HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE VULNERABLE IN OUR MIDST.

PUBLIC POLICY is no longer a private matter. Once the domain of statesmen, politicians, civil servants, business leaders and academics, the area of public policy has become increasingly democratised. Public policy is discussed on street corners, in local pubs and in community halls as often as it is in cabinet rooms, corporate boardrooms, ministerial offices or academe. And this is generally regarded as a good thing. It is surely a fundamental part of a liberal democracy that the people who have to live with the decisions of government have some form of input into the way decisions are arrived at. A vote every three or four years is no way to be an active participant in the democratic process.

To describe human rights as a public policy issue may seem surprising. Yet for an increasing number in our community this is precisely how they are perceived. In many areas, particularly to do with mental illness and aged care (to take but two current and topical examples), the idea of human rights is seen as establishing some degree of care and protection for those people who are unable to secure by their own efforts an appropriate minimum standard of existence. On the one hand human rights are seen as establishing a basic level of security in terms of access to goods and services for groups' and individuals who may be marginalised or in some way excluded from the social, political and economic process. On the other hand they are portrayed as protecting the weak against people who would do them harm. Let us call those who are the focus of human rights in this way "the vulnerable". They rely for their survival and the satisfaction of basic human needs upon others, without whom their lives would be very miserable indeed.

In describing human rights as public policy I am suggesting that as with all public policy issues we ought to apply some empirical standard against which we can measure the success or failure of the policy, in this case the success or failure of human rights. For this is what we do with public policy. We scrutinise it, we criticise it, we measure it against some generally accepted standard, and if our policy does not measure up we change it, modify it or in some cases discard it altogether.

Take for example our approach to heroin. There are, it seems, a growing number in our community who argue that our current prohibitionist policy has been a dismal failure, that to continue down our present path is to continue to tolerate a range of social evils, from police corruption, to the proliferation of crime syndicates, to the spread of AIDS and the appalling health statistics that confront addicts, to break-ins and muggings and the violence that seems to go with drug addiction. Thus, so the argument goes, our current policy has failed and we should abandon our prohibitionist stance for one that is more sensitive to the needs of both the addicted and the wider community.

But the problem with subjecting any public policy to evaluative criteria is that we must in the first place be able to make an informed judgment about whether the current policy has succeeded or failed. So: has the current heroin policy actually failed? What does a failed heroin policy look like, or, more importantly, what does a successful heroin policy look like, and how can we tell (that is, measure) the difference between the two? What are, in empirical terms, the parameters of success or failure? A problem with both sides of the heroin debate is a reluctance to establish criteria against which we can measure the success or failure of the various positions.

With regard to human rights we must logically ask ourselves similar sorts of questions. What should a human rights policy do? How do we know if it is actually doing what we want it to? If it is not doing what we want, should we not dispense with it in favour of some other policy?

The first question is crucial. What do we want a human rights policy to do for us? The answer is simple. At the very least human rights ought to protect those in society who are vulnerable. That is, they ought to offer at least some basic standard of care and protection for individuals who are powerless, dispossessed and at risk of harm, who cannot survive and enjoy a reasonable level of human life without the care, attention and nurturance of others. That is why we tend to hear less about the human rights of judges, lawyers, doctors, media moguls or mining magnates and rather more about the rights of the frail aged in nursing homes or of people with mental illness, or of children, or migrants, or refugees.