Biography

Dr. Jhansi Seetharam Chittoor (Institutional affiliation: Coordinator, Gujarat Research Society for Lifelong Learning,Mumbai, India) has acquired a Diploma in Adult & Continuing Education & a Doctoral degree. She also completed an international Course in Adult Education from Israel. She has authored several articles for national & international journals on several subject areas.

Article Title

Sustainable Development and Human Rights – Perspective and Challenges for the Caribbean SIDS

Abstract

The relationship between development and human rights has a long history, both in concept and in practice. Sustainable human development today has become the prevailing development paradigm both in terms of process and outcome. It can only be achieved through the gradual integration and realization of the basic human rights and fundamental human freedoms. In this sense, human rights and sustainable human development are interdependent. One cannot be achieved without the other. This is what is essentially meant by the rights-based approach to development, an approach increasingly advocated and practiced by the United Nations development agencies and programmes. Globalization is a high priority item on the international agenda. Further, the process of globalization is also linked with sustainable development and human rights issues. The Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are all concerned with, and indeed are struggling, primarily within the World Trade Organization (WTO), to keep pace with the process of globalization, some with more success than others. This paper aims to examine issues and processes relating to the implementation of human rights norms in the context of sustainable development in the Caribbean SIDS. It gives an overview of the universal system of human rights and its main components. It includes in its analysis non treaty-based sources of human rights, i.e., major United Nations resolutions. The paper concludes that while the SIDS of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), by and large, have endorsed and acceded to the complex and ever-growing international human rights system, traditionally little consideration is given explicitly to the nexus between human rights principles and norms and development issues and processes. It is only in recent years that a rights-based approach to sustainable human development has gradually found its way into development thinking and development practice.