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A millennium promise, 10 years later

It was hailed as the "most important promise ever made to the world's most vulnerable people." But a decade on, the Millennium Declaration and the eight development goals that flowed from it risk going down in history as the most important promise never kept.

Undeniably, some progress has been made. For every child who would otherwise have died from preventable diseases, and for every woman who would not otherwise have survived pregnancy or childbirth, the efforts galvanized by the MDGs have been literally lifesaving.  But the stark reality-highlighted in our focus on the MDGs for this e-newsletter-is that most of the goals are way off the targets set for 2015.

World leaders meeting at next week's UN Review Summit will no doubt give this sorry state of incompliance the best possible spin. The sluggish progress, stagnation and even deterioration in many indicators will be blamed on a lack of resources in times of economic crisis rather than any lack of political will.

But what CESR's review lays bare are the consequences of leaving human rights accountability out of the development process. The MDGs have been viewed as aspirational goals rather than politically-binding commitments. Although the UN refers to them as a "quantitative time-bound framework of accountability," the MDGs do not include effective mechanisms for holding governments to account should they fail to meet the targets.

The MDG framework has been criticized from the start as undercutting countries' human rights obligations, particularly those on economic and social rights. These obligations must take precedence, for they flow from another visionary UN declaration adopted more than 60 years ago: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights may not dictate detailed policy prescriptions for achieving specific development goals. But they do provide a binding ethical framework sorely missing in current efforts to implement the MDGs.

Principles such as the duty to use maximum available resources to progressively fulfill economic and social rights, to prioritize core obligations, and to ensure non-discrimination, participation and accountability, should guide governments' choice and prioritization of policies. The absence of such considerations in MDG implementation to date has had fatal consequences, and has meant that progress has tended to bypass the poorest and most marginalized sectors of the population, fueling inequality within and between countries.

The next five years offer an opportunity to place human rights squarely at the center of efforts to accelerate and monitor progress on the MDGs, so that these commitments, however flawed, can be used as a benchmark for assessing compliance by countries, donors and international actors with their more comprehensive human rights obligations. CESR is also working with others in the human rights and development communities to bring about a shift in the development paradigm beyond 2015, so that any new framework of development commitments that emerges following the MDGs has the fulfilment of human rights and human dignity at its core.