[Radix] Re: Chinese experts involved in international school safety guideline creation???

[Marla Petal]

George, Ben, Fred's recent clarifications have helped me understand  
this in a way that is helpful to the 'community-organizing' and  
mobilization tasks we face:

Rather than abstract, culture and value laden "human-rights", we can  
productively focus on hard-fought (and )won "legal rights".  
Ultimately, the example of the Field Act in California which provides  
building regulatory mechanisms for school construction is about  
citizens winning the right to safer schools through specific legal  
obligations of government and school districts to establish and follow  
processes that ensure safe construction...

We can bring together our own strengths in communicate with  
professionals with the urgent need to engage the much wider grass  
roots interest in safe schools in the struggle for the legal  
regulatory frameworks that begin to ensure safe schools.

We can move our own colleagues to get past the usual panacea of  
"building codes" (which most countries have but does NOT confer any  
legal right to safe buildings)....  to focus on fighting for the  
"legal right to safe schools through appropriate building regulatory  
mechanisms".  This distinction may seem small, but I think ultimately  
could prove very helpful to getting us over the next hill.

Cheers,
Marla


On Jan 31, 2009, at 4:12 AM, George Kent wrote:

> Ben, with your (and everyone's) indulgence, I would like to expand  
> on the two paragraphs of yours that are copied at the bottom of this  
> email.
>
> Those comments of yours responded to my saying:
>
>
> ". . . it is possible to imagine laws that say people are legally  
> entitled to safe schools for their children. Ordinary  [people]  
> could be given assistance in making their own assessments of the  
> quality of schools, and they could be given means through which to  
> submit complaints when they believe the standards are not met.
>
> This rights-based approach should be linked to efforts to increase  
> transparency. There should be clear standards for construction, and  
> the general public should be informed about these standards, in ways  
> that are appropriate for non-experts."
>
>
> I was not clear enough when I said that. In my work on rights, I am  
> now making a sharp distinction between rights-based social systems  
> in general, as a generic concept, and the particular concrete  
> manifestation of that form in the current international human rights  
> system. Generically, rights-based social systems are any systems  
> that involve some people having rights, other people having  
> corresponding obligations to ensure that those rights are realized,  
> and institutional arrangements for accountability to make sure those  
> who have the obligations do what they are supposed to do. One can  
> have such systems in schools, prisons, hospital, villages, etc. The  
> rights can be drawn from any source.
>
> Having made this distinction, we should not assume that all  
> conversations about rights are about the  the HUMAN rights system  
> that is managed through the United Nations.
>
> On this basis, I am exploring the idea that national (and other)  
> governments might see that they could use home-grown rights-based  
> systems to help meet their own goals. In our China example, this  
> could be a way of drawing the general public into a system for  
> holding builders and others accountable. Civil society could be part  
> of the process by which government fights corruption. That system  
> and the standards used need not have any relationship to those set  
> up at the global level. With this approach, the rights system  
> becomes an asset for the government, and would not be viewed as a  
> burden imposed on it.
>
> The idea here is to shift from viewing rights mainly in terms of a  
> national government’s obligations to submit to outsiders’ standards  
> to instead seeing a system of rights as a tool through which  
> national governments can pursue their own goals more effectively.  
> The point is not to submit to outsiders’ standards for school  
> architecture, but to set your own, and to get ordinary people to  
> understand that they have the right and the means to insist that  
> those standards are met.
> I was glad to hear that there are some pilot projects that are  
> exploring increased community involvement in school safety issues. I  
> wonder if this home-grown approach to rights would be useful in them.
>
> Aloha, George
>
>
>
> On Jan 30, 2009, at 12:02 PM, bwisner at igc.org wrote:
>>
>> I have mixed feeling about the use of rights language.  There are  
>> so many compelling reasons why children should be safeguarded  
>> without reference to an abstraction like "rights of the child" or  
>> "human rights."  While I don't personally deny the existence of  
>> universal human rights, in some cultural context at particular  
>> historical moments it may be easier to get the work of school  
>> protection done by reference to cultural injunctions in the Koran,  
>> to the economic value of children, etc., etc.
>>
>> In this discussion that began about China but is now broader, some  
>> of use have tended toward taking a more pragmatic approach whilst  
>> others have tended to insist on upholding principles.  I suspect  
>> despite these tendencies, our views overlap.  As you yourself noted  
>> in your experience in working with the Chinese on food quality  
>> issues, sometimes it is necessary work horizontally, expert to  
>> expert and bracket political philosophical issues.
>
>

Marla Petal

mpetal at imagins.com
Home +41 22 740 2704
Mobile +41 76 240 8474
Skype: shmarla








-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.ecie.org/pipermail/radix/attachments/20090131/f3c74271/attachment.htm