A UN journalist arrested a week ago in the northwestern DRC city of Gbadolite by the Mouvement de liberation du Congo (MLC) was released without condition on Saturday, the UN's Radio Okapi announced. Franklin Moliba-Sese, who works for the radio, said he had not been physically harmed, but he was tired from his ordeal.

The first anthology to provide critical perspectives on media structures, ownership, new regulatory regimes, and the way both nations and local communities within them have engaged with globalisation via localised responses in Southern Africa. Studies discuss privatisation, black empowerment, liberalisation, traditional communication, democracy and media freedom, the Kalahari San, identity and new media.

African Union (AU) ministers meeting in Addis Ababa have backed tough new laws aimed at wiping out corruption that has cost the continent an estimated US $148 billion.

Regardless of religious orientation, an average of more than seven out of ten people in four African countries say they support democracy. Some 71 percent of Muslims and 76 percent of non-Muslims agree that, "democracy is preferable to any other form of government." This is according to a survey completed in four African countries.

Resentment about South Africa's leading role in the New Partnership for Africa's Development spilt into the open last week when African foreign ministers launched a bitter attack on SA Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank's debt relief initiatives have failed to help Uganda sustainably manage its foreign debt as its creditors outside the European Union declined to agree to relief terms spelt out by the Bretton Woods institutions. Uganda says the debt had instead increased. It is currently estimated at $3.6 billion.

Ministers from the African Union (AU) were criticised on Wednesday for failing to take corruption more seriously. Only some 13 ministers attended a summit of 42 African countries aimed at tackling corruption.

A journalist with the UN peace-building radio network in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been arrested in the northwestern city of Gbadolite by the Mouvement de liberation du Congo (MLC) of Jean-Pierre Bemba. They were angered by a report of Moliba's on the wretched living conditions of thousands of child soldiers serving in the MLC army.

The Washington consensus, with its emphasis on export-led growth, has failed and it is time for a new development policy agenda that focuses on domestic demand-led growth, argues a discussion paper from Foreign Policy in Focus.

The Board of the World Bank has approved a $100 million credit facility for the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme in Nigeria. The Federal Government is contributing a counterpart fund of $13 million to the project.

Minister of Social Development, Zola Skweyiya and the executive mayor of Thswane, have launched a centre for abused children in Pretoria. Gauteng MEC for Social Welfare Services, Angie Matshego also attended the event.

Human rights are often presented as claims or entitlements. It is also said that rights belong to individuals. Both these ideas arise from a philosophical perspective, which assumes that human beings exist as isolated individuals who make claims or possess entitlements in isolation.

An exactly opposite philosophical perspective tells us that human beings are social beings, not individual beings. Society is a web of relations - social, economic, cultural and political - which have been constructed historically as different interests in society interact, clash and contradict and give birth to new sets of relations. Social struggles, therefore, are the base from which social relations develop. […]

The modern human rights debate - or discourse - is constructed on the philosophical foundation of the human being as an individual, and not as a social being. This lies at the centre of many of the controversies in human rights discourse. […]

The values and principles that underlie the human rights discourse have been constructed historically in the course of social struggles. Therefore, human rights is a contentious discourse in which different, and often contradictory, perspectives representing different interests in national and international society, seek dominance or hegemony.

Just as dominant and dominating interests may employ the ideology of human rights to justify and rationalise their dominance, so also the forces that seek to resist dominance may deploy human rights to mobilise their resistance. Human rights, as we know them today, were born in a period of contention. They were born in the context of the Cold War between the socialist and the capitalist system on the one hand, and in the context of the wars of national liberation from imperial/colonial domination, on the other. This context has had a major impact on the debates within, and about, human rights. […]

Human Rights as Contentious Discourse

The most celebrated document in the history of human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), was adopted in 1948 when the world had just emerged from one of the most devastating wars. There were only 56 member states of the United Nations with only three from Africa, including apartheid South Africa, which adopted the UDHR.

But the world was a long way from recognising the universal human being. More than two-thirds of the world's peoples were colonised and referred to as natives. They were not thought to be human enough to have human rights! President Roosevelt's four freedoms – freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship 'god' in your own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear (no wars between states) – which are supposed to have provided the building blocks of the UDHR did not include the freedom most central to the colonised peoples: 'freedom from colonial oppression' or the right to national self-determination. […]

The human rights ideology was incubated in the crucible of the Cold War (1945-90) and reflected the political, ideological and military disagreements and struggles underlying it. While the Cold War was cold in Europe, it was very hot in the Third World, Africa included. There was not a single year from 1945 to 1990 when there was not conflict somewhere in the world. […]

During much of the Cold War and to this day, the USA presented, and continues to present, itself as the champion of freedom, democracy and individual rights, despite the fact that it was at the same time trampling on the basic rights of Third World peoples - their rights to life and self-determination - as it propelled and fuelled wars and supported dictators. […]

The double-standards in human rights discourse, and the unequal power relations which underlie it, is not fully appreciated if human rights are presented as apolitical, asocial and ahistorical values inherent in us all because we are human beings. The setting of human rights standards through international conventions and declarations is itself a very contentious political process which demonstrates the gross inequalities of the world capitalist and imperial system. […]

Thus the way human rights are prioritised and categorised is itself open to debate, demonstrating the ideological nature of human rights discourse. Like all ideological discourses, half-truths and untruths are presented as absolute truths and whole truths. We should be wary therefore of a perspective on human rights which does not treat human rights in the context of history and social struggles.

Wherever there is oppression and injustice, there is bound to be resistance and struggle. In this process, the oppressors justify and rationalise their oppression in ideologies of domination, just as the oppressed mobilise and articulate their resistance in the ideologies of struggle and resistance.

In the present era, as globalisation is touted as the universal human good, we are also witnessing unprecedented inequalities, injustices, oppression, and levels of poverty and deprivation, which make mockery of our basic humanity, let alone human rights. […]

What Africa pays in debt-servicing and through loss of terms of trade every year would be more than enough to provide decent health, education and safe drinking water to every man, woman and child on the continent. Meanwhile, for the last 10 to 15 years, Africa has been subjected to unprecedented dictation from the international financial organisations and the so-called donor community. The neo-liberal policies adopted as a result have plunged the continent deeper into poverty with little prospect of improvement as its resources are pillaged by multinational corporations and its politics increasingly entrapped in the game of musical chairs for the minuscule urban elites. […]

Human Rights as Resistance

- The rights of peoples to self-determination

As we saw, the UDHR did not include the right of nations and peoples to self-determination although the declaration was born in the midst of a world in which more than two-thirds of the human race lived under colonial or semi-colonial conditions. […]

In the context of the rising national liberation movements and new forms of imperial domination, a number of liberation movements, trade unions and activist intellectuals meeting in Algiers in 1976 adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, known as the Algiers Declaration. ( ). The Algiers Declaration is a fine example of the reconceptualisation of the rights ideology by civil society to legitimise the struggle of peoples. The Algiers Declaration does not pretend to set any standards nor freeze these standards as enforceable rights of individuals to stabilise the status quo, but rather it consciously sums up people's struggles so as to legitimise them.

By further rethinking the right to self-determination and giving the term 'people' a contextual meaning, this right also has the potential to capture the current struggle of the African people for democracy from below and genuine participation in governance.

The right to self-determination, it can be argued, includes the right of the people to be consulted on all matters that affect their lives. Just as an individual has a right to be heard before any adverse action is taken against him/her, so the people have a right to be consulted before decisions are made affecting them. […]

The right to self-determination has been a major weapon used by various NGOs to argue and articulate the case against the ruinous economic policies the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have imposed on African and other developing countries. In February 2002, a number of NGOs campaigning against Third World debts convened a People's Tribunal in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil to hear evidence and adjudicate upon the legality and legitimacy of the debts. The 'verdict' ( ) deploys with great effect the language of human rights generally, and particularly the language of the right to self-determination, in order to show that Third World debts are illegitimate and that the people of the South are fully justified in resisting payment of these debts.

- Right to Life

The right to life is considered a basic right. As a matter of fact, the right of peoples to self-determination and right to life together may be justifiably called the mother of all rights.

In the mainstream interpretations, the right to life is given a narrow meaning of the right to existence. Various campaigns against capital punishment and torture have been anchored in this right. But Third World jurists and human rights activists, faced with extreme poverty and inhuman existence in their societies, have imaginatively expanded the meaning of the right to life to include the right to livelihood, right to shelter, right to land and right to food. […]

In this way, the language of rights is deployed to articulate the most pressing concerns of the large majority of people while at the same time providing the language of resistance against, and changing of, the existing conditions. It is important, therefore, that activist NGOs and other human rights advocates are conscious of the different perspectives on human rights, so that they know what to promote, in whose interest and in which direction.

* See for the Algiers Declaration and the verdict of the People's Tribunal on Debt.

*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.

Required to manage projects, policy and personnel on a community development programme and health projects.

The Poverty Reduction Strategy process, introduced by the World Bank and IMF in 1999, is supposed to ensure that governments and civil society groups take the lead in defining policies that the Bank and Fund should support. But many commentators have complained that macroeconomic policy choices have not been adequately debated and that few countries have deviated from standard options, says a report from the Bretton Woods Project. The report also provides a critical assessment of the current moves to introduce "Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA)".

Two of the three investigations into corruption allegations involving the R335m Komatiland forestry privatisation deal may have been concluded, but the real challenge still lies ahead for government: do they now cancel the deal or move swiftly to conclude it?

I loved reading your journal the first time and will enjoy doing so in future. It's excellent reading.

The newly-formed African Union (AU) has set out its first ever policy to tackle corruption which, it says, is costing the continent at least US $148 billion a year.

The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) says that Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Na'Abba has a case to answer in a corruption petition filed against him.

The 190-member U.N. General Assembly formally endorsed Monday the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the initiative to rebuild and rejuvenate the crisis-stricken and war-ravaged continent.

United Nations General Assembly member states should emphasize political reform and respect for human rights over traditional economic development initiatives, Human Rights Watch says. “It is tempting for member states to want to focus on traditional development projects,” said Peter Takirambudde, director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. “Such projects are less controversial and provide measurable results. But, NEPAD’s success hinges upon the political reforms that are more difficult and that need international support. These are the initiatives that can really transform Africa.”