Attaining Human Rights For All: The Importance Of A Legally Binding Sustainable Development Essay.

UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Question:

Discuss about the Realisation of Human Rights For All.

UN’s 20130 Agenda has been to attain human rights for all the people around the world. The suggested approach was to have a shared responsibility sustainable development process that would see the formation of intergovernmental agreements. This would later guide the global development efforts over the next fifteen years since the formation of the 2030 agenda in 2016. The sustainable development goals were adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2015, and replaced the previous Millennium Development Goals (Fukuda-Parr 2016). The idea was to build upon and complete what the earlier agenda failed to accomplish. Another objective of the new plan was to make sure those countries around the world share in the responsibility of restoring and attaining human rights for all people.

Like the predecessors, sustainable development goals are visions, which are voluntary and not binding treaties. This has presented the greatest challenge in the attainment of human rights and dignity across the world through a shared responsibility approach. This being the case mainly because the agreement is not considered a legally binding treaty (Pogge and Sengupta 2016). In other words, the member states have a choice to either abide by the agenda of not. At the same time, it provides an opportunity for countries to develop better strategist that they feel will help achieve better human rights situations locally.

However, it is evident that the sustainable development agenda is not helping the world achieve improved human rights. It is common to hear cases of human abuse all over the world, especially, police brutality. These are serious issues, which the UN needs to address and incorporate in its share responsibly approach (Pogge and Sengupta 2016). The shared responsibility in this case, therefore, fails to address critical issues that are pertinent to the realisation of human rights for all. In this sense, therefore, the issues of human rights as a global challenge is not being realised through UN’ shared responsibility approach.

Before proceeding to give some recommendations of how best human dignity and justice can be attained globally as a public good, it is important first to understand what the concept of common good entails. The principle is based on the notion that all people should do well to others for the sake of a better community. The idea is that for a human being to flourish then the community must be in a state to support such growth and success. In this regard, for the world to enjoy peace and stability, human rights and dignity need to be protected at all cost. In this respect, the sustainable agenda by the UN seeks to promote the respect and observation of human rights (Hickel 2016). For this to happen, nations that are members of the UN need to share the responsibility of ensuring that their counterparts respect the fundamental human rights. This would promote the spirit of human rights for all across the world by minimising issues of people being treated in inhumane ways.

Challenges of a Voluntary Approach

The greatest challenge and probably the main reason why human rights for all is not being realised despite the formation of a plan that is meant to make this happen is that the treaty is voluntary. This means that member countries have the choice of either implementing the strategies and policies recommended to not. The plan does not also clearly describe hat human rights for all means, hence, under the context; members can use different meanings, which favour their political ambitions and not necessarily respect for human rights. To help avoid this confusion, this has made the plan ineffective, just like its predecessors; the UN should convert the agreement to legally binding agreements (Soumahoro2015). This would mean that countries found not to abide by the provisions of the treaty can be held liable and necessary action taken against them. This way the UN would ensure that all members states especially those have signed the agreement play their role, hence, contributing to the improvement or rather the realisation of human rights for all across the world.

Another strategy that would work is to develop a universal definition of human rights. Different nations perceive human rights to refer to various issues, hence, the confusing in regards to what the UN aims at achieving by 2030 (Hickel 2016). It would be paramount for the member countries to discuss what universal; rights are crucial for human beings across the world. This would make sure that the member states include the specific global human rights being targeted by the UN in their constitutions. This would help reduce cases of police brutality, help provide universal remedies for abuse of human rights and promote the spirit of shared responsibility in the process of attaining global human rights for all people (Nagel 2005). At the same time, a global or rather universal human rights code would make it easy for the world to realise improved human rights and dignity across the globe in the sense that all member countries of the UN would be working towards having the same processes and systems to protect the rights of their people.

The current system seems to promote a false sense of success, hence, making it easy for governments around the world to go slow on the realisation of universal human rights for all people. To help avoid this issue, it would be paramount to differentiate between human rights and noble ambitions (Narotzky 2016). Secondly, it would be important to identify how various stakeholders at the community level contribute to the issue of human rights. This would help develop strategies that are effective and custom tailored to meet the needs of the society regarding the realisation of human rights from the lowest level in the community to the international scale. Through identification of how various organisations within the community contribute to the issue of human rights deprivation, it would be possible to identify cases violating human rights and respond to them almost instantaneously (Clark, Friedman, and Hochstetler 1998). This way, the local, state, and nations governments would contribute towards the shared responsibility to have better and improved protection of human rights.

Finally, the ideology of shared responsibility refers to where a particular goal is attained through the contribution from all members or parties involved. The concept applies to organisations and even in resolving various issues that affect the world (Saith, 2006). Deprivation of human rights is a major global problem, which has led to increased inequality in the society. It is so because not only does denial of human rights go against the basic human principles, but also contributes to the increase in inequality in the society (Evans 2009). The UN had previously tried to address the issue of inequality, hence, promotion of human rights for all through the Millennium Development Goals, which failed. The successor of the program, which is the Sustainable Development Goals, is apparently also not good enough as it is clear that the goal of human rights for all is not being realised across the world (Churchill 2016).

Reference List

Churchill, R.P., 2016. Human rights and global diversity. Routledge.

Clark, A.M., Friedman, E.J. and Hochstetler, K., 1998. The sovereign limits of global civil society: a comparison of NGO participation in UN world conferences on the environment, human rights, and women. World Politics, 51(01), pp.1-35.

Evans, G., 2009. The responsibility to protect. In Responsibility to Protect (pp. 15-29). Palgrave Macmillan US.

Fukuda-Parr, S., 2016. From the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals: shifts in purpose, concept, and politics of global goal setting for development. Gender & Development, 24(1), pp.43-52.

Hickel, J., 2016. The true extent of global poverty and hunger: questioning the good news narrative of the Millennium Development Goals. Third World Quarterly, 37(5), pp.749-767.

Nagel, T., 2005. The problem of global justice. Philosophy & public affairs, 33(2), pp.113-147.

Narotzky, S., 2016. Between inequality and injustice: Dignity as a motive for mobilisation during the crisis. History and Anthropology, 27(1), pp.74-92.

Pogge, T. and Sengupta, M., 2016. Assessing the sustainable development goals from a human rights perspective. Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 32(2), pp.83-97.

Saith, A., 2006. From universal values to millennium development goals: Lost in translation. Development and change, 37(6), pp.1167-1199.

Soumahoro, M., 2015. The Common Good, Human Dignity, and Inequality. [Online] Berkleycenter.georgetown.edu. Available at: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/the-common-good-human-dignity-and-inequality-80d5ec5f-e175-446d-8c41-89b7b23bc4a7 [Accessed 15 May 2017].