Abby Deshman
Centro de Asesoria Laboral de Peru (Peru)
This summer I worked with the Centro de Asesoria Laboral de Perú (CEDAL), a human rights-based development organization based in Lima. The focus of the organization’s legal efforts is on economic, social and cultural rights as defined in the United Nation’s Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights(ESCR) and other international agreements. As part of this work, they publish materials to increase the population’s awareness and understanding of their rights, as well as litigate cases before national courts and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Their most widely recognized case dealt with the Peruvian State’s arbitrary reduction of pension benefits owed to thousands of retired workers, but they have also worked on cases involving the rights of migrants, miners, the physically and mentally disabled and youth among others.
I was involved with several projects at CEDAL. The organization is trying to implement regional monitoring teams that will be able to identify and communicate possible human rights violations. The country, however, is highly centralized, and the vast majority of professionals live in Lima. Furthermore, the professionals living outside of Limahave almost no training in a rights-based approach to development and social policy critique. In order to help teach and guide the local teams, I was charged with writing a rights-based diagnostic of economic, social and cultural rights in five regions of Peru. Ideally, the report was to include locally perceived concerns that could be slotted into a rights-based context, statistical indicators to quantitatively assess the situation and support the local perceptions as well as examples of specific cases that could possibly be brought to court and litigated. When it is published it will be distributed as a model to the regional teams, as well as sent in to the United Nations as an alternative civil-sector report on the state of economic, social and cultural rights in Peru.
This turned out to be, or I made it into, an enormous project. It involved elaborating legal norms and the relevant statistical indicators for each right, finding and analyzing regional statistical data, conducting interviews and reading past reports. I was supposed to be coordinating with several teams of people, a group of lawyers from a university clinic as well as the monitoring teams based in the target regions. Unfortunately, it proved difficult to get in contact with and illicit work from the teams. The report was also supposed to be in Spanish, a goal that I gave up on half way through the summer when I realized that the revision work of my Spanish version would probably be more intensive than any translation work I would create by writing it in English. In short, I learned an enormous amount but I was not able to finish writing the entire report by the end of the summer. I am, however, anxious to see it published and am still coordinating with the NGO to finish it and print it, which will hopefully happen by December.
I was also involved in several side-projects. I helped the NGO apply for consultative status with the UN and start the process of incorporating themselves into the OAS. I also attended several regional conferences on topics such as debt reduction, ESCR, free trade, and the agro-industry among others. We also held several inter-university and city-wide youth conferences to educate youth and in particular law students about ESCR and publicize the recently approved Peruvian National Plan of Human Rights. Currently, I am investigating the possibility of helping the legal team research a case they are planning on bringing before the IACHR concerning the cruel and inhumane treatment of mental health patients. Overall, working with CEDAL was and continues to be a very rewarding experience and I look forward to finishing my current report and providing them with whatever support I can offer for future projects.