Partnerships in Protection

An Overview of Emerging Issues and Work in Progress

by Larry Minear

Director, Humanitarianism and War Project

Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies

Brown University

Providence, RI

An Independent Background Paper

Prepared for the UNHCR Conference on Strengthening Collaboration

with Humanitarian and Human Rights NGOs

in Support of the International Refugee Protection System

Council on Foreign Relations, New York City

March 11-12, 1999

Introduction

The conference being convened by UNHCR is designed to promote a "protection partnership" between UNHCR and NGOs, with an emphasis on identifying steps needed to put such a partnership into place. This Background Paper analyzes emerging issues and recent developments as they bear on the three major issues on the agenda: (1) cooperation between UNHCR and NGOs on advocacy and the promotion of protection principles, (2) cooperation in specific field settings, and (3) greater sensitivity to protection needs on the part of NGO field operations.

Anticipating the participation at the conference of humanitarian and human rights NGOs, the Background Paper provides an overview of seven issues that have emerged at the "interface" between assistance and protection. An Annex presents a sample of work in progress at the interface and offers a selection of materials and training initiatives being developed. It is hoped that participants at the conference will refine the analysis and flesh out the inventory of activities to form a more comprehensive picture.

Drawing on the work of the Humanitarianism and War Project, the Background Paper and Annex are an independent contribution prepared at UNHCR’s request.

Emerging Issues

The UNHCR conference on protection partnerships take place at a time of both negative and positive developments in the area of protection. On the negative side is what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in her letter of invitation, terms the "continuing decline in States’ respect for their international treaty obligations in this area." On the positive side is a growing awareness that protection issues must loom larger in the work of the wider family of organizations involved in the humanitarian enterprise.

As a result of sometimes-bruising experiences during the first post-Cold War decade and the soul searching that these have produced, there is growing recognition among organizations active in providing relief assistance that they must be more sensitive to human rights violations among the populations they serve. The experience of the Rwandan refugee camps in Goma was a watershed for aid groups in this regard. For their part, human rights organizations are coming to acknowledge that relief assistance represents a companion endeavor to put flesh on basic economic and social rights.

For reasons examined below, however, productive partnerships on protection concerns are at a fairly early stage of evolution. That is clearly the case within the NGO community, where partnerships are beginning to emerge between NGOs that focus on assistance delivery and human rights groups. It is also the case within the UN system. There, while UNHCR is the focal point on refugee protection and has established ongoing relationships with NGO partners, many other UN agencies are also involved in human rights concerns. Protection partnerships thus involve multiple relationships, some within the NGOs family and others between NGOs and one or more UN agencies. Some of those relationships are already in place, others are in the process of being created.

Stepped-up interaction at the "interface" between assistance and protection has highlighted a number of issues that are currently being processed in discussions within and among organizations. Seven are identified: nomenclature, the international legal framework, the institutional division of labor, operational challenges, the roles of indigenous organizations, the nature and appropriateness of advocacy, and the need for greater professionalism and accountability. Each is examined in turn, with special reference to the meeting's agenda.

1. Nomenclature

The March meeting brings together what are commonly referred to as "humanitarian" and "human rights" NGOs. There is considerable debate, however, about what the two groups of agencies and their respective activities should be called. There is a growing sense that to frame the debate in terms of a dichotomy between humanitarian assistance and human rights works against the holistic approach to protection that many are seeking to promote. The traditional nomenclature seems questionable for a number of reasons.

The first is conceptual. Relief activities are based on underlying affirmations concerning human rights. "Humanitarian NGOs" are implementing internationally recognized rights: for example, to food, shelter, health care, and education. Their work affirms that persons in need enjoy the right to humanitarian assistance, that humanitarian organizations have a concomitant right to provide it, and that governments should grant them access. Conversely, human rights organizations, while they have traditionally focused on civil and political rights, are increasingly sensitive to the rights-related nature of relief work.

A second difficulty with the standard nomenclature is an institutional one. Some flagship humanitarian organizations -- foremost among them ICRC and UNHCR -- have "dual mandates": that is, their reason for being encompasses both assistance and protection. The ICRC, for example, approaches the two elements as opposite sides of the same coin. "In an armed conflict," writes one official, "it is not the provision of relief as such which gives the Red Cross its unique character but rather the conjunction of relief and protection." UNHCR, while it has a separate protection division (now department) and specialized protection officers, views every field person, whatever the specific portfolio, as involved in protection.

Thus arises a third difficulty, more operational in nature. Activities in the field by single mandate as well as dual mandate agencies do not fit neatly or exclusively into one category or the other. Many assistance activities, by virtue of their contacts with imperiled populations, have a clear protection impact and even intent. Conversely, human rights monitoring can play a role in the needs assessment and strategic planning on which effective aid programs are based. Indeed, as each set of agencies contextualizes its work more clearly in relation to the wider task, the era of "single mandate" agencies -- or at least of assistance and rights agencies operating in isolation from each other -- is waning.

But what should the wider task be called? The nomenclature issue involves more than semantics. Although activities to provide relief assistance and protect human rights now more clearly affirm a common commitment to human dignity, agreement has yet to be reached regarding how such activity at its most inclusive should be labeled. Some analysts, including the Humanitarianism and War Project, have defined "humanitarian action" as encompassing both assistance and protection activities. Others are committed to making "human rights" the chapeau for both. Still others believe that "protection" itself is the best overarching concept, since protection is what is needed to ensure that the full spectrum of human rights is realized.

Of course, the historical relationships of the two communities and their perceptions of each other influence views on the choice of chapeau. Some humanitarian organizations are reluctant to situate their activities in a rights framework because of the perceived political nature of the human rights enterprise. At issue is both the behavior of political authorities that create such abuses and the traditional denunciation of such behavior by human rights organizations. Aid groups fear for the neutrality and continuity of aid activities themselves. Both stand to be affected either by a backlash from criticisms of rights abuses or by the imposition of human rights conditionality as a means of pressuring abusers.

Some rights advocates view the word "humanitarian" itself as pejorative. They challenge the perceived unwillingness of aid groups, intent on the imperative of relief delivery, to address the abuses suffered by aid recipient populations. As a result, some rights organizations are reluctant to situate their work as one element in the broader field of humanitarian action. Similar nomenclature issues affect discussions of the links between human rights and development. Some see human rights as the appropriate chapeau for good governance, while others view good governance as a framework that ensures the protection of human rights.

The nature and outlines of a "protection partnership" will be influenced by how such nomenclature issues are approached and resolved. The March discussions take place at a time of considerable openness and evolution on the part of both sets of agencies.

2. The International Legal Framework

There is growing awareness among the wider humanitarian community of the extent to which international law provides a supportive framework for operational activities. That framework entails elements of international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law. Recent debates are clarifying for practitioners, many of them previously unfamiliar with the provisions or nuances involved, that each of the three set of laws has its own specificities, some of them mutually reinforcing, and its own potential relevance to their work.

Refugee law articulates protections to be enjoyed by persons qualifying under the internationally agreed legal definition of refugees. Predating both refugee law and human rights law, humanitarian law stipulates certain rights in conditions of international and internal armed conflict. Human rights law is broadest in scope, applicable in peacetime and war and to non-refugee as well as refugee populations. In addition, international declarations and conventions provide both breadth and specificity of protections to general or selected populations. Regional as well as international legal instruments make up the operative framework within which protection and assistance activities are conducted. That framework, international lawyers confirm, is itself evolving.

While the international legal framework provides a supportive context for the activities of practitioners, various legal instruments define protection variously. As understood by UNHCR, "the phrase ‘international protection’ covers the gamut of activities through which refugees’ rights are secured." UNICEF defines the concept of protection as "ensuring respect for the rights expressed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child."

The ICRC’s mandate is framed by international humanitarian law, which seeks to limit the means and methods of warfare and to protect all those who do not (or no longer) participate in hostilities. The ICRC views the provisions for war-related needs articulated in humanitarian law as complementary to the protections provided by human rights law. The Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced Persons, distilling the applicable provisions of international law although still lacking formal legal status, affirm the right of each person "to be protected against being arbitrarily displaced from his or her home or place of habitual residence." Enumerated principles govern protection during displacement, "in particular from genocide, murder, summary or arbitrary execution, and enforced disappearances."

The joint promotion of protection principles (the first agenda item of the March meeting) will require a common understanding of the framework provided by international law. Various initiatives, some of them described in the Annex, are currently seeking to make that framework more intelligible and accessible to practitioners. Even those who believe that the international legal framework needs to be more widely understood by practitioners, however, concede that the framework itself is no panacea. The rough and tumble world of civil wars is characterized by belligerents who show little or no respect for such laws and for their obligations under them.

3. Institutional Division Of Labor

Given the interactive nature of protection and assistance concerns, there is considerable debate about the extent to which humanitarian agencies should see themselves as -- and/or become -- human rights organizations. Conversely, there are questions about the extent to which rights organizations have a stake in the effective functioning of assistance programs and should take into account the impacts of their own activities on aid agency work. The debate currently engages not only both sets of agencies within the NGO sector but also UN agencies with single and dual mandates as well. Division of labor issues will need to be clarified in protection partnerships involving any or all such actors.

Discussions among aid NGOs provide a microcosm of prevailing attitudes. Most aid agencies acknowledge the relevance of protection issues though differing on how to relate to and respond to them. Some see human rights concerns as legitimate but a diversion from essential tasks that would carry aid groups into dangerous political terrain. Others see human rights as an alternative optic for viewing what they are already doing. For them, a modest repackaging of existing aid activities will suffice to position themselves properly in relation to human rights. Still others see rights-based programming of assistance activities as requiring more fundamental changes in concept, mission, operations, and support functions. For them, the language used by aid groups to describe their work -- parlance about the moral obligation of donors and about charity and beneficiaries, voluntarism and victims -- needs to be replaced by talk of rights holders and claimants, entitlements and legal obligations.

Discussions among human rights NGOs have evolved as well, albeit in perhaps more unstructured ways. Such NGOs now articulate greater respect for -- and perhaps a touch of envy about -- the access enjoyed by aid organizations to uprooted populations. They are giving fresh thought to the indivisibility of rights and to the need to balance their traditional preoccupation with civil and political rights with greater attention to economic, social, and cultural rights. They are diversifying their own programmatic arsenal beyond fact-finding and denunciation. They are treating aid counterparts more collegially. By and large, however, human rights groups have shown less interest in the interface issues than have their opposite numbers in aid agencies.

In any event, emerging from the debate in each community and between them has come a growing awareness of shared interests. In recent years, the two sets of agencies have engaged on common priorities, although sometimes with different philosophical and political viewpoints, including generally effective efforts in opposition to land mines, child soldiers, and trafficking in small arms and in support of an international criminal court. There is now a sense that a division of labor among the increasing number of international actors in the protection field is both necessary and possible, and that the two sets of agencies are less "strange bedfellows" than they used to be. It should be based on the "specificities" of individual agency mandates and the comparative advantages of each, a topic explored in the Annex.

The discussion of protection partnerships at the March meeting thus takes place within a network of existing relationships and with division of labor issues still to be clarified. The realization that protection, in the words of one UN official, is becoming "more NGO-friendly" does not resolve all comparative advantage issues. In fact, it may create some. Different views are likely to emerge regarding whether NGOs, individually or as a community, should concentrate on advocacy (agenda item 1), operational collaboration with UNHCR (agenda item 2), or their own programs (agenda item 3), and in what relative balance. Reflection upon recent experience may help chart a future course.

4. Operational Challenges

The growing interaction witnessed on protection concerns in recent years has a number of programmatic implications for those involved. Of special relevance in relation to agenda item 2 (cooperation in field settings), these include such matters as coordination, information sharing, policies related to gender, and negotiations with non-state political authorities.

Coordination has proved daunting when it has involved only assistance agencies: the difficulties of coordinating the bevy of UN organizations, government aid agencies, NGOs, and the ICRC are well documented. The addition of human rights agencies to the mix increases the complexity, as would the upgrading of protection profile of aid groups. To realize maximum synergy, coordination would also need to extend to sectoral working groups in a given country, increasing the complexity further. To the extent that other UN organizations beyond UNHCR have human rights remits in a particular setting (e.g., the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights or a UN peacekeeping operation), still more complexity is added. At issue is not only the various aspects of the coordination function but also the differing institutional and political baggage of each of the collaborating actors.

Despite significant improvements in interagency coordination, serious confusion remains in the division of labor among organizations. UN agencies respond differently among themselves to operational challenges, thereby opening up differences not lost on the warring parties. Political authorities have expelled some UN organizations while continuing to welcome others, essentially picking and choosing among the lot. The lack of a common approach in the face of threats to humanitarian principle has proved damaging to the wider effort. While the talk is increasingly of cooperation among UN agencies, the operational partnerships in the field are still uneven and often quite dependent upon the personal inclinations of individual officials.

There are also tensions among NGOs, within relief agencies as well as between assistance and protection groups. These reflect a variety of factors, including their mandates, beneficiaries, and governmental donors. NGOs, too, have been whipsawed by the belligerents and also by UN agencies. In addition to problems of duplication and disarray, there are also gaps on the ground in specific crises between relief organizations and various elements in the UN’s human rights machinery, including the Human Rights Commission’s special rapporteurs.

Information-sharing has proved an item of particular concern. On the one hand, aid organizations can serve as effective "eyes and ears" in the monitoring of human rights violations. Sometimes they witness abuses firsthand or come into possession of sensitive information of major importance to international efforts in a given crisis. On the other hand, taking such violations up with the authorities or reporting these to other organizations often raises difficult issues for aid groups. Agencies which do engage the authorities may be reluctant to share such information with colleague organizations for fear that it will not remain confidential.

Potential protection partnerships involve agencies with differing groundrules, terms of reference, organizational cultures, relationships with the authorities, links to local personnel, acknowledged obligations vis à vis international criminal proceedings, and so on. Such factors complicate, but do not render impossible, agreement on formal or informal collaborative arrangements. The recent negotiation of a protocol between a major aid agency and a human rights organization suggests that such difficulties can be overcome.

Regarding gender, the international protection agenda has long included women and girls among "vulnerable populations," recognizing that women have different needs due to their unique experiences of conflict. The media's focus on gender-based violence in conflict has heightened awareness of the need of uprooted females for physical safety and freedom from violence, for physical, psychological and reproductive health care, and for adequate nutrition and economic opportunities. Some aid organizations have taken steps to address the bias females often face in the delivery of relief and in access to legal protection.

There is now growing realization that many aspects of the lives of uprooted populations are "gendered," including root human rights violations and other causes of flight, the type of violence encountered during flight and in temporary encampments, and the consideration of permanent solutions for resettlement and return. At the same time, gender bias still often exists in the delivery of aid and in asylum and other legal proceedings. Addressing the needs of women and girls means far more than recognizing their "special" needs in existing programs. It means transforming the protection agenda itself to incorporate fully a gender perspective. Some prospective partners have recently taken innovative steps in this direction.

Dealing with non-state actors has proved vexing for the United Nations system and agencies closely associated with it. "UN humanitarian agencies, with governing bodies composed of sovereign states and themselves integral parts of a world organization made up of such states, have exhibited well-documented structural difficulties in discharging their mandates to carry out needs assessments, provide assistance and protection to civilians, and monitor their programs in government- and rebel-controlled areas alike." While the bias of the UN system toward state actors may prove more of a factor in dealing with the protection needs of IDPS, it may affect the UN’s approach to refugees as well. Previous operational experience and collaboration will have a bearing on the response of NGOs to UNHCR’s suggestion that NGOs "complement" UNHCR’s protection work.

5. The Roles Of Indigenous Organizations

In recent years, international relief organizations have emphasized capacity-building among local counterparts, a cardinal tenet of most development programming objectives over the decades. Finding ways to sustain emergency programs and to transform them into a reconstruction and development mode as conflicts subside has become a major priority, although with uneven results. In addition, as post-Cold War conflicts have rendered the direct involvement of international personnel increasingly perilous, donors and aid agencies have sought to keep programs alive by "remote control": that is, relying on local staff of international agencies or on local agencies themselves to carry on activities.

Rights organizations have generally done less than relief agencies in the way of local institution-building. The standard approach of fact-finding and denunciation has left less scope for indigenous organizations; the more sensitive and adversarial nature of human rights activities has also placed serious limitations on the involvement of indigenous groups, where they exist. As in the case of aid agencies, international rights organizations have had difficulty creating fora at which in-country groups play a major role. The heavily external and expatriate flavor of human rights work is also changing, however, as international human rights groups seek out in-country counterparts and frame human rights in non-western terms and as more local counterparts come into being and find their feet.

Discussions of protection partnerships involve not only dialogue between international agencies but between them and local counterparts. Enlisting and nurturing local capacity for protection may well prove to be an even more complex and perilous proposition than doing so for assistance purposes. Enhancing "the capacity of national NGOs concerned with refugee rights" will need to build upon the considerable experience to date, negative as well as positive, in local institution-building. The activities described in the Annex may provide a useful starting point. These issues are relevant to agenda item 2 on operational cooperation between UNHCR and NGOs.

6. The Nature And Appropriateness Of Advocacy

Engagement with political authorities, sometimes combative in character, has been a stock-in-trade of human rights organizations over the years. With notable exceptions, aid agencies, in contrast, have been more reluctant practitioners of advocacy, often minimizing the extent to which they engage the authorities at home or abroad. U.S. NGOs in particular have prided themselves on maintaining what they describe as a "non-political" approach, a desideratum not necessarily shared by European counterparts. During the 1980s, however, even American NGOs sensed a need, now confirmed by experience during the present decade, "to engage governments more rather than less."

Nowadays advocacy is viewed by aid practitioners as a logical extension of their bread-and-butter activities and, in some instances, even as a precondition for such work. Examples abound. A number of NGOs encouraged U.S. policy makers to commit troops to Somalia in 1992 to protect humanitarian operations, although the recommendation proved divisive within the family. More recently, 41 NGO sent a letter to U.S. foreign policy officials urging "more meaningful action for peace" in the worsening Sierra Leone crisis. European NGOs regularly make their views known to the European Union and EU-member governments.

On several recent occasions, spokespersons for international NGO associations have addressed UN Security Council governments on humanitarian issues. For some time, the ICRC has regularly briefed the Council’s president on the crises of the day. The UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs and his Office have also played an increasingly active role -- publicly as well as behind the scenes -- in alerting the Council to life-threatening situations and in negotiating access for humanitarian activities in specific crises. OCHA has given higher priority than its predecessor DHA to humanitarian advocacy with belligerents in various conflicts.

As a result of such developments, the key issues within the humanitarian community today concern not whether organizations should engage the authorities but rather on what issues, in what fora (private or public), and with what relative commitment of agency financial and personnel resources. In some quarters there remain questions about the extent to which advocacy may violate agency neutrality. Reluctance among private and public donors for agencies to engage in advocacy activities also remains something of a perceived deterrent.

Experience with advocacy and attitudes toward it will have a bearing on NGO responses to UNHCR’s invitation to join in "a world-wide campaign on accessions" to international refugee conventions and "other kinds of joint monitoring or promotional activities needed at the global level." (Agenda Item 1) At this point in time, however, the NGO response may turn less on the appropriateness of advocacy as an activity than on the structures for decision-making about advocacy campaigns and on the initiative, strategy, and tactics employed in such efforts.

7. Professionalism And Accountability

The difficulties of providing assistance and protection to civilians in the post-Cold War brand of conflicts has spurred a new concern for articulating standards of professionalism and for ensuring greater accountability on the part of major international actors. Initiative has come in part from aid agencies themselves, as demonstrated by the NGO Code of Conduct and the Sphere Project, with its agreed Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response. The Charter speaks of the "right to life with dignity" as a cardinal principle of humanitarian action. ... International law recognizes that those affected are entitled to protection and assistance." An accountability concern also animates the recent proposal by UK humanitarian agencies to create a humanitarian assistance ombudsman.

Donor and other governments, as well as the international public, have of course also played a role in the heightened attention to accountability. Lessons-learning initiatives have been undertaken and lessons-learning units added to organization charts in public and private agencies, although how much significant institutional change has resulted remains in doubt. For their part, human rights groups are less far along in the process of developing professional associations and fora, performance standards and codes of conduct. Increased professionalism on the part of NGOs may help overcome selective resistance among UN organizations at having them pick up expanded protection roles.

Taking place in the context of increasing concern about professionalism and accountability, protection partnerships will need to incorporate agreed upon performance standards. They will also need to exhibit the kind of mutuality of accountability often lacking in dealings between and among governments, UN organizations, NGOs, and civilian populations.

Conclusion

The current state of dialogue on issues at the interface between protection and assistance is promising. The linkages between the two issues are increasingly well understood. While "single mandate" agencies -- that is, agencies with either assistance or protection mandates -- still exist, many are now framing their activities in broader perspective. Rough edges between the two sets of agencies continue and, given the nature of the issues and the institutions involved, will probably remain. However, rather than squaring off as adversaries, organizations more often regard each other as colleagues, each with distinctive and necessary contributions to a broader effort.

What that common effort should be called -- humanitarian action, human rights, protection, or something else -- has yet to be agreed. However, the relevance of international humanitarian, human rights, and refugee law is increasingly acknowledged, even though its specific bearing on options available at the front lines remains unclear. The institutional division of labor -- within the UN, among NGOs, and between the UN and NGOs -- also remains problematic, despite significant improvements. Beyond coordination, operational concerns in the areas of information sharing, gender, and programming in settings with competing political authorities remain. The importance of local institution-building, advocacy, and increased professionalism is now widely accepted, although the relative priority and modalities for promoting each are variously viewed.

In sum, while serious issues remain to be addressed, the debate is proceeding apace, as is the evolution of law and institutions themselves. The moment is indeed ripe for forging productive partnership arrangements. The Annex describes some of the activities which have played a role in framing the issues just examined and will continue to be involved in their processing in the future.