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Bottom-up vs Top-down Human Rights Practices


Human rights, as a top-down or 'downstream' effort, move progressively from standards set internationally towards people’s daily lives.

The international framework of Human Rights has involved setting standards that are laid out in Coventants and Declarations. The top-down movement also engages in attempts to monitor how States observe many of these obligations. Finally, it has developed a few ways to seek to enforce State compliance with these standards. As these enforcement measures are, arguably, not legally binding on States however, and as there is no formal legal means for the State to be compelled to comply, State response to compliance efforts have been extremely weak. One example is the fate of the 'Concluding Observations of the Treaty Bodies' concerning both country reports and individual complaints. This often leaves the downstream movement stuck on further elaborating rights and duties.

There are other limitations to the top-down effort that highlight the need for another approach:

  1. The international standards are in the form of formal law. However, this requires a functioning and independent legal system, judiciary, police etc. This is far from the reality in many States.
  2. The values that the human rights norms enforce are often not accepted by dominating cultural or political systems in States or communities. People may also not be aware of or may not identify with the formulations of these rights. They are often not attuned to their context or their interpretation of their human dignity.
  3. The human rights norms do not often correspond to local values. They are defined in a way that lacks a significant component of local notions of justice and balance. They do not provide the whole picture. For example, rights tend to be formulated in a rather absolute manner: everyone has the right to …, whereas the struggle for social justice has to be directed against substantive socio-economic inequality that is of a relative nature.


The bottom-up or grassroots human rights movement (also referred to as the upstream movement) sees rights more as they really are: an ongoing, collective human struggle, involving dynamic processes of resistance and change that engage and transform unequal relations of power. It sees also that rights can only be achieved through the involvement and empowerment of the community as a whole, particularly those whose rights are most violated. Bottom-up efforts are grounded in people’s needs. They use the normative human rights standards as powerful, political resources for transformative, action-oriented social change. Bottom-up human rights provide communities with tools to:


Bottom-up or upstream human rights efforts accept the fact that human rights may not be entrenched within an accessible, independent and effective legal system where citizens can readily make claims. It accepts that there may be social, cultural and political realities that prevent people from being able to make claims, even where there is an enforceable legal system. It seeks to move beyond these formal mechanisms of protection to engage in a broader struggle. This struggle involves a process of confrontation against and transformation of unequal power ideologies, relationships and structures that deny rights. And it is this in fact that is the critical function of international rights.


Some key tools of the bottom-up/upstream human rights movement are to:


Human rights construed in this way are powerful resources to help those living in poverty to themselves overcome the serious constraints in their daily struggles for sustainable livelihoods.

These strategies are critical to move beyond the traditional protest oriented and monitoring approach to human rights strategies. Bottom-up or grassroots strategies seek to present concrete alternatives grounded in people’s needs and mobilisation. These alternatives aim towards sustainable solutions, to re-characterise the State, and other duty-bearers, and re-negotiate their engagement with the people.

All aspects of the human rights-based approach are entrenched in bottom-up efforts: use of the human rights framework, empowerment, participation, accountability, and attention to vulnerable groups. Human rights-based strategies must use both bottom-up/upstream and top-down/downstream processes: they require use of the current systems within society as well as expansion beyond them where necessary. However, given the role of these systems in creating and perpetuating poverty, upstream efforts must be central in order for those living in poverty to claim rights, redress injustice and ensure access to political and economic resources.
 
For a good image of how bottom-up human rights-based strategies are applied, go to the Good Practices page.