Book Description

The eleventh in the series of yearbooks on Human Rights in Developing Countries, this volume marks a departure from previous editions and a new beginning. The Yearbook will now bear the title of Human Rights in Development, to reflect the fact that it will explore the role of human rights as an integral part of the development process. The new title is also an indication of the fact that the scope of the Yearbook has widened to include human rights topics and issues in the more developed parts of the world as well as in the developing countries covered hitherto. Moreover, human rights are themselves in development and the new Yearbook plans to keep track of standard-setting in the human rights field. Finally, the new title reflects the Yearbook's aim of engaging in more international and comparative studies on the one hand and in more focused local issues on the other. With the rapid spread of new information technology and improved local monitoring capacity in developing countries, there may be less of a need for the type of nation-level country studies the Yearbook performed in the past. Two themes cut across the series of articles contained in the current edition. One, human rights promotion, is explored in various ways; one article looks at the establishment of national human rights institutions as instruments of promotion; another analyses development interventions in terms of their impact on local populations, drawing on UN and World Bank experience; yet another argues the case for using aid in human rights promotion, exemplified by Dutch aid to Guatemala; a fourth investigates the policies of the EU and ASEAN in seeking to improve the human rights situation in Burma; and finally one article looks at the work of the ILO in standard-setting and implementation in the field of child labour. The other theme, local conflict, is addressed in two articles, one looking at local communities in Latin America caught between local customs and ideologically charged civil wars and the other investigating the tensions between centralized rule and local autonomy in Kenya, recently erupting into ethnic violence. The Human Rights in Development Yearbook is a joint project of the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen; the Danish Centre for Human Rights, Copenhagen; the Icelandic Human Rights Centre, Reykjavik; the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, Vienna; the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht; the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights, Oslo; and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund.