For Media Interviews: ToddHowland@MaximsNews.com

Todd Howland is the former Director of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights and he has also worked on numerous human rights missions with the United Nations, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Commission of the European Communities, the Carter Center Human Rights Program and many other programs.

WHEN WILL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW BE THE BASIS FOR ACTION AT THE U.N.? by TODD HOWLAND (MaximsNews.com, U.N.)

UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com, UN/ - 08 March 2007 --   Many commentators have speculated about the direction the new United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will take the organization.  His desire for “continuity with change” highlights his diplomatic skills, but it leaves plenty of room for commentators to speculate.  

One place where a break from the past is needed relates to how the organization views its own human rights obligations.  

The UN creates human rights law through painstaking efforts in various committees and at numerous conferences.  Oddly, it ignores human rights law in many of its operational activities, most notably in its peace missions. 

The UN pontificates about achieving sustainable peace only through respecting human rights for all and through human security, but the organization ignores these sound principles in the way it structures and fields its operations.

Why does this happen?  It relates to some outdated notion of who is bound by human rights law.  Bizarrely, human rights and humanitarian law are discussed and debated intensely at the UN before the UN intervenes, to determine whether it must or simply should take the step of intervention. 

But once the UN – acting on behalf of its Member States – decides to intervene, the relevance of human rights law basically disappears.

The lack of integration of insights about how to achieve sustainable peace obtained from empirical observation and rigorous study is best explained through how money flows within the UN, bureaucratic turf battles and dysfunctional limits created by Member States placed on UN action.  

These limits are driven by domestic politics and often undermine the effectiveness of UN operations.

As odd as it may sound, political and bureaucratic concerns trump human rights obligations in the organization of international missions, mainly because Member States and UN bureaucrats don’t think they are bound by human rights law in the organization and operation of an intervention.  

This odd position is, of course, also the case in bilateral efforts.

The New Secretary-General should make it clear that human rights law needs to be followed in the international community’s responses to conflict and in measurement of a mission’s accomplishments.  

The UN must move from vague efforts to “integrate and mainstream” human rights to understanding them as binding legal standards.  

To get there we must recognize that human rights obligations apply extraterritorially and that more than one state (e.g., both the host state and those Member States involved in the peace mission) can have obligations to the same individual.  

Such a notion is fully consistent with human rights law as well as general principles of law.  

The application of the human rights framework in peace missions is both practical, given it will enhance performance of field operations, and mandated, given Member States don’t leave their human rights obligations at their borders when acting internationally, even if acting through an agent – like the UN.  

The present UN mission to Haiti is a clear example of the desperate need for a human rights framework and the current marginalization of human rights in peace missions. 

Blue helmets were sent to Haiti even though the main problem was not a civil or even a hot war.  

The main problems were poverty, a long history of bad governance, and weak institutions (especially those needed to protect the rights of the Haitian people).  

The idea of a one-size- fits-all mission comes from structural problems (some related to how money flows), a perceived lack of options, and the lack of accountability of peace missions to improving the human rights situation; this needs to become part of the restructuring agenda.

Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton has a point: the UN and its Member States need to be held accountable.  

Although UN reform and accountability are overdue, more influence from a US delegation that confuses accountability with appeasement and democracy with friendship is destined to make the UN as ineffective as it has been in Haiti .  

It is overdue for Member States to take their human rights obligations seriously and recognize that human rights law provides a framework for government action inside and outside their own countries. 

Thus, peace missions need to be conceptualized, staffed, financed and implemented and success measured based on international human rights law.  

Accepting and applying human rights law to peacekeeping operations will trump operational dysfuctionalities and allow the UN to cohere its academic understanding of achieving sustainable peace with the operations supposedly designed to achieve it.  

It is a change the new Secretary-General cannot afford not make.

         ToddHowland@MaximsNews.com

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