The traditional and conventional approach to human rights was normally associated with limits on political freedoms and the enjoyment of civil rights, denounced in regular reports 2by inter national organisations.

This was what justified, to some extent, the uneasy scepticism of some sectors within developing countries when the UNDP announced that the theme for the GHDR 2000 was the relationship between human rights and human development.

For a long time the two approaches have marched along parallel paths, with the human rights movement directed essentially towards monitoring respect for civil rights and political freedoms, while human development dealt with analysis in the socio-economic domain.

While it may be an established point that, in conceptual terms, human development and human rights start out from somewhat different assumptions, it is undeniable that the two concepts share the same motivation and vision: the promotion of the dignity and well-being of individuals.

The convergence in what motivates and moves the two concepts establishes a strong link of complementarity and even of inter dependence between them. Thus an integrated approach of human development and human rights has laid the conditions for the emergence of a perspective posing the right to development as one of the basic freedoms of individuals.

The GHDR 2000 takes up this innovative approach, and discusses the advantages of such a linkage. For example, the full use of civil rights and political freedoms enables the poor to oppose openly the trends and forces of social exclusion, expropriation, exploitation and other excesses.

In this context, if a community's inadequate access to education, nutrition or health ser vices, noted through the human development measurement and analysis, were understood as a violation of fundamental rights, the approach itself would impel social forces into action to hold people publicly responsible, which is in itself halfway towards a solution.

The human development indicators are aimed at assessing the broadening of people's capacities, while human rights focuses on the enjoyment of freedoms and responsibilities, and the dignity of individuals, as well as the role of the leadership in safeguarding these rights. In other words, while human development concentrates on inputs and their results, the perspective of human rights is concerned with identifying the causes of disparities and insisting on their correction. In this relationship, human rights and human development strengthen each other . (UNDP, 2000: 91)

This conceptualisation is simple and complex at the same time. Simple, because on the one hand it insists on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of social phenomena. Complex, because it advocates an approach of causality that escapes from the tradition of static definitions of the observed and quantified phenomena.

When Sen (1999) defines poverty as the "privation" of the capacities needed to lead a life that the people affected value and long for , he is, in the first place, arguing that poverty is not a rational choice. It is the result of socialisation, or rather it is the product of objective factors that inhibit particular groups of people, and even entire nations or geographical areas, from generating the income necessary to ensure a better life.

By stressing "privation", he implicitly indicates that the solution of the problem is to remove the factors of privation, which is the same as advocating the social responsibility of "the main actors". These "actors" may be confined to national boundaries, or they may be inter national organisations.

In other words, more than just talking about the simple need to fight poverty, the underlying idea is that individuals have a "right" not to live in conditions of "privation". Observing the rights to decent work, to participation and freedom of association and expression, the right to live free of want and fear, and the right to non-discrimination allows the establishment of "social arrangements" and "institutional orders", whether national or international, which promote poor people from the category of "passive recipients" of the results of sophisticated development programmes to the objects and subjects of this process.

In this approach, the poor also become part of the solution to their own undesirable condition. The r ole of the state and of society in this approach is to place freedom from all privations at the epicentre of initiatives, and to play a role of supporting and protecting human capacities, rather than to set themselves up as supply systems or conduits for ser vices ready to be consumed. The rights to development and to education dealt with earlier also fit into this perspective (Sen, 1999: 53).