An NGO world

The 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights known as the Vienna Conference was attended by 841 NGOs from throughout the world, all of which described themselves as working with a human rights mission. Though an impressive figure in itself, this actually represented only a tiny fraction of the total number of human rights NGOs active in the world. Most 'human rights organisations' tend to be engaged in the protection of civil and political rights. However, as we have seen, civil and political rights are just one category of the many different human rights recognised by the international community, and new rights are continuing to emerge. When we take this into account and consider the NGOs active in countering poverty, violence, racism, health problems, homelessness and environmental concerns, to name just a few, the actual number of NGOs engaged in human rights protection, runs into hundreds of thousands throughout the world.Many academics feel NGOs are actually part of the neo-liberal agenda to roll back the state, open international borders for globalised commerce, deregulate labour markets to make hiring and firing easy and push all service provision into the hands of the private sector. In such a situation, the third sector no longer remains distinct from the public and the private sectors. Our civil society has become hegemonic in itself. Certain highly-funded NGOs and consortiums of NGOs dominate the civil society scene to such an extent that even the state seems much less powerful as compared to them. Whereas civil society, as a broad term, is understood to play an important role in pushing society towards an egalitarian and progressive path, in its NGO avatar it is no longer just an informal or incidental component of society. It, indeed, is another word for highly bureaucratised institutions, with a lot of resources to do good work but suffering from all the ills that bureaucracy brings in its wake: inertia, mismanagement and corruption.Muhammad SarfrazRawalpindi

from The News International - Newspost https://ift.tt/37D1hVM