Human Rights and Development

In recent years, human rights and development have been converging. Growing recognition of the crucial links between rights violations, poverty, exclusion, vulnerability and conflict has led many OECD member countries and mulitlateral donors to look at human rights more thoroughly as a means for improving the quality of development co-operation. Some have adopted human rights-based approaches to development, while others have preferred to integrate human rights explicitly or implicitly into various dimensions of their development work, especially into their governance agendas.

The Human Rights Task Team of the GOVNET is the international network on human rights within bilateral and multilateral development agencies. It is working to enhance understanding and consensus on why and how donors should work more strategically and coherently on the integration of human rights and development. In pursuing this objective, the Task Team

• Provides a framework for sharing of information and experience and for collective learning
• Promotes dialogue and collaboration between human rights practitioners and other development practitioners
• Develops policy guidance on how to integrate human rights more consistently into donor policies and practice:
  • Integrating Human Rights into Development: Donor Approaches, Experiences and Challenges
  • DAC Action-Oriented Policy Paper on Human Rights and Development
• Acts as a resource to the DAC and its subsidiary bodies on human rights and development.

In its 2009-10 work programme, the Human Rights Task Team puts special emphasis on building bridges between human rights specialists and other development policy communities and aid managers. This includes first and foremost:

• Human rights and aid effectiveness: realising the potential for the international human rights framework and the Paris Declaration to reinforce and benefit from each other.
• Human rights and poverty: establishing more common ground between human rights and pro-poor economic agendas.
• Human rights, conflict prevention and peacebuilding: identifying ways of reconciling and integrating human rights and peace and security strategies.

In addition, the Human Rights Task Team will contribute expertise on human rights assessments and indicators to an international meeting to be organised by the GOVNET on donor approaches to governance assessments.