International Human Rights Day 2025 is over-shadowed by threats globally and domestically. To a surprising degree progress in human rights legislation and practice in Guyana has been prompted by international pressure rather than by domestic conviction. This was evident with respect to issues such as children’s rights, gay rights, death penalty, corporal punishment, trafficking in persons and women’s rights. The incentive to improve human rights performance was normally financial with development assistance from Western countries being tied to human rights performance. However, human rights leadership from Western democracies is generally failing as wealth displaces dignity, equality, and fairness as the dominant global value.
Guyanese need to ask ourselves where the dynamic to sustain a human rights culture will come from in response to the failing Western leadership as wealth replaces equality, dignity, and fairness as a universal value. Accumulation of wealth is becoming the only measure of a successful person, displacing criteria such as education, community esteem, or public service, thereby widening inequalities and coarsening relations between people. The price to be paid for displacing rights-based development in Guyana is unfair distribution of benefits such as jobs, facilities, scholarships, loans, house-lots, pensions, contracts and appointments, producing exploitation, exclusion and abuse.
Corruption attracts media attention only when it involves millions of dollars, while people are resigned to everyday forms of corruption such as bribes, harassment of women and vindictive transfers of public servants.
While the society reacts with indignation at the abuse of women and children, it seems unable to see this and other forms of abuse as the logical consequence of the obsession with wealth and unrestrained behaviour in all walks of life. And how will the dynamism needed to correct this state of affairs be structured? With the weakening of external pressure our ambivalence towards human rights principle stands exposed. Civil society in particular is challenged to rehabilitate exploitative relations, not simply survive alongside them. Too many of us oppose the disordered features of society only to the point at which the opportunity to join the band-wagon becomes too attractive to resist.
Ultimately, given the global juxta-positioning, it is the degree to which human rights principles inform and protect everyday life and culture, rather than the number of ratification of treaties.
