Question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of regional human rights approaches? Do you think regional approaches ultimately help or hinder human rights enforcement?

Answer 1

First and foremost, the human rights-based approach is especially appropriate for ensuring that critical services such as health care, water , sanitation and education are available to the poorest people. It is the anti-discrimination perspective of human rights which dominates here. It has been shown, for example, that migrants are often put in very poor positions with regard to these services and that the duty on States to eradicate discrimination against migrants is a key to ensuring access to them

Discrimination against migrants is a key to ensuring access to it. Secondly, the human rights strategy is sufficient to reinforce the idea of citizenship. This is especially important for oppressed groups, whether poor farmers in Cameroon, women in Uttar Pradesh in India or 'outcasts' in Bangladesh.As Duni et al. pointed out in relation to Cameroon, providing awareness of what poor people are entitled to and demanding clarification of the mechanisms by which they can claim such rights often play key roles

The human rights approach suggests that the use of legal processes in international assistance and international policy in general is a natural focus.Human rights advocates point out that such an approach ensures that people or organizations are provided legal means to help change their conditions. More generally, the human rights-based approach makes some people in developed countries, who are the worse off, know that they have enforceable rights. This may lead to a spillover (or maybe a magnifying) impact that stretches beyond the areas where development aid focused on human rights is targeted

Research shows that developing countries that are in transition from dictatorships to democracies are likely to meet international commitments not to commit gross human rights abuses (such as torture and other barbaric, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) and that compliance with international human rights does not seem to be attributable to 'rewards' offered by another rank. Rather, a potential reason seems to be that these states surrender to supporters of (domestic and international) rights