THE HUMAN Development 2000 report also calls for concerted stops to eradicate poverty to enable people enjoy human rights and extensive participation of people to ensure that governments take right decisions and honour their commitments. Globalisation, it says, too must be as much about human rights as capital and trade. A ten-point agenda for advancing human rights enumerated in the report calls for strengthening democracy through protection and independence of the judiciary and the media, the inclusion of minorities in the cabinet, the army and other powerful institutions, reform to protect police from political interference and increase in public accountability.

Pointing out that votes alone do not guarantee human rights and that a democratically elected government can crush minorities, it asks national governments and international organisations to tackle oppression, discrimination and new threats to freedom. It also lambasts the world community for being too tolerant to human rights abuses in democracies, saying multiparty elections ate not enough. It warns against growing national and international inequalities, saying they threaten to erode the hard- won gains in civil and political liberties.Laying emphasis on poverty eradication, the report says poverty is much a human rights issue as arbitrary arrest. But it regrets that while the torture of one person causes outrage, the death of more than thirty thousand children every day mainly from preventable causes go unnoticed.

Our view of common humanity must evolve beyond the borders of nation state to where the fulfillment of human rights in any one part of the world is treated with the same seriousness and given the same support as rights in any other, it opines. The report, commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), warns that in many countries progress in civil liberties is being undermined by economic stagnation or decline.Inclusive democracy, it says, embraces all minorities. Violence against minorities is a burning political issue the world over. Even with constitutional protection, minorities can face large threats, it adds, and points out that in Western Europe, immigrant minorities are often victims of racism and violence.

In this connection, the report commends the example of former South African President Nelson Mandela who after first election gave a prominent opposition leader a cabinet post even though his African National Congress enjoyed a comfortable majority.The exclusion of minorities - from Canada to India- is the Achilles heel of many majoritarian democracies. Minorities can be excluded, discriminated against and marginalised. This can lead to violence and even war as in Sri Lanka and former Yugoslavia, it saysArbitrary use of power, the report says, mars many new democracies. Policy is often made behind closed doors whether it is on slum clearance that deprives people of housing, dams that flood houses and farms, budget allocations that favour water supply for middle class suburbs, logging that destroys environment or secretive negotiations with international agenciesThe report regrets that across the world, journalists are attacked and killed and independent media and other elements of civil society, including non governmental organisations harassed.The choice is no longer between democracy and dictatorship. The dark era of military rule is ending.