Rather than enter into a grim discussion of figures, it is more important to be aware of the dominant trend in a number of countries. Records show that there is no longer any progress in populations living conditions, while the human deficit in terms of health remains scandalously high.
For growing numbers of the world's population, the right to life, the most basic human right, is no longer gaining ground. Such is the appalling outcome of the structural adjustment policies. As for the right to education, the right to adequate nutrition, the right to work or to executive power, which increasingly seeks to avoid democratic control. The process has begun. It is high time people became aware of it.
5. Limitations on the exercise of sovereign rights in defining national policies (and the trend towards limiting the exercise of the right to free expression) bar the way to carrying out policies in favour of human development.
At the end of the millennium, the world is both more "globalized" more hierarchical than ever before. Structural adjustment programmes clearly constitute a way of exercising domination over the countries at the bottom of the hierarchy. Indeed, structural adjustment programmes imply, through privatisation in particular, the surrender of sovereignty over part of the production infrastructure and natural
Those who benefit are generally the multinational companies of which the great majority are based in a handful of leading industrialized countries. Who can believe that these companies are more likely to support development in the least industrialized countries than the national
True, the record of many past governments has been deplorable, but who can reasonably believe that their national parliaments and civilian organizations will find it easier to control and influence
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the decisions of multinational corporations and the Bretton Woods institutions than those of their own national governments?
6. Does not the guarantee of human rights in general and the right to development in particular presuppose certain emergency measures, such as the cancellation of the debt system and adjustment stipulations?
Such measures are necessary but insufficient. To prevent a recurrence of the debt mechanism after debt cancellation, further steps must be taken to set up a new economic order, more human and fairer. Are not the refusal to cancel external debts and the approval of demonstrably iniquitous adjustment policies tantamount to a refusal to come to the aid of endangered populations?
7. During this year of 1999, a vast world campaign for debt cancellation has been led by numerous civilian associations. Such a movement can only win support, and the political decisions required to meet their demands will have to be made. *