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The shift from 'national security' to 'human security' is of historic importance.
The challenge posed by the massive earthquake and devastating tsunami of 26 December 2004 was a vivid illustration of the advantages of conceptualising security within the inclusive framework of human security. The natural disaster caused catastrophic loss of life in many countries around the perimeter of the Indian Ocean, including thousands of Westerners vacationing in the pleasure resorts. Mother Nature did not discriminate between Muslim and Christian, Tamil and Sinhalese, poor and rich, native and foreigner. She claimed them all equally to her bosom in the sea to bring forcefully home the realisation that we are indeed one human family. We inhabit the same planet earth, and artificially constructed enmity and rivalry based on the competitive and exclusionary concept of national security can be irrelevant to securing citizens against the real threats to their safety.
As the tsunami example illustrates, the concept of security has been stretched both horizontally, to embrace issues beyond just the military; and vertically, moving up to embrace regional and global structures and down to local and individual identities. Human security puts the individual at the centre of the debate, analysis and policy. He or she is paramount, and the state is a collective instrument to protect human life and enhance human welfare. The fundamental components of human security - the security of people against threats to personal safety and life - can be put at risk by external aggression, but also by factors within a country, including 'security' forces.
The reformulation of national security into the concept of human security is simple, yet has profound consequences for how we see the world, how we organise our political affairs, how we make choices in public and foreign policy, and how we relate to fellow-human beings from many different countries and civilisations.
One 'leg' of human security is in the human rights tradition which sees the state as the problem and the source of threats to individual security. The other is in the development agenda that sees the state as the necessary agent for promoting human security. Both are reflected in the UN policy discourse, and indeed may well explain why the human security discourse first arose within the United Nations and was popularised by the 1994 Human Development Report. Human security was said to include the seven dimensions of economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security.
In general, Canada and Japan have emphasised a different leg each of human security. Canadians have given priority to protecting citizens at risk of atrocities arising from failed or perpetrator states and set up an international commission to try to reconcile the imperative to render effective protection to at-risk populations with the persisting reality of state sovereignty. Japan has prioritised the developmental leg of human security, and set up its own World Commission on Human Security.
The Canadian-sponsored commission defined human security as 'the security of people - their physical safety, their economic and social well-being, respect for their dignity and worth as human beings, and the protection of their human rights and fundamental freedoms'.
The Japanese-sponsored commissioned defined it as protecting 'the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfilment'. It means 'creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity'. The emotional rod that connects both the protection and wellbeing agendas is solidarity across borders, the sense of shared affinity with fellow human beings qua human beings regardless of differences in nationality, race, religion or gender.
The reality of human insecurity cannot simply be wished away. To many poor people in the world's poorest countries today, the risk of being attacked by terrorists or with weapons of mass destruction is far removed from the pervasive reality of the so-called soft threats - hunger, lack of safe drinking water and sanitation and endemic diseases - that kill millions every year, far more than the so-called 'hard' or 'real' threats to security. The 2005 Human Development Report has some telling - and grim - comparative statistics. For all of India's economic successes in the past decade, its child mortality reduction rates have not matched those of its poorer neighbour Bangladesh. Had India matched Bangladesh, 732,000 fewer Indian children would have died in 2005. Among children aged 1-5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys. That is, 130,000 girls are discriminated to death every year in India. Globally, on 2005 trends, the shortfall in the Millennium Development Goal target for reducing child mortality will lead to 4.4 million avoidable deaths in 2015. Some 2.3 million children could be kept alive through preventive and curative neonatal interventions at a cost of $4 billion - just two days of military spending in the developed countries. More than one billion people in the world lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion to sanitation. These deficits could be overcome through a decade-long annual investment of $7 billion - less than what Europeans spend on perfume - which would save 4,000 lives each day from the resulting reduced exposure to infectious diseases.
Reconceptualising security in human terms compels scholars and policymakers into an explicit evaluation of such policy trade-offs. This was starkly and tragically illustrated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans when it became clear that because of Iraq, the region had been starved of funds that could have strengthened the levee flood protection system, and had about one-third fewer National Guards available to help with the disaster rescue and relief operations.
Human security thus gives us a template for national policy and international action, and that is its attraction for the United Nations both in peace and security, and in development. And that is also why it gives me great pleasure to be able to moderate this session on "Human Security and the Role of the ILO". An ILO study last year concluded that only 8 percent of the world's people live in countries providing favourable economic security; about three-quarters live in circumstances of economic insecurity that fosters a world full of anxiety and anger.1 I look forward to learning more about the ILO's work and role in promoting human security.
1 International Labour Organisation, Economic Security for a Better World (Geneva: ILO, 2004). The book is described as exploring the social and economic dimensions of human security: www.ilo.org/public/english/support/publ/xtextsp.htm#b6117.