The state and human rights
The National Budget and Human Rights, Abdel-Khaleq Farouq, Cairo: The Society for Human Rights Legal Aid, September 2002.
Rare are those studies in economic and legal rights literature that deal with the relationship between the national budget and economic, social and cultural rights. Perhaps this is because of the relative novelty of the subject in international thought, having only received official attention at the UN International Social Summit held in Copenhagen in 1995. Hence the importance of this book, which represents the first Arab attempt to link economics and finance with modern concepts in the field of international humanitarian law.
As a document, the national budget, Abdel-Khaleq Farouq explains in his preface, offers a succinct mirror of the nature of social and class relations in the country and embodies the government's social and political agenda with respect to these relations. As such, it should be subject to analysis to determine how closely its priorities are in tune with the economic, social and cultural rights of individuals and groups in society.
The study opens with an overview of legal developments in economic, social and cultural rights, guiding readers through many of the concepts and principles enshrined in such international charters as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), the more than 180 conventions issued by the International Labour Organisation from 1919 to the end of the 1990s and, finally, such UNESCO conventions as the Declaration of Principles for International Cultural Cooperation (1996). Taken as a whole, these many agreements and conventions constitute the legal edifice for the realisation of human rights and for the promotion of a higher degree of international conformity in the application of such principles.
Against this backdrop, Farouq goes on to study the presence of economic and social rights provisions in Egyptian constitutions. Of particular interest is his observation that no mention of such rights had been made in any Egyptian constitution prior to the first post-revolutionary constitution of 1956, of which 18.4 per cent of its 196 articles were dedicated to the protection of the economically underprivileged, the promotion of social cohesion and the rights to education and health care. In the 1923 Constitution, by contrast, only four articles were devoted to the right to obligatory education, the right to form societies and the right to health care. No attention was given to the rights of the poor, who had formed the backbone of the 1919 Revolution that ultimately led to Egypt's first constitution.
Farouq then presents an analysis of the state of social, economic and cultural rights at the beginning of the 1990s. The many facts and figures he cites are stark and paint a uniformly bleak picture. By the 1990s, standards of public education had fallen into such decline that, on the eve of the earthquake of October 1992, the then recently appointed minister of education confessed that the educational system was in a state of collapse. Public education at all levels had become dependent on a parallel system of private lessons, without which students stood little chance of passing end-of-year exams. So powerful and pervasive had the informal educational "market" become that government schools and universities had almost fallen under the control of the "private-lesson mafia". Meanwhile, other cultural services were being operationally and financially undercut as the government became increasingly dependent upon television as the primary means for "acculturation".
The grossly under-funded public health services were in worse condition. In 1984, state hospitals dealt with some 37 million cases, a number that climbed year after year due to various environmental and psychological causes: traffic, pollution, lack of green spaces, lack of potable water and proper waste-disposal systems throughout most of the country. Even without this rising influx of patients, public hospitals were drastically understaffed and under-equipped, a situation not improved by the phenomenon Farouq calls "investment in ostentation": the squandering of large sums of money in lavish redecoration projects for hospital administration buildings and offices. Uncontrolled housing, with all its attendant social, health and psychological hazards, had also come to comprise 37 per cent of urban dwellings. In spite of the warnings that had appeared in studies conducted by various specialised agencies, the tacit acceptance of this phenomenon by successive governments over a quarter of a century contributed to its spread.
Funding for care for children, the aged, the infirm and crippled was negligible, the brunt of these responsibilities having to be borne by various civil-society organisations. Unemployment had risen to six million, and this according to official figures. The private sector and the Social Development Fund, created in 1991 to address this problem, were unable to make a significant dent in the task of generating jobs for the millions of secondary school and university graduates entering the job market, while, ironically, the process of privatisation was proving to be a new source of unemployment.
While Farouq admits that significant sums were allocated to food and other subsidies, he explains how the government's subsidy policies reflected the growing "structural imbalances" in the Egyptian economy since 1974. He also informs us that a large segment of these allocations were "hypothetical" subsidies, such as those intended to support the costs of petroleum derivatives or the interest rates on certain types of cooperative loans.
Farouq is keen to avoid the subjectivity and vagueness that have plunged other studies of the "social dimension" of the national budget into the morass of partisanship and political rhetoric. He therefore establishes a set of objective analytical criteria, deriving what he terms a "public-expenditure efficiency ratio", or PEER, which he then applies to assess government performance on social, economic and cultural rights. But, he also discusses -- and in a way that is highly accessible to the lay reader -- the methodological problems in studying national budgetary performance. For example, changes in methods of accountancy and the reorganisation of the national budget more than five times since 1962/63 have impeded comparison and analysis, making it difficult to follow the financial development of many sectors.
However, of particular benefit to experts and lay readers alike is the chapter on "How to read the national budget", in which Farouq explains many economic terms and concepts, such as "public expenditure", "government expenditure", "net expenditure" and "gross expenditure". Equally enlightening is his discussion of how the national budget lends itself to a variety of "readings". It is a document, he says, that can be approached through the lens of an economist, sociologist, or demographer, as well as, in this case, an advocate of economic, social and cultural rights, on the condition, of course, that stringent methodological procedures are applied.
The study is as comprehensive as it is exhaustive. Farouq scrutinises his documents in terms of those areas or sectors that received the largest share of the pie of wages, investments and expenditures; in terms of the allocations for local and foreign debt servicing (which, he maintains, have had a profound impact on the financial structure of the national budget); in terms of allocations to economic authorities, and finally in terms of the geographic distribution of allocations. The outlays to economic authorities, he informs us, have not been listed in the national budget since 1979, ostensibly to afford these authorities greater flexibility in contending with market forces. In fact, they have registered a net deficit of LE55 billion over a quarter of a century, while the only ones to remain in the blue -- the Suez Canal Authority, the Central Bank and the National Petroleum Authority -- have developed into virtual states within the state.
Against this general backdrop Farouq turns to the distribution of expenditure across fields relevant to economic, social and cultural rights, such as education, health care, infrastructure, cultural institutions and libraries. It is here that we begin to get a glimmer of hope, albeit a faint one. Outlays for education more than tripled over the decade since the beginning of the 1990s, and the PEER rose from 0.4 per cent in 1996/97 to 0.67 per cent in 2001/2002. However, Farouq notes that there have been only minor improvement in what he terms "quality factors", such as numbers of students per professor, decline in the "private-lesson mafia", adequacy of pedagogic equipment and student success rates in pre-university schooling.
The PEER for health care also showed a significant rise during the same period, if progress here proceeded at a more modest pace. It is significant that in his analysis of budgetary performance on health care, Farouq departs from the norm by including outlays for fresh water supply and waste disposal in his calculations because of the importance of these factors to preventive health care. In the past, by contrast, budgetary analyses have treated these elements within the context of their position in the budget, under expenditure for housing and construction. On a less upbeat note, Farouq observes that the "right to housing" has not received a commensurate share of the national budget. In spite of the enormous allocations for this sector, he points out that housing for the poor and for limited-income groups has received only a very modest fraction of the whole, a phenomenon he attributes to an increasing reliance on "deficient and distorted" market forces and mechanisms.
Budgetary performance in the field of culture has undergone an even greater decline over the past ten years, as expenditure on the cultural sector has dwindled in favour of increasing spending on the media (Ministry of Media and Information and the Radio and Television Union). Farouq observes that allocations for various cultural departments, including the Ministry of Antiquities, which alone gets a quarter of all cultural spending, were less than half of outlays for the state's information organisations. Moreover, over the past decade, spending on culture has never exceeded 0.8 per cent of the total.
Farouq concludes this compelling study with a telling contrast. From 1991/92 to 2001/ 2002 the armed forces and the Ministery of Interior received more than LE130 billion, a figure that does not take into account the enormous sums of US military aid that Egypt has received since Camp David. Otherwise put, over the past 11 years our national security agencies and armed forces have received approximately 17 per cent of the annual national budget, or the equivalent of between 9 and 10 per cent of annual GDP. Needless to say, this is far higher than the budgetary shares of such sectors as education and health care, which have an immediate impact on the quality of life of millions.
Reviewed by Nasser Zaki
