Governments like ours are good at handing out targets and benchmarks to every group they can think of. How about returning the compliment?
An Index of Good Governance sounds like a bright idea. The world's governments would be rated periodically against an agreed standard and poor performers held to account by the UN. In fact it is such a good idea that the Green Party has adopted it as policy. On their system an annual score would be allocated to each country on the following criteria -
- use of torture
- use of death penalty
- scale of "disappearances"
- abuse of political prisoners
- denial of right to a fair trial
- denial of free speech
- denial of free movement
- denial of right to political or religious freedom
- denial of rights to women
- denial of child rights
- denial of minority rights
But is it practical politics? And OK, human rights are important, but what about health, education, nutrition and sustainability, the stuff of the millennium development goals? Aren't they part of good governance too?
Sir Richard Jolly, then president of UNA-UK, told the Green Party last year that while he sympathised with their aims, they were being politically naive. The UN was -
"... hostage to governments in how it monitors and reports on human rights implementation. The Human Rights Commission has, in recent years, been captured by some of the more reactionary countries ... Since governments ultimately rule in the UN, no proposal can succeed unless it has considerable support from governments. To be frank, your proposal needs to give much more attention to these political dimensions if it is to be carried forward and if it is to obtain serious support even from NGOs."
But while Jolly assumed that the "developed countries" were on the side of the angels at the UN, and perhaps were themselves exemplars of good governance, the following - from the Washington Post (16th November 2006) - suggests another perspective -
"The US government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience 'very low food security'. Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word 'hunger' to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year. Mark Nord, the lead author of the report said 'hungry' is 'not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey... We don't have a measure of that condition'.
The USDA said that 12% of Americans - 35 million people - could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined 'very low food security' to be a more scientifically palatable description of that group."
So there we have it. A "developed country" seeking to airbrush out of consciousness a basic human reality that not even the Green Party considers central to good governance. Can't we do better?
Click here to see the Green Party's proposed index
Click here for a World Bank proposal with a different focus
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