Phase one:

1) Develop, through a webinar series, dedicated website, newsletters, virtual and in person trainings, and research support, a North-South dialogical process that will introduce and reinforce PCHR as an ethical framework that defines and centers as human rights, the material, cultural and social needs and aspirations of de-colonizing peoples, nations and oppressed classes engaged in concrete mass opposition.

2) Serve as a repository for compiling and disseminating information on human rights issues and struggles of African and other nationally oppressed peoples and classes, with a special focus on African peoples in the Americas and migrant African peoples in the areas of the Global North from the U.S. to across Europe.

3) Build specific institutional relationships with partner organizations in the Americas, Europe and Africa.

4) Integrate PCHR’s frame and counter-narrative into the ongoing work of the Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) campaigns and programmatic work, such as the domestic “No Compromise, No Retreat” campaign, the American-wide Zone of Peace campaign, the “Shut Down the U.S. Africa Command” work and BAP’s other Anti-war and anti-imperialist initiatives.

The United States settler state was established by the violent theft of Indigenous land through conquest and the importation of enslaved Africans who were forced to provide free labor using systematic, unspeakable physical violence such as lynching, rape, race riots, torture and murders by police forces.

These forms of violence constituted the method by which structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy and racial capitalism were established, reproduced and thrived and are the methods by which the U.S. capitalist state maintains its dominance globally using military interventions to control the labor, land natural resources, and the collective wealth of the vast majority of the world’s peoples.

Despite what proponents of the Western “human rights” regime proclaim, the human rights idea is not innocent. This notion of human rights emerged as an aspect of classical liberalism at a particular historical moment in Europe informed by the internal class/social struggles and the colonialist expansion of various European powers. While classical European liberalism professed a fidelity to the “rights of man” and the proclamation that all “men” are equal, it simultaneously provided philosophical justifications for slavery, genocide, settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and imperialism – systems that degrade, dominate, destroy, and systemically oppress human subjects. 

The systematic degradation, dehumanization and murder of Palestinians with the full support of the “collective West,” is a graphic example the moral dualism of the white supremacist Western project.

How has liberalism been able to achieve this? Because at the heart of the liberal project are exclusionary criteria for those who deserve to have rights - that tragically for millions of people during the last 500 years of European dominance, rest on a stratification of humanity in which Europeans and their civilizational project is at the apex. It is that internal moral contradiction that explains how Thomas Jefferson could speak of fundamental equality while holding slaves, raping Black women, and facilitating the genocide of, and brutal land theft from Indigenous peoples; how Winston Churchill could call for self-determination of nations while maintaining a colonial empire; how U.S. authorities can justify kidnapping and assassination even of U.S. citizens and the invasions of States, all in the name of fighting Islamic terrorists; and how war can be employed in the name of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect” but is ignored when Palestinians face a genocide.

Therefore, for social justice activists around the world, but particularly in the global South, it was precisely these moral contradictions by both Western and non-Western states that created deep dissatisfaction and mistrust of human rights as an instrument for radical social change. It appears to many of these activists that the orthodox framework is not able to offer any more than bland reforms and a depoliticized politics.

In response to the human rights crisis of relevance, a “people(s)-centered human rights” concept and approach has been developing from the margins of the U.S. human rights movement over the last few years. Introduced in 2004 by Ajamu Baraka, human rights activist and co-founder of the Black Alliance for Peace, the PCHRs framework is informed by the African American radical human rights tradition and recognizes the contingent and contested nature of human rights framework. The modern expression of PCHR developed out of the organizing and agitation directed at the newly formed United Nations between 1945 and 1951 and subsequently taken up by figures like Malcolm X and elements of the radical Black anti-colonial, revolutionary movements in the 1960s. This tradition of human rights struggle combined the struggle against white supremacy and anti-colonialism with a commitment to domestic and global systemic transformation. As a political project historically and socially grounded in the needs and realities of oppressed communities and peoples and committed to social justice and the development of the people as autonomous political subjects, it rejects the mystification of the supposedly non-political, universalist perspective and practice of human rights.

There was something quite different with Malcolm’s approach to human rights that distinguished him from mainstream civil rights activists. By grounding himself in the radical human rights approach, Malcolm articulated a position on human rights struggle that did not contain itself to just advocacy. He understood that appealing to the same powers that were responsible for the structures of oppression was a dead end. Those kinds of unwise and potentially reactionary appeals would never result in substantial structural changes. Malcolm understood oppressed peoples must commit themselves to radical political struggle in order to advance a dignified approach to human rights.

“We have to make the world see that the problem that we’re confronted with is a problem for humanity. It’s not a Negro problem; it’s not an American problem. You and I have to make it a world problem, make the world aware that there’ll be no peace on this earth as long as our human rights are being violated in America.”

And if the U.S. and the international community does not address the human rights plight of the African American, Malcolm is clear on the course of action: “If we can’t be recognized and respected as a human being, we have to create a situation where no human being will enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Malcolm’s approach to the realization of human rights was one in which human agency is at the center. If oppressed individuals are not willing to fight for their human rights, Malcolm suggested that “you should be kept in the cotton patch where you’re not a human being.”

If you are not ready to pay the price required to experience full dignity as a person and as members of a self-determinant people, then you will be consigned to the “zone of non-being,” as Franz Fanon refers to that place where the non-European is assigned. Malcolm referred to that zone as a place where one is a sub-human:

“You’re an animal that belongs in the cotton patch like a horse and a cow, or a chicken or a possum, if you’re not ready to pay the price that is necessary to be paid for recognition and respect as a human being.

“And what is that price? 

“The price to make others respect your human rights is death. You have to be ready to die… it’s time for you and me now to let the world know how peaceful we are, how well-meaning we are, how law-abiding we wish to be. But at the same time, we have to let the same world know we’ll blow their world sky-high if we’re not respected and recognized and treated the same as other human beings are treated.” 

In the contemporary period, PCHR advocates continue that approach but with an even more explicit focus on naming the main enemy of human rights – the Pan European White Supremacist, Colonial/capitalist patriarchy.

People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) are those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves and Collective Humanity through social struggle.

This definition is a description of a process and an ethical framework as opposed to a pre-figured list of items defined as representing human rights. This is one of the key differences between the liberal framework and PCHR. PCHR’s approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom-up.

PCHR’s approach to human rights activism does not limit itself to a national legal regime or to the normative standards reflected in international human rights treaties, covenants or declarations. While this approach recognizes the importance of these texts and the legal and ethical principles implied in them, the ultimate meaning of the language in the texts, the scope of rights that will be recognized, and the modalities for rights implementation, are an evolving process whose final determination is dependent on popular political struggles and societal dispensations of power. De-linked from the bias and partial ontology of classical liberalism—and grounded in the racist, sexist and classist pretentions of natural law and presumptuousness of its universality—the content and teleology of human rights becomes an area of contention itself.

This is not to say that the people-centered approach lacks a “foundation” or source of legitimacy—nor is it arguing for moral relativity. The approach simply recognizes a different foundation, source of legitimacy and moral authority – that of the people’s positive struggle for social justice. Therefore, the “people” in struggle, with an understanding that the construction of the “people” is a political process informed by specific national realities, the PCHR’s approach eschews the legalistic and morally vacuous debates around “collective rights” and the “justiciability” of economic, social and cultural rights, while real live “collectives” (peoples) are starving; losing lands to transnational corporations, being denied the right to speak their languages, or having their leaders killed. The “universal” norms that a people-centered process would reflect would be grounded in and guided by the needs and aspirations of the people.

This is the Black Radical Tradition’s approach to human rights.  It is an approach that views human rights as an arena of struggle that, when grounded and informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed, becomes part of a unified comprehensive strategy for de- colonization and radical social change.

PCHR’s framework provides an alternative and theoretical and practical break with the race and class-bound liberalism and mechanistic state-centered legalism that informs mainstream human rights.

The people-centered framework proceeds from the assumption that the genesis of the assaults on human dignity, which are at the core of human rights violations, is located in the relationships of oppression. The PCHR framework does not pretend to be non-political. It is a political project in the service of the oppressed. It names the main enemies of human dignity and rights: the Pan European white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy and all forms of human oppression that flow this material reality.  

Therefore, the realization of authentic freedom and human dignity can only come about as a result of the radical alteration of the structures and relationships that determine and often deny human dignity. In other words, it is only through social revolution that human rights can be realized.

The demands for clean water and clean air; accessible and healthy food; free quality education; healthcare and healthiness for all; housing; public transportation; family sustaining wages and socially productive employment that allow for a dignified life; ending of mass incarceration; universal free child care; opposition to war and the control and eventual elimination of the police; self-determination; and respect for democracy in all aspects of life are some of the people-centered human rights that can only be realized through a bottom-up mass movement for building popular power.

By shifting the center of human rights struggle away from advocacy to struggle, Malcolm laid the foundation for a more relevant form of human rights struggle for people still caught in the tentacles of Euro-American colonial dominance. The PCHR approach that creates human rights from the bottom-up views human rights as an arena of struggle. Human rights do not emanate from legalistic texts negotiated by states—they must develop out of and reflect the aspirations of the people. Unlike the liberal conception of human rights that elevates some mystical notions of natural law (which is really bourgeois law) as the foundation of rights, the “people” in formation are the ethical foundation and source of PCHRs.

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