Should human rights be made the primary explicit goal of business projects and development? Endeavoring to make human rights the major aim of development has wide implications. For one, it means questioning whether human rights supercede growth as the major goal of development or whether human rights set the agenda as the goal of growth.
It means looking at the arguments in favor of and in opposition to such a redefinition as well as the political and institutional difficulties in doing so. It means analyzing how human rights and economic welfare stand to each other - both on the level of business goals and with regard to empirical constellations. It has implications for the relationship between donor and recipient countries and between investors and recipient countries participating in trade or research business projects. It is time to consider going beyond conditionality and related sanctions in order to focus on redefining the contractual relationship.
The question then to be posed is whether all parties would be obligated to submit their allocations of resources for direct development aid as well as trade and research business projects to the criteria of human rights. Enforcement mechanisms then become important. They would have to be built in as an integral part of a development or investment strategy. Finally, clarity is needed about the interplay between human rights and business projects. This means identifying which vision of human relations and social ordering has to be articulated to sustain human rights as a goal of development and growth, whether it be containing abuse of political and economic power or realizing global citizenship.
The issue of the obligations that a human rights policy places not only on the recipient countries, but also on donors and traders or research business projects, in terms of resource allocation and implementation, is.....
