A/HRC/9/23
page 12
18. As part of their national strategies, States should adopt a framework legislation ensuring
that the right to food is justiciable before national courts or that other forms of redress are
available, so that in situations such as the current one, when the prices of food undergo a sudden
increase, the other branches of government will not be allowed to remain passive, and so that, in
the adoption of measures aimed at realizing the right to food, any discrimination in access to
food or means for its procurement will be effectively prohibited. By defining in a framework law
the obligations corresponding to the right to adequate food with a greater degree of precision,
courts or other monitoring mechanisms, such as human rights institutions, will be encouraged
to contribute to ensure compliance with the right to adequate food. Such accountability
mechanisms may therefore contribute to ensure that, where macro-economic or social policies
are misguided or are not well targeted (for instance, because they underestimate the needs of
certain segments of the population or of certain regions), this will be identified at an early stage
and corrected.
19. While the Comprehensive Framework for Action developed by the High-Level Task Force
on the Global Food Crisis to provide guidance to Governments advocates the regular assessment
of food and nutrition insecurity,19 this is not couched in human rights terms, and is conceived
solely as a tool to guide policymaking at the national level. Thus, the dimension of accountability
remains absent, and the establishment of recourse mechanisms for the victims of violations of the
right to food is not recommended. Instead, these dimensions would be present if national
strategies were grounded on the recognition of the right to adequate food, and if courts or other
mechanisms, including national institutions for the promotion and protection of human rights or
ombudsman institutions, were assigned the task of monitoring whether the different branches of
Government fulfil their duties under the said national strategy. In order to assist States in setting
up such a framework, the FAO Right to Food Unit should be strengthened in the context of the
current reform of the Organization so as to make its work on the right to food less dependent on
the discretion of voluntary donor contributions.
C. Securing rights related to the use of land
20. A particular source of concern is that, despite decades of work on this issue by FAO or the
World Bank, too little attention has been paid to the rights of those who cultivate land or need
access to it as a productive resource, among the answers to the global food crisis. While the
Comprehensive Framework for Action developed by the High Level Task Force on the Global
Food Crisis does refer to the need to implement “a transparent land tenure policy for managing
land effectively while securing access to land rights for communities or individuals, particularly
marginalized groups (e.g. indigenous people, women)”20 it is not developed in any detail, and
constitutes an exception in the range of proposals currently developed in response to the global
19
At 39.
20
At 28.
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