The Right to Development 1986: Articles 6 to 10

In one line

Article 6 declares all rights indivisible and interdependent and requires obstacles from any rights failure to be removed, article 7 links disarmament to development, article 8 lists the national measures including women's active role, article 9 makes the Declaration internally indivisible and adds a saving clause, and article 10 requires implementing measures.

Article 6: indivisibility, seven years before Vienna

6(1): All States should co-operate with a view to promoting, encouraging and strengthening universal respect for and observance of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without any distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.

6(2): All human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent; equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, promotion and protection of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

6(3): States should take steps to eliminate obstacles to development resulting from failure to observe civil and political rights, as well as economic social and cultural rights.

Three points, and the first is the one to lead with.

6(2) states indivisibility in 1986, seven years before the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action said it in 1993. A candidate who attributes indivisibility to Vienna alone has missed that the proposition was already in a General Assembly declaration, and pressed by the very States most often accused of wanting to trade civil rights away.

6(3) is the reply to the "development first" argument. The argument, taken up in [Asian Values: the Argument and the Answer], is that a poor State must postpone civil and political rights until it has developed. Article 6(3) says the opposite on its own instrument's terms: a failure to observe civil and political rights is itself an obstacle to development that States must eliminate.

And 6(1) reproduces the Charter's four grounds, race, sex, language and religion, rather than the longer Covenant list, which is a drafting echo worth noticing.

Article 7: disarmament and development

All States should promote the establishment, maintenance and strengthening of international peace and security and, to that end, should do their utmost to achieve general and complete disarmament under effective international control, as well as to ensure that the resources released by effective disarmament measures are used for comprehensive development, in particular that of the developing countries.

The disarmament dividend, stated as a human rights proposition. The article does two distinct things: it treats peace and security as conditions of development, and it earmarks the savings from disarmament for development, particularly of developing countries.

Its practical force is nil and its rhetorical force is considerable, which is a fair summary of much of the third generation. No mechanism exists to identify released resources, let alone to direct them, and the article names no defaulter. It is nonetheless the clearest textual statement anywhere in the framework that military expenditure is a human rights question, and that is worth saying.