Sumilao Farmers and Human Rights

Today, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, president of the Philippines, is quoted in newspapers as giving the Sumilao farmers land ownership to the disputed 144 hectares of farm land. The decision came after the farmers marched 1,700 kilometers in a period of two months. The farmer’s representatives met with Arroyo earlier.

The rights-based approach (RBA) to development aims to make people capable of choosing, determining and pursuing the economic, social, cultural and political process by which to fulfill their human rights. Its standards for development initiatives are the established and accepted human rights. RBA is guided by four fundamental principles: One, the human person is the subject, participant, owner, director and beneficiary of development; two, development and its process are based on human rights principles; three,development and its process should respect the normative content of human rights, and, four, development and its process should be coherent with the levels and natures of a state’s human rights obligations.

RBA is premised on the notion of poverty as powerlessness rather than a mere lack of commodities and services. This idea is consistent to Amartya Sen’s definition of poverty as the absence or inadequate realization of certain basic freedoms, such as the freedoms to avoid hunger, disease, illiteracy, and so on. RBA is also attuned to the conclusion of a World Bank study that “development should ultimately increase people’s freedom to live the life they value.”

In Thomistic philosophy, human rights are those that are due to a person; thus the goal of development is the fulfillment of human rights or justice. As such, development is demandable and holds the instrumentalities of the state accountable if the demand of justice is not fulfilled. Poverty, including the denial of the right to own a land to qualified beneficiaries of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, violates human rights; hence, the instrumentalities of the state that are responsible for such poverty are liable for committing an injustice. Under the Thomistic theory of human rights, RBA demands that the instrumentalities of the state promote development though the heavens fall!

Although human rights can be traced to ancient, medieval, modern and postmodern political theories from the east and the west, the current human rights regime is built on various theoretical foundations. According to Varun Gauri,

Because social rights and, more broadly, human rights are established on several different foundations, there exist disagreements regarding their content and form. A foundation for social rights based on dignity, for example, might suggest a stronger principle of equality than one based on agency, which only requires that individuals enjoy the minimal social infrastructure necessary to articulate and enact a life plan. What people have a right to, whether people can hold rights without a designated person or entity bearing a duty to fulfill or protect those rights, and whether or not rights exist prior to their legal establishment are all controversial topics (Sen 2000). What people have rights to, for instance, has evolved (Varun Gauri, Social Rights and Economics Claims to Health Care and Education in Developing Countries, March 2003).

Given the pluralism of the theoretical foundations of human rights, which one should be applied in the case of the Sumilao farmers? Can we say for certain that Arroyo is morally justified to give the land to the farmers? Is Arroyo telling us that we could only get justice if we demand and fight for it? Should the government not be punished for the delayed delivery of justice?