Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention: Law and Practice in the Field by Elizabeth M Bruch

Author:Elizabeth M Bruch [Bruch, Elizabeth M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317274957
Google: 8NEmDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30203906
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

As with local authorities, translation within the mission, even among human rights personnel, required a connection between the law and the practical or political. Human rights are not necessarily synonymous with human rights law, and the authority and usefulness of both law and field officer are in question.

Nathan later continued on this theme, connecting it to the ambiguities of a human rights mandate. The formal mandate reflected in Security Council resolutions may or may not specifically reference human rights law, but most make general mention of human rights. This distinction sometimes mattered in the field:

NATHAN: It was really only the young, young people who had any knowledge of human rights law even as being relevant to a human rights officer job. Awareness that there is this thing out there, human rights international law, and that there are treaties that have these rules in them … People understood the mandate. What is a human rights mandate for me, naturally, the phrase “human rights” brings in international human rights law. You could argue that it’s not exclusively an issue of human rights law. “Human rights” has a broader meaning, but it certainly includes it, you know … For other people it didn’t. They were looking at it, the older notion that human rights [violations are] just bad stuff.45

Nathan describes a process of interpretation in this context that is a familiar labor for lawyers.46 Here, the expertise in the law confers both the power to interpret the legal texts of the treaties, as well as the legal/political text of the mandate. However, that expertise may be limited in value if the role of law is not appreciated or embraced by other participants in the mission.

Over time, this legal dimension of human rights—and of the expertise of the field officer—has become more pronounced. Like Nathan, several field officers specifically distinguished more general understandings of human rights from legal understandings of human rights—or human rights as law based. They also distinguished human rights practice and the work of human rights officers along similar lines, with law and legal experience bringing more certainty and rigor to the work and augmenting expertise. This is the point of “credibility” that Suzanne, who was trained and experienced as a lawyer, raises:

SUZANNE: I think a lot of people who go on to do human rights don’t really appreciate the fact that human rights are law, … and it’s a body of law that should be treated like a body of law, with respect and rigor. Maybe it’s sounding a bit too lofty here, but I certainly see as a manager here that people either come into rights, a) without a law degree, or b) with a law degree and never having practiced … I find that the people who don’t have a law degree and the people who didn’t practice don’t understand the rigor necessary. And they make accusations and rely on misinformation or unsourced information, um, that, makes them lose credibility … Human rights people don’t need to exaggerate it because there’s enough stuff there.

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