PRESS CONFERENCE ON REPORT ‘MAKING THE LAW WORK FOR EVERYONE’

During a Headquarters launch this morning of a new report on Making the Law Work for Everyone, Madeline Albright and Hernando de Soto, as co-chairs of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, called for the anti-poverty agenda to include the four pillars of legal empowerment: access to justice and the rule of law; property rights; labour rights; and business rights.

Also participating in the launch with former United States Secretary of State Albright and economics author de Soto was Naresh Singh, the Commission’s Executive Director, who said the independent Commission, hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), had focused on the subject of exclusion from the law throughout the world and had found 4 billion people unable to use the law to create new economic opportunities, or to protect the basis of their livelihoods.  The report itself was contained in volume I.  Volume II contained the expert group reports covering property rights, labour, business, access to justice and the rule of law, and finally, how to make reforms work.

Also, Mr. Singh made the distinction between legal “empowerment” and legal “reform”.  He said the legal empowerment agenda focused on enabling people to organize and take social action, which was a much more political process than a technical reform process.

In her introductory statement, Ms. Albright made note of four former Presidents and a Prime Minister being members of the Commission, and said the launch was the “end of the beginning”, since the report was being turned over to the United Nations.  Consultations would now be held with UNDP, and the next few months would be devoted to considering implementation aspects of the subject with far-reaching implications.

Further, she said Mr. de Soto’s long-developed concept of the “trapped capital” of poor and developing countries had been the impetus for establishing the Commission in 2004.  The concept held that, if the poor had title to their land, they could become active participants in the economies of their countries and really help both their countries and themselves out of poverty.  Upon teaming as co-chairs, they had recruited UNDP and Governments, with Norway as a major contributor to the effort.  The concept of property rights had been expanded to look at access to justice as a basic element, and then to also link it with business and labour rights to see how those 4 billion people could become part of the system in which they lived.

She said the premise behind the Commission was that poverty had to be dealt with, and while there were fewer poor people worldwide than ever, the gap between rich and poor was growing.  Some way needed to be found to include the poor in helping to solve economic issues in their own societies.  But, finding access to the system was difficult, since they were seen mostly as “objects” of States, rather than agents directing their own lives.

Therefore, access to justice was an important part of letting poor people become citizens and participants in their countries, she added.  The report dealt with how to empower those 4 billion through an integrated process of providing access to justice, property rights, business rights and labour rights by garnering political will and conducting education initiatives about how the poor could become part of their own system.

Mr. de Soto said the Commission could not have done its work without the wide spectrum of people brought together by Ms. Albright.  Their views had reflected the situation in the world and consensus had been found on terms “loaded with dynamite” since the cold war, including property rights, business and democracy.  The ideas were talked about, but they had to be concretized for action to be taken.

He said the current food shortage was an example, with the world somewhat prepared because it had developed “ambulance services” such as how to bring in more food where there was famine.  But, in terms of long-term solutions, questions centred on how to produce more food, and poor countries were not responding to what should have been a terrific stimulus, the high prices of food.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the world now produced most of its food from about 1.5 billion actors, but the actors now idle in developing countries numbered over 2.7 billion.

He said the characteristic common to those actors -- mostly in Africa, Latin America and Asia, was that they were “untitled”.  They had no property rights and, therefore, no mechanisms to get organized, so as to put into production the thing whose price should stimulate the production.  Without property rights and identification with a piece of land, farmers had no access to credit and could not raise capital or put together the different facets of production.  They could not respond to prices and the food shortage would continue, or benefit only the developed countries where property rights were very clear.

In the United States, with well defined property rights, he said as an example, production had continued to rise over the past 20 to 30 years and the production of agricultural goods had risen about 250 per cent on ever less land.  A clear idea of who owned what formed the basis for organizing towards better production.  The report dealt with a very important element in dealing with issues without which solutions to other issues couldn’t be found.  Poverty, food shortage and water shortage couldn’t be addressed without addressing property rights and answering questions about who owned what and where.  Global business also wouldn’t benefit everybody until property rights were granted to the poorest in the world, and right now at least 4 billion people didn’t have those rights.

Asked how the Palestinians could claim their property rights, Ms. Albright said there would hopefully be movement on the peace process and that a separate Palestinian State, capable of enforcing its own laws and being able to follow through, would be operating.  The resolution of long-standing issues was involved.

In response to a question on ownership, she said “nobody washes a rented car”, as a Commission member had said.  One who didn’t have property rights would perhaps not work as hard as one who did, and without title to land, it was impossible to get a loan or buy fertilizer.  The food crisis had been highlighted recently by the current crisis in commodity prices and had brought those to a “point of relevance” for the public.  A direct link could be made between food prices and the fact that billions of people did not legally own the land they were on and so were not in a position to improve it.  The concept of “trapped capital” was a way to think about helping the poor and moving in the development cycle.  The property rights of refugees, indigenous people or those related to gender rights had all been looked at and a template developed to allow people to decide, if access to justice was provided within a system.  Then the other issues could be addressed.

Mr. de Soto said the concept of “trapped capital” had been planted onto firm ground in the report, not by providing a formula for solutions, but by providing the space in which to solve the issues.  Physical space could be seen in two ways, one from the perspective of political sovereignty, or the rights of Governments over lands, and the other in terms of property rights, or the rights of individuals and associations of individuals over lands.  Many issues could be resolved by settling a sovereignty problem, but not without looking at the property rights issue, as well.  In developing countries or the Middle East, the tendency was to look only at sovereignty, he added.  Looking at the property rights factors could help resolve sovereignty issues and could contribute to the motivation for taking one political course of action or another.  The report made clear that property rights were not only crucial for addressing issues such as famine, but were a crucial ingredient for the resolution of many political problems.

Asked about the timing of legal empowerment versus security on the ground as in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he said it was impossible to have security on the ground without legal empowerment.  There was no security without knowing who lived where.  There was no telling who was the invader without knowing who was the owner.  Further, there had always been owners.  Even in the case of Tarzan, when he went into alien property, an arrow was shot into a tree near his ear.  The important point was to get ownership rights into law, so you could decide who has the right to what.  American detective shows always depict the police starting out with an address for a suspect and from there went door to door until they found the murderer.  “There is no way to have security without addresses, no way to have addresses without property and no way to have property without legal empowerment”, he said.

Ms. Albright pointed out that a major concern since the cold war had been to sort out how various States functioned, what the role of economic and political development was, how peacekeepers operated and what was to be done with failed States.  The report related directly to States that were in flux or were in trouble in a variety of different ways.  Often, too much time had passed before the structures establishing the rule of law were put into place, and they now needed to be put in place earlier.  Consideration needed to be given to determining the elements of a good State.  Also, States needed revenues and the only way to get that was to make evident who owned the land, who paid the taxes, what services the State provided by building roads and schools and other such issues.  The whole legal structure needed to be out there in place, as a way of dealing with insecure situations.

Asked about linkage to the Global Compact and labour unions, she said the integrative aspects had been looked at, and business people had been contacted and public-private partnerships had been established.  Labour was part of property rights.  Work with the International Labour Organization would continue.

What should be done to create the political will for legal empowerment of people in countries where it didn’t exist? the chairs were asked.  Ms. Albright said an appeal must be made for the rationale of creating a functional State that actually got poor people to be in the system rather than outside it, and who paid taxes and were contributors to the system.

“The political will comes, if in fact you see the creation of a modern State and having more participants in it.  That’s what this is all about”, she said, adding that Heads of State who had been consulted had seen the benefits of not having slums and of having citizens who were not victims of the system but participants.  And it wasn’t a matter of imposing a system on people, but of people understanding that a better State was something worthwhile.

On the question of labour unions, Mr. de Soto said there was a lot of respect for labour unions among the Commission members.  However, in most countries like his, labour unions represented only about 5 to 8 per cent of the work force, since most of the labour was in the informal sector.

Further, he said, Governments had shown interest in providing property rights for their people, but before the Commission’s work there had been no consciousness of just how important it was to legally empower poor people.  The report indicated that property rights weren’t just a matter of conducting surveys and keeping records.  It was a matter of literally empowering people and it wouldn’t move while it continued to be handled as a technical issue -- the way it was handled at the level of the United Nations, the World Bank or international organizations.

“It is an empowering issue”, he said, which needed to be raised to the same consciousness level as refugee issues.  People needed to begin considering that the genesis for implementing legal empowerment in the former Soviet countries and in developing countries was not yet in place.  Also, it was not a matter of looking at the poorest recipients of assistance, but a question of empowering them so that assistance measures were seen tools for development, not just as awards.

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For information media • not an official record