I Book Review: Privatisation and Human Rights in the Age of Globalisation
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410502300414 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Part D: DocumentationI Book Review |
Koen De Feyter and Felipe Go
´mez Isa (eds.),
Privatisation and Human Rights
in the Age of Globalisation
, Intersentia, Antwerp-Oxford, 2005, xii + 328 p.,
ISBN: 90-5095-422-7*
Privatisation of public services takes place in all parts of the world, both in poor and
in rich nations. It is a complex phenomenon that may take many different shapes
and creates many different problems. Take the privatisation of gas in a poor country
like Bolivia, for example. Since privatisation nine years ago, the annual State take
from the gas industry has fallen considerably, even though known reserves have
grown ninefold.
1
Now relate this to the privatisation of the sophisticated Dutch
health care system, where the government is in the process of introducing
competition between the insurance companies, which are all to become private
entities. These are both very different developments, and yet they lead to similar
human rights questions: what are the implications for consumers when a
government delegates its responsibilities to private entities? What does this
delegation mean in terms of the availability, accessibility and quality of the services?
The human rights framework does not yet provide a clear answer to these
questions. However, the book under review, which is the result of a joint research
project under the auspices of the Center for Human Rights (University of
Maastricht, the Netherlands) and the Institute of Human Rights Pedro Arrupe
(University of Deusdo, Basque Country, Spain), is a useful attempt to address these
matters.
2
In 11 chapters it discusses the relationship between privatisation and
human rights from various perspectives.
Before discussing the book’s general outcome, a brief overview of its chapters
(which have not been numbered) is in place. The first three chapters provide
important general information on the relationship between privatisation and
human rights. In the first chapter, De Feyter and Go´mez Isa set the stage for the
book by explaining a few basic ideas. The following chapter by Go´mez Isa builds on
this information and introduces the subject of globalisation. Graham in the third
chapter discusses human rights and the privatisation of public utilities and essential
services. Although focusing on the United Kingdom, he also includes a few
important general comments about this relation. Robbins then continues in the
fourth chapter to give a critical account of the privatisation of prisons, whereby the
focus is on the US. Aman in the fifth chapter explains how domestic administrative
law offers means for addressing human rights violations arising from the privatisa-
tion of, again, prisons in the US. In the sixth chapter Lamarche addresses the right
to social security in the context of globalisation. The emphasis in this chapter,
however, appears to be more on the right to social security as such than on the
privatisation of social security. Courtis in the seventh chapter, gives an account of the
privatisation process of public services in Argentina, where privatisation took place
alongside growing recognition of the normative value of human rights law. Bloche
subsequently addresses the question of whether the privatisation of health care is a
human rights problem in the eighth chapter. He argues that in principle it is not,
but may become so in societies where the provision of public health care is least
I Book Reviews
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Vol. 23/4 (2005) 697
* Brigit Toebes works as a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom.
1
The Guardian, 3 June 2005, p. 17.
2
For a report of the final conference, Newsletter of the School of Human Rights Research, Vol. 9,
No. 2, June 2005, pp. 5-6 (www.law.uu.nl/english/orm).
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