An implementation mechanism for achieving a goal has both monitoring and response components. The monitoring component assesses the distance and direction from the goal, and the response component acts to move toward the goal. An automobile driver, for example, monitors through her eyes, and responds by pressing the pedals and turning the steering wheel. Where the goal is to improve children's nutrition, the monitoring element could use indicators such as food intake or anthropometric measures to assess the location and extent of malnutrition in the society. The response element would involve feeding, health, and care programmes targeted to where the monitoring component showed it was needed.
There are many ways in which such a system could go wrong. The monitoring component may measure the wrong things, or it may not be very sensitive. Or the responses may not work well. For example, income transfers to the family may be diverted to uses other than meeting the needs of the child. Government-funded school lunch programmes that feed all public school students may feed many who do not need assistance, and thus may be unnecessarily costly. People who are technically entitled to a particular benefit may not know about it or may have difficulty accessing it. A child who is fed at a centralized feeding programme may for just that reason get less to eat at home. An effective system would notice these problems, and make constant course corrections to navigate the system toward the goal. The design of a system for assuring children's right to adequate nutrition would have to be refined over time until it could be shown that it really works.
Social service programmes usually reach only some of the needy some of the time. Governments may boast about the number of individuals served, but they tend to be silent about the number of people who are needy but are not served. Accountability means paying attention to that shortfall. The obligation is not simply to provide some service, but to end the problem of malnourished children. Any government that really wants to end childhood malnutrition should be willing to make itself accountable for meeting that challenge.
Assurance that services will be provided results not simply from the creation of service programmes (e.g., school lunches, nutrition education programmes) but from institutionalized mechanisms to establish accountability. An accountability (or compliance) mechanism watches the implementation mechanism to make sure it does its job well. It is located outside the implementation mechanism, and may have its own separate monitoring procedures. Governments have their legislative auditors and Inspector Generals to make sure government agencies stay on track.
In the United States, there is a compliance monitoring procedure designed to assure that the states provide disabled children the educational services to which they are entitled under the law. If a government wants to assure that it will always be attentive to the concerns of children, it could pay for an independent Children's Ombudsman to handle complaints against the government.
Many different kinds of measures can be used to provide accountability. In a well-designed system of rights there will be specialized government agencies (such as Inspector Generals) to assure the accountability of implementing agencies. If they are absent or ineffective, non-governmental agencies can hold the implementing agencies to account.
The use, or threat of use, of the judicial system can be a potent means for keeping implementing agencies on track, but other more political means (such as public information campaigns through the media) may be used as well. In Hawaii, the non-governmental Children's Rights
Coalition has launched a suit against the state government for its failure to provide mandated educational services for learning disabled children. The legal action is being accompanied by a public information programme that will help people to understand their children's rights. If there were a right-to-adequate-nutrition on the books, such a coalition also could bring action against the government for failing to prevent malnutrition.
In general, if the system threatens to go off the tracks, the compliance or accountability mechanism sounds an alarm and takes action to correct the implementation mechanism. Accountability means there are independent observers of the implementation mechanism that have some capacity to take or call for corrective action if the system is not operating well. Ideally there should be explicit standards against which the accountability agency evaluates the performance of the implementing agency. Theaccountability agency is in effect a permanent auditor.
In a negative approach to accountability, a government agency assigned the duty of ending malnutrition could be sued or fined in some way for each severely malnourished child that is discovered, thus increasing its incentive to end childhood malnutrition. (A comparable device may be found in the right of California's courts to sue the state government when prisons are overcrowded.)
In a more positive approach, designated non-governmental organizations could be given an award or "bounty" of a small sum of money for each malnourished child they find and present for services. This sort of positive approach would engage non-governmental organizations in a partnership with government in support of their larger common purpose.
One particular form of accountability mechanism is giving aggrieved parties themselves or their representatives a procedure for complaining and getting some remedy. Human rights in the law rests on the principle ubi jus ibi remedium --- where there is a right there must be a remedy. Article 8 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that '`everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law."
Children's nutrition rights should be articulated in the law, together with a description of the means of legal recourse that are available if even a single individual's rights are violated. If you or your child do not get what you feel you are entitled to under the law, there should be straightforward, simple, accessible, inexpensive, fair, and safe means for pressing your claims. This legal recourse is essential for assuring the government's compliance with the law.
The implementation of the right to adequate nutrition is ultimately the responsibility of government at different levels, but it is also the responsibility of the community at local, national, and international levels. Interested groups both within and outside government can watch the performance of service delivery agencies and call them to account as necessary, even if there is no explicit provision in the law for their playing that role. If the law says that every child has a right to adequate nutrition, anyone who is concerned could help to see that the right is honoured.
The meaning of hard rights and accountability can be understood by recalling the nature of contracts. Suppose you have a contract with me in which I promise to provide goods or services in exchange for a specified amount of money. That contract is not simply an articulation of claims; if it is legally binding it represents enforceable claims. If one of us is not satisfied, there is some third party to whom we can go to press for fulfilment of the contractual obligations. Similarly, a human rights regime can be understood as representing an implicit contract between citizens and government, comparable to that described by Rousseau in The Social Contract of 1762. If that contract is to be taken seriously, there must be some basis on which claims against the government can be enforced.
People in power may resist the articulation of specific rights because rights imply accountability—and political people do not like the idea of being called to account. Nevertheless, the argument is worth pressing. Talk about human rights does not mean much if it does not mean accountability.
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