Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
dignity (UN 1948). They are derived from the needs and aspirations of ordinary peo-
ple. They empower each human being and their communities with entitlements and
enforceable claims vis-á-vis their own and other governments. Human rights explicitly
address power imbalances; at the very core of the human rights idea is the will to resist
oppression (Monsalve 2012).
Stemming from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948), two sets
of human rights have been defined and recognized at the international level. The first
of these are civil and political rights (ICCPR 1966), including for example the right
to self-determination, physical integrity, liberty and security, equality before the law
and fair trial, political participation, and the right to not being discriminated. The
second set pertains to economic, social and cultural rights (ICESCR 1966), which
include labor rights, the right to social security, family life, an adequate standard of
living (including the right to food, water and housing), health, free education, and to
participation in cultural life. The social, economic and political processes caused by
land-use change and land grabbing challenge many of these rights of local communities
and individuals, if they are not already overtly violated.
The human rights framework offers a variety of standards and instruments of
international law that have been agreed upon by the international community in order
to guarantee and protect the rights of every human being “without distinction of any
kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national
or social origin, property, birth or other status'' (Principle of Non-Discrimination,
UDHR 1948). All human rights declarations, conventions and their respective General
Comments set a minimum standard for a human life in dignity. States party to these
treaties have committed themselves to complying with the obligation to protect human
rights in their own countries and beyond their national borders. As a consequence, the
responsibility for the compliance with human rights is or is becoming a transnational
and global issue, which increases with the pace of economic and financial globalization.
The recently adopted,
Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in
the area of Economic Social and Cultural Rights
(ETO Principles 2011), are a response
to the urgent need to tackle human rights violations caused by transnational actors.
When conducting case studies of conflicts regarding land-use change and land-
property change in the context of the LAR project, a HRBA focuses in the first place
on the relationship between the rights-holder (individual person or group), the duty-
bearer (state) and, in certain cases, third actors involved in the conflict (companies,
etc.). It identifies violations of human rights of a victimized group and analyzes a state's
compliance with its human rights obligations. Civil and political human rights (ICCPR
1966), as well as economic, social and cultural rights (ICESCR 1966), impose three
different types of obligations on states: the obligations to respect, protect and fulfil.
First, the obligation to respect requires states to refrain from interfering negatively
with the enjoyment of rights. Thus, the right to housing or the right to territory is
violated if states engage in, for example, arbitrary forced evictions. The obligation
to protect requires states to try and prevent violations of such rights by third parties.
Thus, the failure to control the extraction of water by a private company may amount
to a violation of the right to water and the right to food of surrounding communities
that consequently lack access to drinking water or irrigation water for their crops.
The obligation to fulfil requires states to take appropriate legislative, administrative,
budgetary, judicial and other measures towards the full realization of such rights.
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