A human rights-based technique to science, technology and development pursues to place a concern for human rights. The human right to relish the benefits of scientific progress and its applications embraces the protection of cultural and scientific works, and urges putting science to work improving society. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights acknowledges the right of everyone to “share in scientific development and its benefits” Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 27)
This Declaration was aserted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948 as a common standard of attainments to all the people of the all nations. It starts out, for the first time, vital human rights to be universally guarded.
The Article 27 utters that:
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
For making science more closely with society, and to make accessible to all, many of analysts have a view that the elements of the right to enjoy the advances of scientific progress and its utilization are availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality but this article focuses on the component of accessibility because this element is the one which affirms that access to scientific information is a right.
This indicates that the assets of scientific advancement should be shared publicly, free from limitations by social groups, corporate entities or states. More than that, a rights-based approach to science pursues to generate the situations for equitable contribution in the global science community and impartial access to scientific information and goods.
Human-rights based approach in other words recognizes that science is a socially organized, human activity and shaped by organizational arrangements and processes. It also inquires how governments and other stakeholders can make and execute policies to guarantee security, health and livelihoods. It also includes people’s requirements and priorities in progress and environmental strategies; and to safeguard they partake in decision-making that affects their lives and resources.
It confirms everyone’s right to participate in and benefit from scientific advances, and also be safeguarded from scientific misuses.
Human rights-based approach in Science and technology also wants scientists to go beyond knowing how their work associates to human rights, and claims that they strive to secure and avow human rights through the knowledge they produce.
Science is a respect for human rights is two-way street that profoundly rely on each other. Let’s for example scientists are dependent on human rights in order to protect their own scientific freedom which in return let them promote welfare and human rights through their work.
On the other side, science and technology boost the development and even the fulfilment of human rights. It extends to information and communication technologies (ICTs) as tools that possibly facilitate access to scientific knowledge. ICTs are rapidly influencing our lives in different ways but the use of ICT tools can also be repressed through censorship which leads to digital divide that bring new forms of exclusion. This demonstrates how human rights approaches can defend demands for impartial and effective use of technologies such as ICTs.
Science is a right to sustainability, functioning to protect the poor and vulnerable from the excesses of market-driven science and technology. Exclusive of human rights approach to science, technology, and development, the uneven distribution of goods from services and natural resources to intangible resources such as human dignity and sovereignty. It would only grow intensified, resulting in further environmental degradation and, especially, worsened vulnerability.
Precisely human rights-based approaches should not be considered as merely ornamental moral lengths to policy or scientific and technological innovation. They can make the very heart of sustainable futures.