How are disaster relief and human right related and how are they different?
That’s been a big challenge for me as a kind of person who really believes in a basic human rights strategy. Fundamental to the human rights strategy is the notion that by virtue of the fact of being human you have basic rights and the way that comes across in any country is it’s also by virtue of being a citizen you have certain rights. In virtue of being a citizen rights would be given by the government, but a place like Haiti the government doesn’t have money to deliver even the right to vote. The international community becomes engaged in so that people have the right to vote because no poor government can pull of an election without a lot of help. Somehow with education and with healthcare we assume that the government whatever they can do fine, and the rest we can make people pay for. That’s not basic rights approach and so we’ve tried to support the public sector to deliver rights to health as a basic right free of charge. In disasters were used that model as well. We bring our
