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1. The eighth meeting in the series was held on Monday
7th March 2005 at ODI and was chaired by James Darcy.
The speakers were Anneke Van Woudenberg and Andrew Bonwick.
2. The first speaker, Anneke Van Woudenberg,
promoted the idea that human rights should play a central
role in humanitarian assistance. People affected by
crises were beginning to demand their rights rather
than simply humanitarian relief and this was evidenced
in recent demonstrations in Kanga Bayanga, eastern DRC,
where the local population refused food aid: they did
not want humanitarian assistance; they wanted an end
to the suffering of conflict and human rights abuses.
3. Van Woudenberg suggested that when we talked about
human rights in chronic humanitarian crises, we were
talking about the right to life, freedom from torture,
rape and arbitrary arrest. Whilst rights were not limited
to these, the focus was perhaps necessary given that
economic and social rights were less well defined and
more difficult to realise in practice.
4. Much of the controversy surrounding human rights
in humanitarian action revolved around the principles
of neutrality and impartiality. Aid agencies did not
operate in a political vacuum and could afford to ignore
neither the political context in which they operated
nor the human rights violations to which they were witness.
Agencies were open to manipulation and aid could be
used as a tool. This had happened in Bunia: aid agencies
based there when it had been taken over by one of the
two main ethnic groups involved in the conflict had
been unable to properly coordinate their responses to
the manipulation and to speak out with one voice. Recent
events in Sudan had raised a similar dilemma.
5. Van Woudenberg suggested that, in reality, situations
which required short-term life-saving interventions
were rare, particularly in Africa, and the human rights
and humanitarian community needed to work together to
improve the situation. Agencies increasingly faced ongoing
crises where human rights abuses had become entrenched
and agencies themselves had become part of the landscape.
If their chances of being able to withstand manipulation
were to be improved, it was vital for both humanitarian
and human rights agencies to speak out and to incorporate
human rights into their programming. Using the human
rights framework to alter the tone and the nature of
advocacy gave agencies greater opportunity to influence
the parties to a conflict.
6. A second area of contention was the promotion of
the peace and justice agenda in these very difficult
conflict situations. Van Woudenberg argued both that
justice played an important part in reducing conflict
and that agencies had a role to play in that process.
The work of the International Criminal Court (http://www.icc-cpi.int/)
was just beginning in complex conflicts such as Uganda,
the DRC and Sudan and this was raising complicated questions
about what agencies did with the information they had
about human rights abuses, either during the conflict
or by ensuring that it would be available to promote
justice when the time came. Agencies needed a much clearer
policy on this. Ultimately, whilst the constraints on
operational agencies were greater, the agendas of humanitarian
and human rights agencies were essentially complementary,
and the questions were more about how to get information
into the public domain than whether to.
7. The second
speaker, Andrew Bonwick, opened with the question
of whether human rights continued to apply in humanitarian
crises. He argued that advocacy was not necessarily human
rights work. In Srebrenica in 1995, despite being both
hungry and thirsty, the first question people asked was
'are we safe here?' and the second was 'where is my family?'.
For Bonwick, this was not about rights, it was about safety.
Darfur had been described as a human rights crisis, but
it was questionable whether the people of Darfur saw it
that way or were concerned primarily with safety. What
was the value of employing human rights language for situations
like Darfur, when the same language was being used to
talk about school uniforms in the Western press?
8. Human rights had been held to be indivisible, inalienable
and universal. The humanitarian agenda was much narrower
and focused on ensuring basic subsistence and basic
safety. For humanitarians, justice and due process were
both held to be a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
In northern Uganda, for example, the test would be the
question of whether referrals to the International Criminal
Court would serve towards meeting the need for safety
in the region or work against this.
9. The 1996 joint evaluation of the international response
to the Rwanda genocide had concluded that humanitarian
action was no substitute for political action. Political
action might be a precondition for effective humanitarian
action, for example in the form of UN Security Council
action. However, whilst humanitarian advocacy was a
necessary part of humanitarian action, its effectiveness
had to be judged by whether it actually helped to make
anyone safer in contexts such as Darfur. Humanitarian
advocacy was concerned not only with political level
negotiation, but also with local level action to deliver
on basic humanitarian needs, and this was as much about
negotiation with district officers as with officials
at the national or international levels.
10. Another area of contention identified by Bonwick
was the relationship between human rights and humanitarian
principles. Whilst there was no real conflict between
human rights / humanitarian advocacy and the requirements
of impartiality (that assistance be provided on the
basis of need and need alone), the more difficult dilemmas
were in relation to the principle of neutrality. Neutrality
could be understood either as 'not taking sides' in
a conflict, or as not doing anything to involve the
agency in political controversy. The latter, however,
was unavoidable. Whilst it was important not to be party
political, humanitarian agencies could not be apolitical.
Oxfam's country director had been asked by the government
to leave Sudan at the end of last year because of a
statement which he had made. A constant balance had
to be sought between the need to continue working in
a country and to speak out.
11. International law had been defined as a process
of decision-making based on norms and desired outcomes
(Rosalyn Higgins). This went beyond the rule-based approach
- which in its focus on the gap between law and the
reality of violations was destined to result in constant
frustration - towards an understanding of the law as
a process into which values became gradually incorporated.
The norms governing UN Security Council intervention
had evolved from a stark reluctance to intervene in
Biafra to the point where the necessity of involvement
in Darfur was considered a given.
12. Bonwick suggested that law should be first used
as a benchmark against which to measure the treatment
which people could expect to receive and, secondly,
as a mechanism for locating responsibility and determining
who advocacy should be aimed at. Another argument often
put forward was that the law could command and entail
enforcement. However, Bonwick suggested that, in reality,
this was a weak tool at the international level. When
people were not likely to respond well to being told
what to do, political and moral arguments were necessary,
and these could be humanitarian rather than legal.
13. Bonwick concluded that, whilst there was some complementarity
between humanitarian and human rights agendas, the overlap
was not total. Agencies needed to focus on the areas
of common concern and complementarity. Whilst advocacy
was an essential component of humanitarian action, agencies
needed to consider the timescales required for successful
advocacy, particularly given that humanitarian actors
tended to think in weeks or months rather than the longer-term.
Finally, if law was not to serve as a dangerous excuse
for inaction, it needed to be used as one of a range
of tools by which to bring about humanitarian outcomes
and defend humanitarian norms.
14. A central theme of the discussion was the relationship
between human rights and humanitarian needs, including
the difference between rights-based and needs-based
approaches in practice. It was suggested that the Sphere
project (http://www.sphereproject.org/) had started
out as an explicit attempt to link needs and rights,
and might become a tool for RBA in practice. Could a
rights-based approach also serve as a tool for strengthening
NGO accountability given that it provided clear standards?
15. Much of the discussion focused on the question
of what was to be gained from adopting the language
and perspective of rights, rather than humanitarian
needs or any other approach. Women's rights provided
an example of the added-value, particularly in addressing
sexual and gender-based violence. The emphasis on rights
shifted the focus away from rape as a reproductive health
issue, requiring palliative care and post-rape counselling,
towards a focus on rape as a human rights violation,
which required redress and preventative action to be
taken.
16. However, Bonwick suggested that many of these issues
related to the question of what was understood by humanitarian
need. The 'protection' agenda had been essentially about
including safety as a humanitarian need. Agencies were
often engaged with efforts to get people to stop doing
various things, and the question was whether rights
were the only or the best way to do this. He suggested
that there was a certain 'tyranny' associated with human
rights practices and the documenting and monitoring
of individual human rights violations rather than a
focus on the impact of those violations to the community
at large.
17. There were also questions about priorities between
rights or particular classes of rights. Van Woudenberg
pointed out that civil and political rights had become
much better established and incorporated into international
law. There were debates within Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty about the "less hardcore" economic
and social rights but the view was that, in conflict
crises, the more critical civil and political rights
necessarily took priority. Against this, it was suggested
that the exclusion of health from the list of rights
which should be accorded priority by human rights organisations
was not likely to be shared by those suffering from
disease or HIV/AIDS in crises, and did not reflect the
reality of priorities on the ground. An alternative
perspective, which sought to reconcile these two apparently
conflicting positions, was that there was no incompatibility
between believing that all rights were of equal value
(with no inherent hierarchy), and agreeing a priority
agenda for action on rights within a given context.
18. A number of points were raised in relation to civil
society and local stakeholders. It was pointed out that
the costs of speaking out did not concern only the international
staff, but also country staff and the thousands of human
rights defenders around the world who put their lives
on the line. There were also questions about how far
human rights advocacy could be anything but normative
and value-driven when the state in question was not
a signatory to the international conventions. In these
countries and elsewhere, international agencies still
tended to neglect the role of civil society and of local
and national NGOs in developing a strong advocacy movement.
19. This raised the issue of how far advocacy was likely
to constitute a political agenda. It was suggested that,
in Latin America, the human rights agenda was more political
than in some other contexts, with the result that there
was less of a cross-over between human rights and humanitarian
agendas and they may even become incompatible. In these
contexts, or where donor agencies were essentially prohibited
by their mandates from doing human rights work, the
language of humanitarian need and the need for safety
might be more effective. Consideration of the relationship
between human rights and the state or political agendas
also raised questions about who was likely to be safer
and whose voice more effective in pursuing advocacy
at the local, national or international levels.
20. In this respect, it was argued that a careful consideration
of risks, as well greater coordination between actors
at each of these levels was required. However, there
were questions about the extent to which greater coordination
was both practicable and desirable. Whilst humanitarian
agencies had been known to use the backdoor to get information
on abuses out to human rights agencies without jeopardising
their neutrality, such efforts were sporadic and, given
the extent of the risks, were also highly dependent
on the context and personalities involved. Finally,
it was suggested that whilst offering no easy solutions,
the tension between human rights and humanitarian agencies
might be helpful, in challenging each other, helping
to keep both on the right track and in addressing different
aspects of crises, so that whilst there might be complementarity,
the efforts to seek convergence might be at best misguided.
