Speech by the Deputy High Commissioner at the B4Gov - Bocconi for Government Week

“XX CLAPI Day - International Organizations: Between Values and Operations”

27 February 2015

Dear friends,

Many thanks for this invitation. It is a great pleasure to be here, in my home town, together with a fellow UN colleague and Milanese – Filippo Grandi.

The topic of our discussion today is “International organizations: between values and operations”. This is very apt. All of us face dilemmas in managing the gap between our principles and our ability to live by them in real life. Long ago, in another century, I was a philosophy student, and this clash has been the subject of deep thought since Plato, at least. But nowhere have I truly felt it as much as in my work for the United Nations.

The organization I work for is the UN Human Rights Office, and its mandate is to promote and protect all human rights, for all people, in all countries of the world. We are truly an organization based on values – and not just any random values: to many people, human rights represent some of the few truly universal values of the world today. The Universal Declaration for Human Rights, which all States have adopted, has been translated into nearly 400 languages. It is, according to the Guinness World Book of Records, the text that has been translated into the most languages in the world – more languages than the great books of the world’s religions, more languages than world-famous stories like Pinocchio, more languages than even the iphone user manual.

Those human rights include:

• Freedom from any form of discrimination, whether based on sex, race, belief, sexual orientation or any other factor
• Freedom of expression and the right to privacy
• Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
• Freedom from torture
• Freedom from unlawful or arbitrary arrest or detention
• The right to life, liberty and security of person
• The right to education, health, food, shelter, clothing and social security
• The right to a fair trial

Let’s be polite: some States have opted to interpret some or all of these rights in very specific and limited ways. Other governments seem to pick and choose between them: they might, for example, argue that their people enjoy prosperity and education, which somehow magically annuls their right to vote. Or they might refuse to accept that true equality for women should include the right to choose whether or not you marry, or work. Today we see increasing numbers of States arguing that the need to protect their citizens from violence overrides their right to privacy.

But the UN Human Rights Office must seek to protect all these rights, for everyone. Now you may ask, if we have this clear mandate to protect these universal values, how could there ever be any tension between our values and our operations? Why even ask the question? How could a value-based organization ever find it difficult to stand up for its values?
But believe me, we do. We face terrible dilemmas. And so do other organizations in the UN family – UNDP, UNIFEM, UNODC (where I used to work), UNRWA, which Filippo represents, UNHCR, UNICEF – all, with their mandates that range from humanitarian aid, to development, to ensuring peace and security and so on. It is not always easy to stand up for all these values simultaneously when you are operating in the real world.

Sometimes the values that we stand for may seem to conflict with each other. A few years ago, the UN had a peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo that operated with a limited mandate. Under the rules of engagement, the UN’s blue helmets could only arrest persons if they were immediately be handed over to national authorities, and they had no authority at all to detain anyone for a longer period. Legally, only the Congolese authorities could do that. But in the area where the peacekeepers were operating, which was being torn apart by war, there was no police force, no court and no prosecutors. And yet armed men were killing people, raping people, maiming and looting. What could the peacekeepers do? Should they arrest and detain them – which would mean violating local laws as well as the right to a proper trial? Or should they let them free, to kill or maim or rape again?

The human rights officers on the ground found an imperfect, but creative solution. In one of the camps for displaced people, they by chance encountered an official of the Congolese judicial police who had fled the fighting. He offered to write a letter to the nearest court, in Kisangani, to ask the court for an exceptional authorization for the UN peacekeepers to detain people until such time as they could be transferred to the Kisangani prison. The Kisangani court agreed, and the perpetrators were detained and eventually transferred.

Legally speaking, this procedural arrangement was unlikely to hold up in the ensuing trial and the mission was definitely stretching its mandate – but still it provided the best solution available at the time; and an imperfect but acceptable balance between the right to life and the right to due process.

It is not pretty when a UN mission finds it is obliged to violate important procedural rights in order to protect people – but it is hard to run a perfect operation in an imperfect world.

Another very difficult dilemma arises in some conflict situations, where the UN is tasked with helping local security forces to stop the violence – even though we may be aware that those security forces do not respect human rights.

Let me give you an example from South Sudan. As you may be aware, there has been a strong undercurrent of ethnic violence in South Sudan since the country’s independence in 2011 – whether low or high in intensity. And an understaffed UN peace mission has been operating since that time to try to stop this violence, while at the same time seeking to encourage and empower the Government to do the same. But more often than not, when trying to intervene to stop violence, Government forces have cracked down with excessive violence and committed human rights violations in the process.

In the spring of 2012, there was a particularly nasty outburst of violence in the Jonglei region, and the South Sudanese Government approached the UN mission to ask for petrol so as to be able to go to Jonglei and intervene. But the forces being sent to Jonglei did not have a clean human rights record – so what to do? Provide the petrol, and risk enabling a brutal and excessive crackdown by the security forces? Or not provide the petrol, in the knowledge that the violence might escalate, since no law enforcement officers would reach Jonglei in time to stop it?

This is a sadly common dilemma. And the UN has guidelines to deal with it. The Human Rights Due Diligence Policy requires us to support security forces only if they do respect fundamental international humanitarian, human rights and refugee law. The UN must assess whether there are substantial grounds to believe that there is a real risk of recipient security forces committing grave violations of those laws and, if so, they must work with national authorities to eliminate, or at least mitigate, that risk – by for instance, changing a commander with a dubious human rights record for a reputable one; changing the rules of engagement of the security forces in question; or making sure that the security forces are well trained in human rights before intervening.

Back to the petrol in South Sudan. In the end, the UN mission decided after careful consideration to provide the petrol – but only to some of the forces. Others, which were led by commanders who were known human rights violators, could not be given any.

In another, very recent case along the same lines, the UN mission has decided that we must suspend support to the Congolese security forces in a certain region, until the authorities agree to remove two generals who are known violators of human rights from their duties there. This is a decision that may have serious consequences for the people in that region. It is not a decision that can be taken lightly. But sometimes we must stand up for our values, or risk betraying our essential purpose.

Another type of dilemma that we may encounter in the UN are cases where agencies are trying to work together despite having different mandates, and thus different priorities or operational needs. One very clear case of this was in Sri Lanka, during the final, bloody months of civil war in 2008. The UN desperately needed the Sri Lankan Government to permit our humanitarian agencies to access the conflict zones, so that they could bring emergency help to the women, men and children who were trapped there. These people lacked every kind of essential supplies – food, tents, water. They were civilians. But they were also being killed by the very same Government whose agreement we needed to cross into the zones where they had fled. And the Government was also sending very strong signals that if the UN publicly denounced the killings, our staff would be expelled from Sri Lanka – and hence no longer able to provide any aid at all to the population.
We needed access, to help people; but we also needed to stand up forcefully for our values and persuade the Government to stop the killings.

Let’s be frank: we did not succeed. After the conflict, a panel of experts found that although the UN may have successfully delivered its humanitarian aid, it spectacularly failed in convincing the Government to stop the killings. And there have been other cases of such failure, where civilians have been killed in large numbers despite UN presence nearby: although these situations have their own specific characteristics, the Rwandan genocide is one terrible example of this, as was the massacre of civilians in Srebrenica in 1995.

Following the expert investigation on Sri Lanka, the Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, concluded that this was a damaging and systemic failure, and he drew up a new “Human Rights Up Front” action plan which we hope will ensure that this is never repeated. Human Rights Up Front seeks to prevent human rights abuses before they rise to the level of mass atrocities, by emphasizing monitoring and early warning signals. Where prevention fails, the UN’s main priority must be the protection of civilians. In many ways, this is simply a reiteration of the core purpose of the UN. However, Rights Up Front is unique in that it offers a six-point plan directed at the entire UN System to institute changes that will lead to real improvements in prevention and response.

The six points include:

One, clearly integrating human rights into the lifeblood of the entire UN. Not only the colleagues I work with in the UN’s human rights office should protect human rights, but all UN staff should.

Two, providing Member States with clear and candid information about serious violations of human rights. We must tell States what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

Three, UN agencies must work coherently, with the shared priority of protecting civilian life. This may mean operating with division of labour – sometimes a good cop/bad cop strategy may work best. The Human Rights Office can speak truth to power while the humanitarian agencies try to obtain local access. But the effort must be joint.

Has this new action plan had any effect so far? Yes, it has. Let me take you back to South Sudan, this time to the end of 2013, when the violence suddenly escalated into outright civil war and tens of thousands of civilians were fleeing. The UN mission faced a difficult choice. Should they open the gates of the UN compound to shelter these frightened families and shield them from the massacres – even though the Government did not agree, and despite the fact that the mission had barely enough supplies and security for its own staff?

Or should the mission keep the gates to the compound closed, and risk a bloodbath?

In a brave decision, and following the lessons learned from Sri Lanka, the UN mission opened its bases around the country to the frightened, fleeing civilians. Despite its total lack of preparations, insufficient supplies and over-strained security, the mission sheltered over 100,000 people – and today, continues to do so. Unquestionably this has saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of civilian lives.

But not without challenges. Many of these protected civilians still lack some of the basic necessities for a life of dignity. The ethnic violence could not totally be contained even within the camps. Some civilians have been killed, even inside the UN’s premises, by armed so-called “civilians” of another ethnicity, and several peacekeepers have been killed while trying to protect people. Some of the alleged perpetrators of these murders are currently being detained by the UN, without much hope for a fair trial in the broken South Sudanese justice system – entailing similar challenges as in my first example in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our work, in an imperfect world, is far from easy.

[4. The challenge of values conflicting with operational needs]

Before concluding this very frank discussion of the clash between idealism and real life, I feel I must outline another type of dilemma. And I want to use an example from the rich world.

As I said in the beginning, the UN Human Rights Office has a beautiful but difficult mandate: to promote and protect all human rights for all. Unlike UNRWA and many other UN entities, that means that we do not only operate in crisis situations – in wars, in humanitarian emergencies, or in places where there is deep and chronic poverty. We also have a duty to protect human rights right here in Italy, and in the US, in Russia, in China and in every single country under the sun.

At the same time, like all other UN entities, the human rights office is dependent on States, which set our mandates, and permit us to operate within their borders, and fund our work.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, the saying goes. Well, we have to! We have to name and shame and arm-twist even our largest donors when they do not respect human rights. We have to take a stand on Guantanamo with the US, we have to fight attempts at mass surveillance, we need to advocate for the rights of the Roma with France, the situation of migrants with Italy and the situation of LGBTI persons with Russia.

And this can lead to some serious clashes. Let me give you a hypothetical example: What would you do if you were the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Foreign Minister of a powerful nation tells you that “unless you pull back your statement about that torture case in my country, we will withdraw all our financial support?” And if he does that, you will be unable to continue working to prevent torture in another country where torture is so endemic it is basically the rule. Would you persist in standing up for the one torture victim in his country or would you try to save your office’s ability to prevent thousands of cases of torture in the other country where it is rampant? Would you choose to be Kantian in your approach, or Utilitarian?

I will tell you what I would do, but only if one of you tells me what you would do first.

I look forward to your thoughts. Thank you.