The elusive succinct and neutral application.

When I finally admitted to myself in college that I was not going to be a groundbreaking female biomedical engineer and that I would not end up in medical school (the fainting episode that I tried so hard to deny during my high school "shadow your future profession" week that took me to the pediatric ICU in Texas should have been my first glaring clue), I decided I wanted to be a lawyer.  Not just any lawyer mind you, I had to be a lawyer that was going to do something to help people, and not just help them divide their assets or fight over children (though to be honest those jobs are equally as taxing and draining on the soul but maybe more financially rewarding).  At that time, at that turning point in a 19 year-old's life as it may have been, I used the phrases human rights lawyer and advocate of humanitarian law interchangeably as a way to describe my future aspirations.  It wasn't until a few years later that I learned there is a fundamentally important distinction between the two, a distinction that may in the future wedge the two further and further apart. 

Both come not without controversy, perhaps mostly directed at human rights law most cynically described as a sort of flimsy and lofty set of rights and entitlements that are supposed to yield a better life.  Human rights describe those things to which every person on this earth should equally be able to seek or achieve.... a fair trial, freedom of speech, freedom to exercise religion (not controversial in western countries), access to clean water, access to education, (more controversial in countries like the united states).  

Humanitarian law governs the treatment of hors de combat or those not taking up arms in armed conflict.  During the late 19th and 20th centuries there was a recognition of the barbarity of war and the damage that it wreaks on all portions of society, not just those in a combat zone.  The Kellogg-Briand pact attempted to outlaw war in general, but as the Greek gods predicted, conflict is part of the human world as run by gods.  What gods you ask?  Well for the Greeks it was their 12 Olympian gods, but take your pick these days and the God of Christianity, Judaism or Islam would probably concur.  Instead of banning war, there are now Hague laws and Geneva laws that govern the means and methods of warfare, and the treatment of persons involved (intentionally or unintentionally) in combat activities.  These are not lofty "be the best that you can be laws".  An Australian humanitarian lawyer Helen Durham said it in a way that has stuck with me: the laws of war are "pragmatic documents which relate to bare survival during the most horrific condition humans can manufacture - armed conflict".  (Helen Durham wrote a fascinating article on the Athena/Ares modes of warfare for the Melbourne Journal of Int'l Law in 2007, to which I credit my thinking for this entry).  It is these laws of war that allow killing with impunity. 

The right to life is at the heart of human rights law and the thought that killing another can and legally will result in impunity juxtaposes the two regimes of law and begs the question, can they be reconciled?  Arguably in some aspects yes, the laws of war set out restrictions and narrow circumstances in which taking the life of a combatant is legal.  Laws of war permit killing under certain conditions only; indiscriminate killing with weapons yielding excessive harm are banned.  The rules and the following of the rules is what makes human rights law marginally compatible with humanitarian law, while still recognising that there are aspects of both making them fundamentally at odds. 

However, in our world today, states choose to selectively apply the universally ratified Geneva Conventions.  Somehow there is a belief that a legitimate or a just conflict privileges the wagers to hold themselves to a less restrictive legal regime.  Is that right?  Is it right for global precedent to thumb ones nose at laws that make the most banal instances of human existence minimally protected?  To me (albeit a person on the outside of conflict zones and outside the rooms where orders of attack are launched) it seems detrimental to any sort of international harmony or just shear human co-existence (harmony/peace is likely an unascertainable and inadequate aspiration for the global community), to draw different rules for different interventions.  After all....who gets to decide what is just, whose measuring stick will be used in judgement? 

Human rights law applies at all times, even during armed conflict.  Certain aspects of the law are deemed derogable, while others such as the right to life and right to be free from torture are absolute.  Humanitarian law applies in times of armed conflict, modernly this has been made to encompass both international and non-international conflict.  When I changed career trajectories from doctor-who-would-save-people-who-were-ailing to lawyer-who-wanted-to-save-people-from-suffering-and-help-achieve-a-more-dignified-life, the spirit of altruism stayed.  I didn't understand the difference between human rights and humanitarian issues, I didn't understand the level of suffering to which people daily endure (I still don't think I can fathom it),  but I have a fuzzy understanding of fairness.  Human rights law and humanitarian law as overlapping concepts and as a means of protection bring to light a crucial notion of fairness: how to find a fair balance between military necessity and principles of humanity.  

We live in a world where states choose to selectively place themselves under the ambit of international law.  International humanitarian law is neither applied succinctly nor neutrally in any conflict.  But it's universal law, why not???  I've never been a real rule-breaker (the one time I missed curfew by 5 minutes I got grounded) so maybe it's easy for me to say follow the freaking rules! If a state signs up to a set of rules and laws....follow them!  Don't personally decide what is just, don't make up rules of impunity for one group and actively prosecute others.  If the world continues to selectively fashion itself in that way, then human rights law and the eventual incarnation of humanitarian law will be forever at odds instead of both protecting the human being, however small that protection may in fact be.  If human rights law and humanitarian law were meant to be selectively incorporated, they would have been called "selections for states to choose from at their whim and convenience" and not "law".  

For all those rule-benders out there....bending rules may be fine, but when you bend the rules and that bending infringes on my rights and legal protections as a person, you've bent too far.    Your rights are not more important than mine, or more important than those of a woman in Bosnia, a man in Burundi, or a child in East Timor.

A community for surviving....barely.

Often words fail me, but pictures can tell a much more effective story about the things I am learning, studying, confronting, mulling....

There are currently almost 2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.  This is after the UNHCR and other int'l organisations worked on voluntarily repatriating over 3 million refugees that were in Pakistan back to their home state of Afghanistan.  The irony of this was that the UN originally estimated that there were only ever 3 million total Afghan refugees in Pakistan beginning from when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the late 1970s.  Somehow nearly 2 million people went unaccounted for.  Think for a moment, aide that has arrived over the years - based upon a belief there were 3 million - barely covered the 3 million that were thought to be there; what about aide for 2 million more people?  Criticisms lately go that refugee camps in the region are harbouring terrorists, that people are "economic" migrants, that moving out of their home state b/c of drought is not a legitimate reason.  While the official "Refugee Convention" definition does not include persons moving due to natural disaster or for reasons of making a livelihood, it is undeniable that suffering is ubiquitous in the region.  As humans we may in theory all have "equal human rights" but the reality is that conditions in many areas of the world make it nearly impossible to realise a majority of human rights without help.


even with all of this aid from America, the UN and MANY other countries.......





.
.....this still happens.





 Check out other photos from this series.


Visual injustice is a funny thing....it makes people FEEL bad, or sad but few are propelled to do anything.   Why? 


I suppose a more telling question would be if your neighbor was suffering like this would you help? 


Or even MORE potent in this world: do you even know your neighbor?  Are you so convinced of the infallibility of the individual that it's not worthwhile to make your neighborhood a community?  These people in the photos would not be surviving, albeit by a thread, without a community.


Where is your community? 

The reluctant leader.

Someone told me last night that the best leaders are the reluctant leaders, those individuals that don’t walk with puffed chests, but instead move more slowly and deliberately and with a limp.  It got me thinking, what our world needs is not the self-assured and overly-charismatic to take center stage, but for the self-assured to encourage those they believe can change and lead, to take a step forward.  That step out of obscurity could be the first one to change.  Martin Luther King Jr. was a reluctant leader; he was a father, a husband, a preacher in a small Southern town and did not see himself as the one to lead a charge for equality. And yet during the March on Washington he spoke to over 250,000 people crammed shoulder to shoulder and delivered what was the greatest speech by an American of the twentieth century.  This reluctant leader showed that dreams are not impossible and to call a dream impossible is to utter an oxymoron:

Washington D.C., 28 August 1963:

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

MLK, the reluctant leader of the 1960s helped the United States break down racial barriers, and helped reduce to the law that which was supposed to be self-evident and was long overdue…that every man IS equal.  America and the world in general still need the “leader with a limp” to fight for injustices against women, minorities, castes, gays and lesbians…anyone who continues to live a life where oppression is the status quo and equality is still the dream.  All you flashy and swaggering leaders, find a reluctant leader and convince her or him to take a stand; we are always in need of change.