One of the most apparently successful operations ever mounted to recover funds looted from a developing country by a dictator has fallen apart. Nigeria has been forced to resume legal action to seize funds plundered by Sani Abacha, the country's corrupt former ruler, following the collapse of an out-of-court financial settlement with his family worth more than $1bn.

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), working in partnership with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), invites applications for the Transitional Justice Fellowship Program, a funded, six-month residential fellowship program in Cape Town, South Africa, for 26 professionals from 13 different countries to study transitional justice.

A combination of violence, fraud and mismanagement prevented the registration of almost a third of Nigerians who turned out to put their names on the electoral roll this month, the country's Catholic church has claimed.

African economies are expected to pick up slightly next year after stumbling in 2002 but the continent faces vast challenges including a worsening famine in the south, the IMF reports.

The editorial by Professor Shivji (PAMBAZUKA NEWS Edition 80) captures brilliantly the dilemmas facing proponents of social justice in developing countries seeking to use the discourse of human rights to advance pro-poor policy choices. This is particularly important in the current global world order, where rights arguments are increasingly being used to justify particular sets of policies imposed, or expected of developing country populations. By locating human rights correctly within a political economy and historical context, the nature of rights as products of social construction enable us to better understand how we can better make use of human rights arguments, and how human rights arguments may be used against us.

Some comments:
1. By understanding human rights as products of contestation, we recognise the role of human rights as essential to contributing (positively or negatively) to struggles around power. Rights can in practice be deployed as much in defence of privilege and the powerful in society, as they can be to advance the interests of poor and marginalised. Witness the way in which corporates are able to use rights machinery (e.g. Freedom of Information) to silence publication of critical research results, to oppose regulation and to threaten and implement litigation to achieve desirable policy goals. Hence, it is not possible to judge the role of human rights in advancing pro-poor choices and social justice, without referring to the integument in which human rights operate. If human rights mechanisms prioritise the needs of the poor and the marginalised, then rights become powerful mechanisms whereby democracy can be advanced. However, if rights mechanisms operate independent of the power imbalances that exist between and within countries, then rights are easily co-optable in the service of those who already benefit from inequity and imbalances of power.

2. So, how do rights mechanisms put the poor first? Only if civil society is able to mobilise to assert itself in structural and institutional ways. South African civil society, though much weaker now than during the heyday of anti-apartheid resistance, has successfully achieved a set of institutional mechanisms which (we hope) are successful at placing the interests of the poor and marginal first - a Constitutional Court operating within a framework of a Bill of Rights, a Human rights Commission that is attuned to the needs of the poorest sectors of society, etc.

3. From the above, flows the implication that not only are human rights strengthened by an active civil society, but human rights mechanisms need to reinforce the opportunities for organisation and mobilisation in civil society. While the Western preoccupation with "good governance" makes a misnomer of what this role should be, it is at the level of public participation that a human rights culture can be sustainable. The success of a human rights approach should be judged not only on the court decisions, on the policies adopted, on the implementation of pro-poor policies, but also on the capacity of human rights instruments to strengthen the agency of the least powerful in society to act in their own interests, individually and collectively.

4. The above throws up a number of difficult, maybe uneasy contradictions:
- How do individual rights and group rights get traded off? It isn't sufficient to argue that they are naturally compatible.
- If rights are about power, is there an inherent incompatibility to talk about individual and collective interests under the rubric of "agency of the least powerful in society?"
- How can strengthening that agency resolve these possible differences? In the health field EQUINET is increasingly seeking to consider how human rights approaches can help to strengthen pro-equity policies in health. How can we ensure that human rights leads to reduced inequalities? A preliminary look at the area is suggesting that the answers lie in resolving these difficult questions.

It is also evident that when different people, agencies or organisations use the notion of human rights, they may be using the term in completely diverse ways:
- as a set of standards derived from international human rights law;
- as an approach to monitoring and analysing policy with a view to holding governments accountable;
- as a lobbying and advocacy tool to mobilise civil society.
While the above are all inter-related, they represent different ways of conceptualising and acting, and all can range on the spectrum from the completely ahistorical to the most dialectic of interpretations. What is clear is that in trying to advance our understanding of human rights and the role it plays, we need to critique rights in the context in which they are to be deployed.

* Leslie London, MD, is Associate Professor, Occupational and Environmental Health Research Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Health Care, University of Cape Town

* For last week's editorial see

*Would you like to respond to this editorial? Send your views to editor@pambazuka.org and we will publish them in our Letters and Comments section next week.

We call for the immediate suspension of the policies and practices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group which have caused widespread poverty, inequality, and suffering among the world’s peoples and damage to the world’s environment. Substantial responsibility for the unjust world economic system lies with those institutions and the World Trade Organization (WTO). We note that these institutions are anti-democratic, controlled by the G-7 governments, and that their policies have benefited international private sector financiers, transnational corporations, and corrupt officials and politicians.

There has been a growing corpus of literature tracking the ANC’s adoption of neo-liberal economic policies. However very little has been written on the reaction of communities who face the consequences of this rightward shift that manifests in evictions, electricity and water cut-offs effected at gunpoint under the guise of cost-recovery. Across South Africa community movements have arisen to confront these attacks on the poor. This article focuses on one such movement in Cape Town, the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign (MPAEC) with particular emphasis on the militant forms of direct action undertaken in defense of “rights” to water, electricity and shelter and the response of the post-apartheid state to these struggles.

Zimbabwe is supposed to be a multi - party democracy where we cherish competition and diversity of views. In an ideal situation we would have wanted to see all political parties conducting free and fair primary elections. This becomes more critical where there are no primary elections and that candidate goes through unopposed.

The UN military mission in Sierra Leone will continue for at least another eight months. The Security Council has agreed unanimously to extend the mandate for the forces by six months and has said that measures to reduce the size of the 17,300 member force will begin after eight months.

Two years ago this week Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a call for "an independent panel of experts not unduly influenced by creditor interests" to reassess the debt burden of developing countries and the international measures taken to date to deal with them. His report noted that the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) initiative had proved inadequate even for the countries included, and that there were many debt-burdened countries not included in the initiative. As the IMF and the World Bank gather for their annual meeting two years later, the evidence of failure of the creditors' HIPC initiative is even more overwhelming. So is the damage in lost lives and devastated economies caused by the failure to address the issue. The evidence is also clear that when money is saved by debt cancellation, it does go for productive investment in health, education, and other urgent needs.

The President of the Ivorian National Assembly, Mamadou Koulibaly, suggested Tuesday that the government launch a complaint at the UN Security Council and the African Union about what he alleged was a terrorist attack in Cote d'Ivoire involving neighbouring countries.
Related Links: Related Links: http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.jsp?a=37&o=9439 and http://irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=30015

The commission of inquiry into alleged corruption in the Uganda Revenue Authority has found that corrupt officials are not penalised. "Tolerance of corruption is what has made URA what it is today," an official said.

Ministry of Roads and Public Works officials are being investigated for corruption.
Anti-Corruption Police Unit officers, led by Dr John Orora, are expected to scrutinize the ministry's headquarters for a month.

Detained Mohammed Abacha has been freed by President Olusegun Obasanjo. But Abacha will have to restrict his movement within the country and the Abacha family is expected to comply with an agreement to pay over $1 billion to the Federal Government.

The World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings that begin in Washington this week, will again take place behind heavy security fences and police lines designed to protect delegates from chanting protestors intent on disrupting their proceedings. But many of the critics are also becoming increasingly adept at pressuring these institutions on the inside, sometimes through member governments who can exert substantial influence on their operations. This year some of the most vocal critics argue that the bank and IMF are doing too little on issues such as debt relief, poverty reduction and education in Africa.

Sparks are set to fly between the African National Congress (ANC) government and its tripartite alliance partner the Congress of South African Trade Union (Cosatu), if the trade union's planned anti-privatisation strike goes ahead on October 1 and 2.

Letter to the Governor of the Reserve Bank
On behalf of the SA New Economics (SANE) network I wish to express our concern at your decision, together with MPC, to raise the Repo rate again. First, the present macro-economic paradigm puts inflation-targeting above all other considerations, including growth and employment. We do not agree with that paradigm. We think that growth that produces employment should be the overriding consideration, because it is vital for our country. Employment and poverty alleviation will spread our political liberation to the economic sphere and so spread its benefits to the whole of our population. Thus it will begin to address the greatest danger to our political liberation – namely the alienation of poor and low-paid people.

As a regular receiver of your newsletter, I find each edition logical, educative and entertaining in some cases. But particularly I want to specifically commend the Pambazuka News 77 edition. The editorial on the article "The Missionary Position: NGOs and Development in Africa" is simply superb. (See for the editorial and full edition.) It encouraged me to download the complete article from the Internet and I must say I am thrilled by the quality of work done.

The World Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs) should reassess their continued backing for mining projects in poor countries, says a report released Monday by Oxfam America. Contrary to what the report calls "folklore" propagated by the IFIs and the global mining industry, mining never acted as a major spur to development in the United States, Canada, or Australia, the three countries often held up by the IFIs as examples for development that mineral-rich poor countries could follow.

Concerned at high levels of corruption costing the country millions of dollars and threatening the economy, members of the public have joined civil society's call for a national audit in order to bring perpetrators to book.