5.2.3 The Millennium Development Goals and NHRIs
The eight UN MDGs range from halving extreme poverty, to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and to providing universal primary education by the target date of 2015.
Goal 1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Goal 2 Achieve universal primary education
Goal 3 Promote gender equality and empower women
Goal 4 Reduce child mortality
Goal 5 Improve maternal health
Goal 6 Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
Goal 7 Ensure environmental sustainability
Goal 8 Develop a global partnership for development
The MDGs form a blueprint agreed to by the world’s countries and leading development institutions.10 The goals are the direct result of commitments to:
- human rights generally;
- the protection of the vulnerable;
- compliance with international instruments; and
- efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable.
The goals correspond to many rights set forth in the UDHR. For example, goals number 1, 3, 4 and 8 related directly to Article 25 of the UDHR (“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and the well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance”) and goal number 2 relates directly to Article 26 (“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages”.) MDGs can further be aligned to the work of NHRIs, with clear linkages between MDGs and ESC rights: The realisation of the UN MDGs by the target date of 2015 is a material test of whether ESC rights have been successfully implemented.
All eight MDGs are important to human rights generally. For women and children, who are so much the focus of development work, MDG Goals 3 and 5 are of particular relevance. NHRIs can incorporate the MDGs into their existing work on gender equality.
MDGs are linked to inequality and discrimination at a general level and are also of particular relevance to issues facing women, in part because women are often disproportionately affected by the areas targeted by the Goals, including extreme poverty and hunger.
The MDGs offer a key opportunity to improve human rights around the world. To be sustainable, the State should establish long-term strategies aimed at achieving the Goals as well as ensuring that human rights obligations are respected. The 2005 Millennium Project Report recommended: “in every country in which national human rights institutions exist, it should be given an explicit mandate to review and report on the realisation of the MDG targets at regular intervals”.11 UNCT staff are uniquely well-positioned to support NHRIs who wish to strengthen their work” in these areas and to encourage those that have not yet moved in that direction.
The MDGs and Human Development Reports set benchmarks and targets for human development. The MDGs in particular create links between certain ESC rights, the rights of women and children, and a host of other rights that are directly and indirectly linked to development and democratic governance. Some of the goals tackle the disadvantages that vulnerable persons experience in both social structures and institutions: more specific targets have been developed as priorities that can help NHRIs in choosing their own priority areas (see Chapter 8) for detailed discussions on Strategic Planning). NHRIs can use these targets to identify objectives and track progress.
Millennium Development Goals and Human Rights Standards
At a practical level, links between each goal, living conditions and related human rights standards are illustrated below:
- Extreme poverty: ESC rights are engaged when access to housing is denied, due to expropriations, relocations, and when there is insufficient food to maintain health; ESC rights are also engaged when minimum wage laws are non-existent or inadequate.
- Inability to access basic public health services, such as sanitation, due to an exhaustion of available services or because services are not available locally, will go directly to goals 4, 5 and 6.
- Education, especially for female children, when they
- are denied or cannot access primary school education
- are charged for tuition fees and uniforms for public schools, which might result in them receiving less education than boys who are given preference
- are members of a single women-headed households and therefore less likely to go to school than girls in male-headed households
- cannot travel safely to school.
- Employment, when discriminatory laws, policies and practices operate to create barriers to:
- seeking work
- work on equal terms, especially for persons with disabilities, women, and minority groups, including equal pay for work of equal value.
- decent work conditions
- special measures for women requiring maternity benefits, and being able to access working arrangements to facilitate nursing and caring for young children
- forming trade unions
Each area is linked to specific human rights, which in turn engage the responsibility of the State to respect, protect and fulfil those rights. The MDGs thus offer a “road map” to national human rights institutions that are trying to determine priorities in their respective countries in part by providing progress indicators to track and monitor specific goals. Although the MDGs are a blueprint, they require national ownership and adaptation to a particular country’s context. The capacity to identify progress depends on access to good data across most of the rights areas addressed by ESC rights. Particularly, this requires access to accurate and timely disaggregated data where specific minorities, women or other groups are linked to an NHRI’s programming.
MDGs and other internationally-agreed goals12 can be used in planning: specific targets can serve as starting points for programming choices. This is especially true for those objectives that are linked to minimum core obligations. For example, the ESC right of an adequate standard of living includes a minimum core obligation of access to adequate food. The MDGs have regional and country targets that can be the basis of even more specialized planning. NHRIs can use these targets in and work to support progressive implementation.13 However, MDG advocacy should always be accompanied by a strong articulation of the corresponding international human rights norms.
Some initiatives of the OHCHR bear mention in this context:
- A Special Advisor on MDGs and Human Rights has prepared a paper on the relevance of human rights to the MDGs.
- The human rights aspects of the MDGs have been underlined in both the report of the Millennium Project, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and in the Secretary-General’s report to the General Assembly: In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all. (Please see the references section of this Chapter)
One of the key recommendations of the Millennium Project is to strengthen MDG-based poverty reduction strategies that provide a framework for promoting human rights. It also aims to increase awareness of the links between human rights and the MDGs and to strengthen the capacity of the UN system at the country level to incorporate human rights concerns into the development issues which lie at the heart of the MDGs.
10 United Nations, “Millennium Development Goals”.
12 “Internationally-agreed goals” (IAGS) relate not only to the MDGS but to other UN frameworks and the international human rights norms and standards.
13 Source: The Millennium Development Goals Report 2008.