Human Rights versus the Humanitarian Ideal: Sustainable Programming in Countries with Questionable Human Rights Records

The humanitarian assistance community is gradually forming a consensus that sustainable interventions should focus on building resilience in order to successfully address the ongoing effects of natural disasters and complex emergencies as well as to minimize the effects of new crises.[1] Such attempts often require working within local government institutions to build local capacity in health, education, food production, or any one of the many silos that fall under the sprawling UN Cluster System.

Ideally, these efforts strengthen the institutions of local and national governments which represent the interests of the communities they serve. But what happens when these efforts are undertaken in less than ideal circumstances, as they so often are? Even a cursory analysis of humanitarian aid financial allocations shows that there is significant overlap between the places where the largest amounts of humanitarian assistance are dispersed (Figure 1) and countries which are repeatedly rated as having an extreme risk for human rights abuses (Figure 2). Under these circumstances, it is unavoidable that humanitarian assistance and human rights advocacy will sometimes conflict with one another.

Figure 1

            The core principles of humanitarian assistance are built around those first iterated by the International Committee of the Red Cross: impartiality, neutrality, and independence.[2] Impartiality demands that dispersal of assistance must rely solely on the need of the recipients. Neutrality requires that the organizations that conduct humanitarian operations not take action in support of nor against any party to a conflict. And independence necessitates that operations are conducted free of outside influence. The ‘rights-based approach’ to humanitarian assistance acknowledges fundamental disparities in resources and power and in many ways directly contradicts all three of these principles. Acknowledging that specific populations (such as those prone to gender-based violence[3]) may be disadvantaged because of inequities could challenge the notion of impartial assessment of need. In a conflict where one or more parties are actively committing atrocities, a human rights-based approach might demand that humanitarian organizations do away with neutrality in order to advocate against abuses. And the need for sustainability in interventions may necessitate working with local communities and governments in order to build capacity and resilience.[4]

Figure 2

            When working in countries with a history of human rights abuses, humanitarian assistance organizations must therefore choose between two equally difficult approaches. Either an organization can entirely embrace the humanitarian principles, working impartially, neutrally, and independently. But as Alex De Waal says, “sending relief is a weapon of first resort: popular at home, usually unobjectionable abroad, and an excuse for not looking more deeply into underlying political problems.”[5]  These organizations can do their part, pack up, and head home, and will do so again and again in the same parts of the world because they choose to ignore the underlying inequities that underpin the global system, creating fault lines for economic, social, and political unrest and consistent vulnerability to environmental extremes. NGOs can also choose a human rights-based approach, seeking to tackle disparities both locally and systematically in a hybrid of activism and service delivery. But they will be seen as representatives of western powers pursuing an agenda of globalized ethical norms that may in practice be anti-traditional. This in turn may further undermine the notion of humanitarian neutrality for all organizations, regardless of their view on these issues.

            The issue of neutrality is of specific importance because it is critical to gaining access to many populations in the direst need. Whether in Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Yemen, humanitarian space is gradually being eroded by the perception that aid organizations are working with and for Anglo-American and European interests. The populations affected by conflict were the raison d'être for humanitarian aid in the first place, and the rights-based approach threatens to cut off practitioners from this population. Furthermore, it is hard to say where the rights-based approach is to end. If a country is actively committing genocide, would an international NGO be philosophically required to support armed intervention to end the conflict on behalf of the targeted disparate population? The end result might only be that increased mortality is more broadly distributed across the population, as occurred in Somalia or Kosovo[6]. Similarly, neutrality and impartiality can lead to compromises that are similarly abhorrent to the humanitarian ideal. For example, distribution of food aid to both victims and perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide, employment of local nationals as staff who were likely linked to warlords in Somalia.[7]

            Organizations that switch in-between these roles will necessarily be undermined by their past history. Médecins Sans Frontières would have a very difficult time operating clinics in territory controlled by the Taliban if they had a long history of advocating abortion and other contraceptive rights for women. Similarly, Human Rights Watch would hardly be considered an authoritative advocacy organization if they had previously compromised with the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in order to gain access to Syrian prisons. Both types of organizations are needed in the humanitarian space, but they must also remain separated, since their principles are fundamentally at odds. The most logical response to this reality is that organizations must pick a clearly defined role and stick to it, or risk losing their institutional credibility. This is the only way that the humanitarian and human rights-based organizations can continue to do their respective work, coexisting in countries with a history of human rights abuses, for the people that need them the most.

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[1] Smillie, I. (2001). Patronage or partnership: Local capacity building in humanitarian crises. IDRC.

[2] McGoldrick, C. (2011). The future of humanitarian action: An ICRC perspective. International Review of the Red Cross, 93(884), 965-991.

[3] Liljestrand J. Sex selection, gender-based violence and human rights abuse. Acta obstetricia et gynecologica Scandinavica. 2008;87:482-482.

[4] Choi, B. C., McQueen, D. V., Puska, P., Douglas, K. A., Ackland, M., Campostrini, S., ... & Corber, S. J. (2008). Enhancing global capacity in the surveillance, prevention, and control of chronic diseases: seven themes to consider and build upon. Journal of epidemiology and community health,62(5), 391-397.

[5] Alex De Waal, Famine Crimes (Oxford: Indiana University Press, 1997).

[6] Kernot, S. (2006). Humanitarian intervention: Human rights versus humanitarian assistance. Global Change, Peace & Security, 18(1), 41-55.

[7] Kernot, S. (2006). Humanitarian intervention: Human rights versus humanitarian assistance. Global Change, Peace & Security, 18(1), 41-55.