All good things go together : Menschenrechte, Demokratie und Entwicklung

Human rights, democracy and development have been understood as different themes and handled accordingly. Since the Vienna Human Rights Conference of 1993 and the discussions on Rights Based Approaches in recent years, the separation is increasingly questioned and development cooperation has asked for and promoted approaches which combine human rights, democratization and (economic) development. Based on comprehensive and multidisciplinary theoretical clarifications (chapter 2) the present work presents the thesis that human rights, democracy and development are complementary and mutually reinforcing ("all good things go together"). This is important in two regards. First, new areas and horizons are opening up for political science (especially for human rights-based democratization theory and policy analysis in developing countries and development cooperation). Second, development cooperation should encourage and promote the development and implementation of a human rights and democratization approach. Given the difficult framework conditions (a suboptimal international system of human rights protection, non-existence of a global government system etc.) (chapter 3), it is important to tackle the traditional challenges with innovative approaches. In chapter 4, several empirically researched challenges and approaches from various developing countries (mainly from Rwanda, Cambodia and South Africa) are presented and discussed. It appears that much needs to be done and much can be done on the ground. Human rights are helpful to tackle these challenges as they provide an important reference system. Human rights can be operationalized by using the triad of obligations (to respect, to protect, to fulfil), which allows to specify state obligations at three levels (chapter 5). Furthermore, the analysis of experiences that various actors have already made in promoting human rights and democracy (chapter 6) helps to identify precise results at the normative, analytical and operational levels, which are presented in chapter 7. Beside the big challenge of a (new) global governance system, the challenge is now to combine more closely human rights, democracy and development in theory and in practice, so that a virtuous cycle gets under way (chapter 8).