Launch of the Professional Standards for Protection work

CICG
Geneva, 30 April 2018
Remarks by the Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights

Thank you for the opportunity to join you in the launch of this welcome manifestation of our work together; in which we have sought to articulate the relationship between, and complementarity of, human rights and humanitarian law and their implications for our practice standards.

On behalf of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, I thank in particular, Peter Maurer for his leadership and his example; Ambassador Heidi Grau, Head of Human Security Division of the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs for her commitment to this effort and through her Switzerland for their kind hosting of us and; Volker Türk, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, UNHCR for his partnership and friendship which is invaluable as we UN agencies strive to lift ourselves on to higher standards of delivery for protection and impact for those who need us most.

Friends, the world is changing around us in ways, and at pace, difficult to fathom and with consequences impossible to fully predict:  demographically, technologically, environmentally: it is driving crisis, contagion, conflict, calamity; manifesting too in political instabilities –  in instances and places where the State fails, betrays, is without capacity or simply is absent.

This is no longer the same world in which our organizations’ missions were founded, our mandates ascribed; our claims of operational legitimacy forged; not the same place in which we learned our various professional disciplines or shaped our common practices.  

Much of what we are familiar with – our underlying assumptions – is emerging as out of step with the world as it is, and as it will be because we linger behind in the world as it was.  

To be better suited/adaptive to the realities of this profoundly changing and changeable world, our siloed, fragmenting thinking, and its methods and practices – should be jettisoned. 

It then follows that aspects of our typologies likely need deep challenging.  In regard to humanitarian action, we understand, for example, that speed is king.  And mine is most certainly not an argument against rapid response.  But with conflict mainly protracted; with disaster not only rapid in onset; with deprivation of essential services not just the result of a temporary absence of capacity but the product of deliberate policy of some governments – our orthodoxies must be also re-examined.  

The old divisions between (longer term/slow onset) development and (short term/rapid response) humanitarian spaces have to be challenged.  Convenient as these may still be for our operational purposes, frequently those distinctions bear little relation to the reality of the lives of the people we are to serve, specifically so when for years they are caught up in so-called crisis.

In this regard, the African proverb is instructive – yes, “To go fast, go alone”.  Is speed the main challenge of this changeable world?  For the proverb concludes – “But to go far, go together.”  If you ask me, our greater challenge is to go further for more for longer – sustainably and more inclusively.  And it is in enhancing this “togetherness”– our capability for cooperation/collaboration – that we must invest.

Damn our self-interestedness; our own brand-based individual worthiness.  Damn our straplines and our “market shares”.  Damn our need to prove “stand apart” value in order to “earn” stand alone investments from our donors.  Damn the competition we foster among ourselves. For each time those dimensions seize our practice - dominate our delivery - the core purpose of our work moves off centre, is pushed further aside.  

Our organizations’ preoccupations with “brands”, “niche”, (donor driven) ideas of “attribution” – with the contest between claim and counter claim as to our own distinctive value; our preoccupation with “comparative”, rather than collaborative, advantage – these things are likely be leaving us less well equipped to focus on the best solutions for the main purpose.

That purpose is the person.  People themselves - who must always be at the centre of all that we do - the dignity of that person who, absent the relief, support and essential services we provide, suffers the most.  Not a person dismantled and fragmented into the bits and pieces of our separate mandates (her stomach fed by one; her education served by another; her shelter provided by a third with – her sexual and reproductive rights served by?).   Not a person rendered silent and passive, in gratitude for our largesse.  Not as someone without voice, without choice, without the information they need to freely consent to what they are about to receive.  

No.  At the centre of our project must be always the person as partner and as agent:  The primary first responder.  The essential peace enabler.  The wider reaching provider of relief.  The true front liner.  Indelibly, a rights holder.  

In this framework, I am attempting to describe – if you like - the person from “above the neck”, not merely “below” it -  the person willful, clamorous, demanding, acting; that person whose rights to equality, to non-discrimination, to choice, to participation do not crumble in disaster; are not left behind when in flight; do not fade away when crisis mounts.  

Their rights endure – rights after all constitute us as human beings.  And when we pretend otherwise; when our practices guard not, nor comply with, these standards - the consequences always, without exception, are de-humanizing.

For our sectors/our organizations to rise to the demands of this time in which a more profoundly person-centered project is needed, we will have to see and engage the person more holistically – in their entirety as holders of rights universal and indivisible.  

Which brings me to acknowledge just how dependent is the “human rights” contribution to protection of people in tough places, on the partnership with you that these Standards are intended to support.  

Human rights can be seen as too abstract, too legalistic and too a-practical.  We offer no tent, deliver no food; we don’t set out vaccinations stations or offer maternity services.   But, on the other hand, we can spot cruelty a mile off!  We can spot the wrongs of discrimination in protection practices – intended or otherwise.  We can spot too where peoples’ rights to active participation must be activated for integrity to be better embedded in those practices. And we recognize how key ensuring responsibility for wrongs is, knowing that people will seek justice whether we provide justice infrastructure or not.  

It is a strange that while, universally, we readily recognize human beings hunger for food and thirst for water, but rarely appreciate just how intensely humans long too for justice.   

While unrelieved starvation and dehydration quickly get the better of us, the ache of injustice works in different ways at a different pace.  A longing rapidly formed once we are wronged, injustice’s ache lingers long and deep, unless relieved.  And if unrequited, while it may not lead directly to the demise of the wronged, over time if fermented into hard-held resentment, grievance - even hatred - it readily may cause the demise of another/s.  

Indeed, conflict after conflict has been fueled by grievances unrelieved - long nursed and long unrecognized. Which is why efforts to establish transitional justice and the rule of law are crucial if we are to help communities achieve and follow the practices of non-regression and non-recurrence.  That is why justice services should be regarded as essential services, as is the case for their counterparts in health, food and shelter.

In this regard, human rights framing also affirms, and urges prioritization for, the part that civil society actors and human rights defenders play in processes for communities’ expression of grievance, in their resilience and recovery.  It is essential that our systems of delivery neither displace or compete with those local actors just as we must never seek to silence them or be made complicit in their silencing.  To the contrary, the essential – even if insufficient – path for peoples’ dignity sustained - even in the toughest of places at the toughest of times – is people themselves; people in exercise of their rights to freedoms of expressions, association and assembly; it is they – not us – who are the greatest asset for the purposes of sustained recovery, non-recurrence and non-regression.

Which leads us to the crucial question of what might “build back better” mean in this approach?  What does a less-siloed, more joined-up approach offer in the context of aftermath and for a reconstruction effort that is about more than tangible material infrastructure – as important as that is.  Well, it is clear that our contribution to recovery processes must deepen inclusion of efforts to divert building-back towards new more rights-based, rights fulfilling pathways, paved with a greater loyalty to equality, inclusion and to justice.  

Which brings me to a critical dimension of a challenge we all face. And that is how best to exercise and sustain our courage not only to act in dangerous places but: stand up for the rights of unpopular people, in unpopular places with unpopular needs. We have to be ready to stand up for their inconvenient truths; the truths that many Members States would rather not hear or confront.

That leads me to my final point.  To uphold such values in our operations we must be truly values based.  To be values based, we must be values observant ourselves.  Perhaps the greatest existential threat to the humanitarian project writ large is of our own making – our own violations of those values - eating at the core of our credibility and calling into public question our trust-worthiness/our social license to serve. 

Specifically, sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation – our associated failures of duty of care to our own colleagues, notably to women in the field – and our failure to protect those whom we serve from ourselves – these instances are mounting exceptional threats to our standing on so many levels.  They are beyond unacceptable.  And it is to the end of such violations of our duty and our trust – and of other prohibited conduct – that we must truly dedicate ourselves as a sector, not merely agency by agency.   

Our standards of practice must stand on standards.  In this, the 70th anniversary year of the UDHR, we should recall where those standards come from and stand up accordingly.