“Human Rights - but which Human Rights?”

Aims of this presentation
• Are Human Rights at the heart of Social work?
–IFSW Statement on Human Rights (1996)
–Social Work implications UK Human Rights Act ,1998 (Williams, 2001)
–Key ECHR Rulings
– Social Work literature (Ife, 2012, Lundy, 2011 and Mapp, 2008)
• While we see level Social Work as very much concerned with a Human Rights agenda, there is a need to interrogate the concrete meaning of this agenda in the light of an understanding of the way the context of practice is defined through organisational systems. In other words we need to move away from a general discourse of the ‘goodness’ of Human Rights and look at how institutional systems nurture or stymie this at the level of everyday practice.
• We conclude by arguing that Human Rights based practice needs to be conceptualised as a three way relationship between Ethics, Professionalism and the dynamics of Organisational Systems within a neo-liberal paradigm.