (not her real name) told Human Rights Watch her husband grabbed her wrists, dragged her to the door, and threw her off a balcony. In Turkey, “Zelal” described an attack by her ex-husband: “He held me, I screamed ‘Let me go,’ and he started beating me…. He pulled my hair and covered my mouth, and he dragged me to my house…. Then he took off my clothes and raped me.” Survivors of such violence are often denied crucial services and access to justice; two police stations turned “Zelal” away when she tried to report the abuse.

To change this, governments should commit to ending violence against women, whether it occurs in public or in private. Sustainable Development Goal 5  – which the UN will adopt this month as one of 17 global policy priorities – calls on member states to do just that as a means to ensure gender equality and women’s empowerment. This is a start, but it must be accompanied by clear benchmarks and strong reporting and evaluation mechanisms that hold states accountable for taking steps to eliminate violence against women. 

Violence against women threatens the rights to life, health, physical integrity, an adequate standard of living, and non-discrimination, among other rights enshrined in international treaties. The UN General Assembly has stated that, as well as violating women’s human rights, violence against women “impedes social and economic development.” Governments have not only a moral imperative to end violence against women, but an economic one. Health care, social and legal system expenses related to such violence, and women’s lack of economic participation due to injuries, are costly. One study estimated that violence against women cost the EU 228 billion Euros in 2011, or 1.8% of GDP.

As a first step in Europe, every Council of Europe member state should ratify the Istanbul Convention on violence against women and domestic violence. This groundbreaking treaty requires that states criminalize forms of violence from forced marriage to stalking, and meet standards for prevention, service provision, and accountability. Despite political commitments, countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK have yet to ratify.

As a new global policy agenda, the SDGs can spur reluctant states into needed action on violence against women. No region – including Europe – should be exempt.

All children have the right to a free primary education and should have secondary schooling available to them. But when children are locked up –whether for breaking the law, immigration control, or a misguided effort to protect them—they are all too often denied this right.

Children detained for breaking the law are most likely to receive some form of schooling when placed in facilities designed to house young offenders. But if they’re held in adult facilities, as Human Rights Watch has documented in Egypt and South Sudan, among other countries, they generally receive nothing.

The United States is in a class of its own, and not in a good way. It leads the developed world in the number and percentage of children it locks up, it also sends an extraordinary number to adult jails and prisons. Children as young as 13 may be subjected to solitary confinement for weeks or months in adult facilities, isolated for 22 to 24 hours a day, denied books and education as well as exercise and family visits. “The only thing left to do is go crazy – just sit and talk to the walls,” a youth confined in Florida told Human Rights Watch.

Worldwide, children in immigration detention may also be held for months without access to education, as Human Rights Watch has documented in Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand, and elsewhere. Australia’s Christmas Island detention center offered no schooling for child asylum seekers for a year. Unaccompanied migrant children in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine are often held for protracted periods in prison-like “transit centers” with little or no access to education, others have found.

When children with disabilities are institutionalized, ostensibly for their care, they are often denied appropriate education, among other abusive practices. In far too many cases, as we’ve found in Russia, they may be locked up with no pretense of schooling or other services. We’ve seen similar abusive practices in Croatia, Ghana, Greece, and India, to name just a few.

To say these practices are counterproductive is an understatement. Criminal detention often comes precisely at the age when children are already most likely to drop out of school – any interruption makes it all the more likely they won’t continue.

Education is essential to rehabilitation, which should be the juvenile justice system’s goal.

Children shouldn’t be detained solely for immigration control, but if they are, it’s in no society’s interest to leave them without the education and skills needed for adulthood wherever they spend it.

And for children with disabilities, states have committed to removing barriers that hinder full and effective participation in society.

Education is a critical component of economic development. For development to be truly sustainable, education must reach all children.

If the Sustainable Development Goals are going to live up to their promise, states will have to ensure that implementation reaches the most marginalized. That includes making sure that the promise of education for all extends to those who are behind bars.

Upon arriving in a Tajik village for resettled families, Khorsheed, a mother of five, quickly realized her lush vegetable garden and fruit orchard—her key food sources—were a thing of the past. Lacking land, she was forced to sell her cattle. “Now my children beg me to give them fruit,” Khorsheed said. “I have to try to distract them with sweetened tea. The children want milk, but now I have to buy it and it is expensive.”

What happened to Khorsheed is a sadly typical example of the adverse impact development can have on vulnerable communities.

Tajikistan, a mountainous country in Central Asia, suffers from critical energy shortages in cold winter months, so the government has pursued the development of the Rogun Dam and Hydropower Plant to increase energy supply and bolster the economy. To make way for the dam and reservoir, the government resettled 1,500 families like Khorsheed’s and may displace some 42,000 people overall. Despite government commitments to protect those resettled, many families have lost farms, orchards, and pastures essential to their food security and livelihoods, that were never properly compensated for or replaced. Most families have found themselves resettled to places where they have Insufficient land and an inhospitable climate that prevents them from engaging in agriculture there.   The government didn’t consistently provide timely and accurate information about grievance mechanisms and remedies, as required by national and international law.

As governments around the world forcibly relocate people for large-scale development projects, many families - and often whole villages - are driven into acutely vulnerable situations. Tajikistan and other governments should ensure that economic development efforts don’t undermine or violate basic social and economic rights that are the basis for key sustainable development goals, including ending poverty, eradicating hunger and achieving food security.

With the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), governments have committed to “access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations” to “safe, nutritious and sufficient food…” and to ensuring access to “ownership and control over land.” To this end, governments should ensure and monitor changes in access to land and other productive resources, including for small-scale food producers, of which there are many in Tajikistan.  Without this, governments risk undermining the very rights which any progress made to achieve truly sustainable develop

If you want to understand the impact between hunger and development, look no further than the lower Omo valley in Ethiopia.

A large-scale, state-owned sugar plantation project is underway there, which is supposed to create jobs and address Ethiopia’s sugar shortfall. Instead, like many other large-scale projects around the world, the plantation is undermining food security for the 200,000 indigenous agro-pastoralists who call the valley home.

These communities are being relocated and losing their grazing land, which will be completely cleared for the plantation. That means less grazing land for their cattle herds, which are their economic mainstay, and less land to plant sorghum and other subsistence crops. The authorities are coercing them, often with promises of food aid, to move into new government villages, often in deplorable conditions, where they are encouraged to work on the new sugar plantations as laborers. These communities are unlikely to see benefits from the plantations and instead may face great hardships to feed themselves.

Sadly, this isn’t an unusual circumstance. Human Rights Watch’s research has found that even when governments are working to end hunger and achieve food security nationally – Sustainable Development Goal 2 – when they do so without assessing the human rights impact of projects and consulting with affected communities, they can end up making food security for these communities worse and trigger large-scale rights violations.

The Ethiopian government typically promotes large-scale development projects, often at the expense of local communities that get little say, much less a chance to voice concerns or criticism of the government’s development policy. The country’s repressive laws prevent nongovernmental organizations from operating freely; there’s little independent media permitted; and those who speak out and seen as anti-development or anti-government are often punished severely. Local community members may be passive bystanders while their livelihoods are destroyed, or be arrested or harassed by security forces if they try to speak out.

A development approach like that used in Omo can actually lead to a worsening of food security for local communities. Most Omo groups have two main sources of food: their cattle and crops grown along the Omo River. The government will reap the financial benefits of the conversion of these grazing and crop-producing lands to sugar. But local communities, having lost access to the land that sustain their food sources will now either be reliant on government food aid or forced to find other means to eat.  

Ensuring that local communities have a voice in development and in evaluating progress is vital to ensure meaningful progress towards the elimination of hunger and malnutrition. Governments committed to poverty reduction should commit to open, participatory and transparent development, robust monitoring procedures, and a meaningful role for civil society.

As one Omo pastoralist said to Human Rights Watch, “What is development? Whenever ‘development’ comes, it means we become hungry.”

 

 

 

 

On September 25-27, global leaders will take a crucial step toward building a better world by adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2015-2030 at a United Nations high-level summit in New York. The goals set out a far-reaching agenda to tackle poverty and promote environmentally sustainable economic development.

Success is anything but assured, and bold action is needed. Deep inequalities and compounding threats of violence, climate change, and environmental degradation pose enormous challenges to the world and the poorest and most marginalized are bearing the brunt.

Human Rights Watch research over many years and across all regions has found that a lack of focus on human rights in economic growth and human development programs often reinforces and exacerbates exclusion, discrimination, and inequality. The poorest and most marginalized – women, people with disabilities, ethnic and religious minorities, children, LGBT people, and those furthest from centers of power and influence – are especially likely to be denied the benefits of economic progress or access to economic opportunities, resources, and services. And, these groups are often left out of discussions, decision-making, and planning of programs designed to enable them to reach their fullest potential.

Over the next two weeks in the lead-up to the UN Sustainable Development Summit, Human Rights Watch will be publishing a series of articles that bring a human – and human rights – focus to what is sometimes an abstract discussion around these goals. The central theme in the series is an insistence that human rights remain central to any discussion of sustainable development. That means that governments and international organizations should:

• Allow people to meaningfully participate in decision-making that affects them, their families and communities; 
• Strengthen accountability at national and international levels for delivering on commitments to inclusive, sustainable, and rights-respecting development; and
• Collect data to monitor the progress of disadvantaged groups in meeting the SDGs.

This won’t be easy. And, the growing impact of climate change will place an increasing burden on governments struggling to meet their human rights obligations with limited resources and fragile or inadequate infrastructure.

But human rights are critical – whether the issue is sustainable cities or quality education. At the heart of these at times abstract discussions are real people, individuals who should enjoy their fundamental human rights and “live free of fear and want.”

Will the SDGs succeed? It’s uncertain. But one thing is sure – in 2030, when we look back and consider what good these goals have done, much will depend on how well we have respected the human rights of people living in poverty and whether the world and its new set of development goals were answerable to them.