Urban Politics of Human Rights
- Anishka Govekar
- June 16, 2020
Content :
Human rights may be viewed as a collection of ideas "containing and implementing behavioral norms, a subset differentiated by its legal nature." Yet, while its legal form distinguishes human rights, not all actors in the city always refer to human rights in their legal form. In many cases, human rights are mobilized only discursively, with no specific reference to the law but only to the larger idea. Since cities are part of the state, they have an duty on the state to uphold and enforce the international law of which the state is a party (Nijman, 2016). One might find this translated into local legislation and it would indicate that in their own actions the local government should respect human rights norms.A more recent trend is that, based on human rights principles, cities are now specifically and actively implementing policies and programs and being part of community networks.Human rights are though created at international stage it needs to be implemented by country government and implementation becomes easy when power of its implementation be given to the local and municipal level. Even environment protection is one of such example. Every person should have right to get clean and healthy environment as per international laws. And all citizens must have right to live in healthy and clean environment is a fundamental right given by constitution in India. And to protect environment and take necessary precautions, government has distributed its powers of implementation to local and municipality level like cleaning the city and maintaining natural environment etc. But sometimes government is modifying human rights as per their convenience due to various political and other reasons and due to which main principle behind the Human Rights remains un-served.
