By clothing-bag, 27/02/2023

Human rights Human Rights "from below": a space in dispute

Today, December 10, the International Human Rights Day is celebrated and the 70th anniversary of the approval of the Universal Declaration is commemorated.

The global context maintains certain continuities since then, but also notable changes, new subjects, new dynamics that mark our current reality.

These go through exacerbation in the commercialization of life, deregulation, expropriation and necropolitics, issues that impact the central cores of rights.Therefore, they do not seem good times for in -depth reflection on the International Human Rights framework.However, it is urgent and strategic that we position a reconfiguration of this from below, from the social peoples, communities and movements.

Human rights at a critical moment

El telón de fondo, el contexto del debate actual sobre los derechos es que vivimos una ofensiva mercantilizadora a escala global, en la que las dinámicas capitalistas, patriarcales, coloniales, autoritarias e insostenibles se exacerban. Se instaura así un modelo donde las grandes empresas amplían exponencialmente su poder.

These are question.The result is a progressive destruction of popular sovereignty and the capture of countries and territories as if they were part of the internal organization of large corporations.

In this context, people are becoming more merchandise, and therefore, likely to be discarded, which implies placing the commodification of life in the vertex of the hierarchy of legal norms.In this way, the normative asymmetry that protects the rights of transnational corporations and financial capital, which have rules of mandatory compliance and with private courts that apply them with absolute efficiency is exacerbated in this way.Meanwhile, human rights move between the fragility of international standards, the recommendations of the committees responsible for their application, and the impunity of governments in the breach of human rights texts.This asymmetry highlights the fracture of its guarantee systems and demonstrates how they evolve towards territories of legal rhetoric.

On the other hand, commercialization is accompanied by a great accumulation of wealth in very few hands, in the face of a great poverty collection in many others.The inequality that the model generates, is made up with the idea of stability, which appears linked to the security that world resources need to reach rich countries and with guaranteeing the mobility of financial flows, but not with the protection and safety of human rights.

Thus, in the border region with Mexico, US businessmen and owners demand the free circulation of goods to avoid alleged million -dollar losses, while President Trump authorizes shooting at migrants who illegally cross the border.That is, the free movement of consumer people is guaranteed and the displacement of people fleeing from misery and violence is criminalized.

In short, human rights are empty as a substantive category by losing normative space against the commercialization of life.

In another order of ideas, the patriarchy also marks its own imprint on human rights, and, as Amaia Pérez Orozco points out, “life is resolved through the work that does not exist, carried out in the fields that are not economical and by the subjectsthat are not political subjects ".That is, the community work not valued, the implemented inside the homes or the care of the people who do not attend, are some examples of how the essential elements are ignored for the maintenance of everyday life.Therefore, human rights cannot be mortgaged by a permanent invisibility of the processes that support life.

Finally, the relationship between rights and colonialism has always been a very conflictive relationship.On the one hand, the official discourse on human rights has been accompanied by an assumption universalism, and on the other, it has been linked to state action, the market and the capitalist development model.All this, in addition, imposed on many occasions from substantially violent, racist and hierarchical power relations.Therefore, considering human rights as forms of liberation and resistance against the exploitation of the peoples and communities of the southern countries is to resignify the contents and instruments that regulate them.

Human rights: deregulation, expropriation and necropolitics

El punto de partida, tal y como afirma Gonzalo Fernández, es que “el capitalismo atraviesa un momento especialmente crítico, en el que a las escasas expectativas de reproducción de un enorme excedente financiero se le une la incuestionable merma física en la que opera el sistema”. Por tanto, el capital y las empresas transnacionales se lanzan a la destrucción de toda barrera que impida la mercantilización a escala global y, en este sentido, si las élites quieren mantener y aumentar sus beneficios codiciosos, las prácticas contra las personas, las comunidades y la naturaleza se extreman.

It is in this context that substantial modifications are generated in the legal category of human rights, which suffer a triple reconfiguration.First, they are deregulated based on the generalized exploitation of people and privatization processes.Second, they are expropriated based on the accumulation by dispossession in a colonial context.We cannot forget that the dispute over the shortage of materials and energy sources is one of the most serious conflicts in the current crisis of accumulation and economic growth.Finally, they are destroyed according to an extreme colonialism/racism linked to the necropolitics of human beings.

The deregulation of social, labor and collective rights is imposed as an immutable legal category.Informal work;Child and slave labor;the poor working person;the limitation of the union and collective action of workers;the sexual division of labor;And the reproductive work done for free by women - which, now to a large extent and in a very precarious way, migrant women execute - are the mirror on which part of the reality of human rights is reflected.

But in addition to intrinsic deregulation to neoliberalism, we also see how communities and people are expelled from their homes and their lands to generate benefits in agribusiness, in mining, in oil companies, in electricity, in tourism, in finances, in the construction companies, in the security and war industry, etc..For example, the acquisition of large -scale land by transnational corporations destroys local economies and redefines vast land extensions as places for extraction and business, which causes denationalized spaces that expel its inhabitants.In turn, evictions in European cities, for example, leave homeless to those who cannot face the greed of real estate speculators.

On the other hand, climate change and devastation of ecosystems push thousands of communities to abandon their lands and embark on vicinity of horror, which consolidates a gradual "mass destruction" of human rights of unpredictable effects in the framework in the frameworkof a global systemic crisis.

Finally, the necropolitics completes the deregulation and expulsion picture, explicitly betting on letting people die.As Achille Mbembe states "de facto leaders exercise their authority through the use of violence and the right is shown to decide on the life of the governed".Violence is revealed as an end in itself and is used to discern who is important and who does not, who is easily substitutable and who does not.

It is very evident that global institutions and most states are not only eliminating and suspending rights.They are also reconfiguring who are subjects of these, who are left out of the category of human beings, which causes a sense of generalized decomposition of the International Human Rights System and the “de facto” formalization of racist systems that establish a hierarchical order betweenethnic or racial groups.

In sum, human beings who cannot consume or produce hinder, and become human waste, as Bauman states.In addition, leaders and leaders of environmental, feminist, LGTBI, peasants, Afro -descendant and indigenous movements are murdered for leading responses in defense of the Earth and against the large hydroelectric projects - 300 activists killed in 2017 - at the same timethat human rights defenders and dissenting persons with the political and economic model are criminalized.

In short, to seriously talk about human rights entails adjusting empty speeches to contexts where rights are subordinated to the interests of capital.Actually, in the imaginary of the official discourse, human rights are still linked to private property, freedom and security of its only holder, the white, owner and Judeo -Christian man.In this way, the concrete reality that we live in the great social majorities that we inhabit the planet is obvious.

Reconfigure human rights "from below"

Afrontar los desafíos descritos en las líneas anteriores requiere construir espacios globales donde disputar la hegemonía a las clases dominantes, donde rediseñar el sistema internacional de tutela de los derechos humanos. Muchos de los imperativos universales de los derechos humanos conectan con la emancipación y la resistencia de los pueblos, pero otros colisionan con otras categorías de derechos y de maneras de entender las relaciones humanas.

Contrahegemonics therefore require a new reinterpretation that responds to the proposals of social movements and communities in resistance.Thus, the dignity of human beings must be out of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist visions, assuming the agendas proposed by popular organizations.

These looks swing between individual and groups, between the rights of nature and the rights of people and communities, between the immanent and transcendent values of the peoples, and among the new "transnational peoples" of migrants and national citizenship.They also place in the center of human relations, the sustainability of life, the sexual and reproductive rights of women and the right of women to a life -free life of sexist violence.

Feminism, environmentalism, movement in favor of human rights and sexual diversity, trade unionism, indigenous and Afro -descendant communities, the peasant, anti -colonial, anti -racist movement etc.., they have to establish dialogues and become the protagonists of a new conceptualization of human rights, which allows them to reappropriate them through categories away from state and market logic, always linked to realism in international relations and the interests of the powerful.

Peoples, communities and social movements seek to be subjects, not mere objects of law.They seek their constituent and normative space in the future of humanity.The category of states cannot be the beginning and end of international law, so the prominence and recognition of social movements and resistance peoples must occupy the place that corresponds to them, reconstructing forms of collective action on the marginof the traditional vision of the State and in pursuit of new relationships based on sovereigns understood as new links between people, peoples and communities.

Talking seriously of human rights involves radicalizing democracy, defending the sovereignty of peoples, building collective projects and reconfiguring new counterpower spaces at the local, national and global level.