United Nations System
Standing Committee on Nutrition

 

Working Group on Nutrition, Ethics and Human Rights

held during the ACC/SCN's 30th Session in Chennai, India, March 2003

Chaired by Urban Jonsson (UNICEF)
Rapporteurs: Wenche Barth Eide and Uwe Kracht (WANAHR)

The meeting divided its time between specific case study presentations on human rights and ethical issues in the field of nutrition and its regular strategic policy and programme business. Meeting in India, the working group discussed Indian experiences with the implementation of the right to adequate food, largely from a legal and juridical perspective, focusing on actions and decisions by institutions like the National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court1. The cases challenge certain provisions in the Famine Relief Code of 1910, still in force today, and their conformity with human rights principles, and question the constitutionality of situations where millions of people are at the brink of starvation in the face of surplus stocks. These challenges have led to decisions that require changes in state relief administration and hold senior officials accountable for effective food programme administration. The Group also reviewed ethical issues arising from large scale nutrition programs, based on a number of case studies2.

As part of its regular business activities, the Group reviewed developments since its last meeting and implications for its future work, and focused on the need for, and nature of human rights based programming in the UN system.

Developments since the last meeting in 2001

The two years since the Group’s last meeting have seen a further consolidation of human rights in the work of the United Nations. UN agencies are increasingly embracing a human rights perspective in their work, with the focus of attention shifting from conceptualisation and the building of understanding of human rights towards their operationalisation in development programming. The working group and the SCN as a whole must do their share in addressing the strategic and practical implications of this process.

A major development and challenge to SCN’s future human rights work has been the establishment of an Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG), with the participation of stakeholders, to develop voluntary guidelines for the implementation of the right to adequate food, as recommended by the 2002 World Food Summit:five years later. The IGWG is serviced by a small secretariat based in FAO. A Group task force drafted an SCN position statement on the nutritional aspects of the future guidelines for submission to the IGWG. Important lessons for the guidelines process can be learned from a series of national seminars (in South Africa, Uganda, Mali, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Nepal, Norway in 2002/2003) that consider what a rights-based approach to food and nutrition security would entail. The Oslo-based International Project on the Right to Food in Development (IPRFD) is facilitating a series of such seminars. Civil society is a crucial stakeholder in the voluntary guidelines process; an important CSO proposal was developed at a meeting organised in Mülheim, Germany, in November 2002.

Other important developments include the drafting of “Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies”, a process led by the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights during spring/early summer 2002; the establishment of a UN Social Forum (SF) under the auspices of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, which is an experiment for a new form of enlarged and enhanced dialogue on human rights beyond established UN standards, involving those seldom directly heard in UN fora – poor groups of stakeholders – to debate their cases with UN human rights and development agencies and financial organisations; and the activities undertaken in the framework of HURIST, a joint programme of UNDP and OHCHR, which supports the implementation of UNDP’s human rights policy as presented in the policy document “Integrating Human Rights with Sustainable Human Development”. Its Consultative Group provides an important forum for sharing experiences among UN agencies and partners, which the working group Chair used for holding a seminar on a human rights based approach to programming in January 2002. In August 2002, UNICEF held a Global Consultation which adopted a human rights based approach to programming as the overall strategy to implement the current Medium-Term Strategic Plan.

New ground was broken by the Group Chair’s presentation on “The right to nutrition in conflict situations” to last year’s SCN Symposium, which dispels the widely-held notion that human rights do not apply in conflict situations. This was followed up by consultations held by the Chair with the SPHERE Project in the context of the current field review of experiences with the Project’s humanitarian charter and minimum standards, both of which are based on human rights and humanitarian law principles. A further assessment of the operational implications of human rights in conflict will be on Group’s future agenda.

In the assessment of the Chair, follow-up to Group recommendations has been less consistent than one would desire, with planned activities not always followed up and partly replaced by unforeseen initiatives.

Future agenda

The Group’s agenda over the next couple of years will be shaped by following activities:

  • Active participation in the IGWG process of developing voluntary guidelines for the realisation of the right to adequate food over the next two years, including participation in IGWG sessions and related national seminars, follow-up to statement drafted by the group for the SCN, now being submitted to the IGWG.
  • Sharing of experience with, and cooperation in human rights based approaches to development programming will be a key priority
  • Monitoring and evaluation: further work on rights-based benchmarks and indicators to monitor the realisation of nutrition-related human rights is absolutely crucial and will build on the draft document on “Monitoring the realization of the rights to adequate food, health and care for nutritional well-being” presented to the 28th SCN session; the document proposed a new approach to monitoring, linking rights, duties and accountability to the analysis of roles of responsible actors and their capacity to exercise their responsibilities. To this effect, a meeting will be organised prior to next year’s working group meeting.
  • Human rights in emergencies: further work on the application of human rights to nutrition programming in emergency situations.
  • Cross-cutting all areas is the need for human rights training: The Group will promote the sharing of programming guidelines, training materials among agencies, the participation of agencies in each other’s training activities and involve the academic community.

1 Based on presentations by Amrita Rangaswami, Centre for the Study of Administration of Relief (CSAR), India, and by Aparna Bhatt, Human Rights Law Network, India
2 Presented by John Seaman, Save the Children Fund, UK