Kabir's Workshop

Richard Carver writes:

The CENDEP blog is taking a short seasonal break. We will be back at the beginning of January. We thank all our readers for their interest and loyalty over the past year, and wish you all a peaceful 2018.

This post is a little more light-hearted than usual. I wrote this story a few years ago based (very loosely) on a true event.

Secretly, Kabir had been excited about going to the Regional Workshop on Training of Trainers for Sustainable Human Rights Protection. To his colleagues in the National Human Rights Commission he treated it as a necessary burden – an additional strip on his multi-coloured wall calendar. With Maryam in admin, who booked his flights, he was blasé and bored. International travel? Tiring and tiresome.

But Kabir liked it all. Well, perhaps not all. He could have done without the insolent pat-down from the security police at the airport. And, in truth, also the crowded, smelly first leg of his journey in the ex-Soviet turbo-prop. But once he intersected with one of the great international airlines, he relished it: the duty-free shops, the individual video screens, and the foil-and-plastic wrapped airline meals. What he liked most was this: the universal apparatus of the conference, workshop and seminar. He loved the conference pack in its newly logoed canvas rucksack. He loved the name tags and the buffet lunches and the pin boards smothered in conference photographs. He loved going to break-out rooms and he loved collecting his per diem. He loved the words for themselves. Per diem: it could only mean you were at a workshop. But he was not averse to the hard currency either. He could save it and take it home for Ali’s school fund.

The workshop was being held in a large and luxurious hotel. Palatial was the word that came to Kabir’s mind. It was monumental and impersonal, with a large atrium and corridors leading off to many meeting and function rooms. Kabir presented himself at the registration desk early, a good twenty minutes before the designated starting hour. Of course, it would start late – they always did. But the anticipation was part of the pleasure. He could riffle through his registration pack, study the agenda, read about the city tours and cultural evenings that had been arranged for his pleasure.

No one else appeared to have arrived. A friendly young woman asked him to fill in his name and contact details on a form.

“This is for the participants’ list,” she said. “We’ll circulate it in the course of the workshop and you’ll have a chance to make any corrections.” Yes, the participants’ list. He kept these from every workshop. He copied them for Mohammad to put into the mailing database, while he himself carefully entered each new address into his email programme.

With an acrid-smelling marker pen, the young woman wrote his name on a piece of card, which she slipped inside a plastic sleeve with a clip on the back. She handed it to Kabir, who fumbled to attach it to the lapel of his jacket.

“I’m Maria,” she said. “If you need any help with anything, just contact me or anyone in the secretariat.”

Maria gave him an expensive-looking leather shoulder bag.

“All your conference materials are in there,” she said. “You are rather late – perhaps you’d best just slip in and sit at the back.”

Kabir was mortified. He sneaked a glance at his watch. No, it was their fault; they had surely sent him the wrong starting time on the provisional agenda.

Maria must have read his expression. “It’s alright, Mr Abbas,” she said with a smile. “I expect you’re tired from your trip.”

She lowered her voice and cast up her eyes. “And it’s just the report from the steering committee this morning.”

It was only after he had found a seat near the back of the hall, whispering his apologies, that he realized that he had not received the report of the steering committee. No report and an inaccurate agenda. That was something he would have to note on his evaluation form. Oh, but perhaps it was Maria who had put together the pre-workshop mailings. And she had been so helpful.

For a few moments Kabir pondered the ethics of failing to register his criticism of the secretariat. No, he concluded, there would be much else to write in his evaluation. For now he should concentrate on proceedings.

It was always difficult to concentrate when you came in late (another reason why Kabir never did). And the fumes from that marker pen did not help. He still felt slightly dizzy.

The speaker was a well-groomed grey-haired man in a suit, who was speaking in a flat monotone. When Kabir first started doing human rights work you would never come across anyone in a suit. But now all the men in suits knew the human rights language and all the human rights people dressed in suits so that the men in suits would take them seriously. It could be confusing.

The grey-haired man was talking about “outcomes-based methodologies”. He almost became animated about the exciting possibilities of integrating these into “the planning-implementation-evaluation continuum”.

Behind the speaker was a large blue and white banner with the letters AFROPEC on it. Below the acronym was a longer string of words that Kabir could not read from the back of the hall. At one side a dove swooped elegantly down towards the large C. At least, he assumed it was a dove, but it was not very well drawn and had a slightly sneering expression and a generally aggressive mien.

Kabir wracked his brain. What did AFROPEC stand for? He knew that the workshop was under the auspices of the UNOHCHR, but this must be the local partner. No, hold on. The AFRO in the title must mean that it was the regional coordinating body. It all used to be so simple. There was AI. That was easy to remember. And the ICJ had been around for a long time. Then along came HRW. And now there was a whole alphabet soup: ISHR, ICTR, ICHRP… Even UNOHCHR was a mouthful. Woe betide if you got them confused with UNHCR. Some tried to avoid the whole thing by adopting some snappy injunction or worthy abstraction as their name: Liberty, Justice, Human Rights First. Human Rights Whenever, Kabir thought.

Kabir was a diligent student. He prepared carefully for his human rights workshops, reading all the material he was sent and more besides. He affected a casual air, but he knew he was privileged to attend and he owed it to his colleagues at the National Human Rights Commission not to waste the opportunity. Still, this was really dull stuff and Kabir found himself day-dreaming and longing for the coffee break. What a pity he had missed the introductions. There would probably have been an icebreaker – an opportunity to get to know his colleagues. He had recognized some of the names on the list of participants circulated in advance: Aggrey, Alice, Tendai. He scanned the hall in search of a familiar face.

Finally, the grey-haired man stopped speaking and the chairperson invited questions from the floor. There was a long silence before a few arms began to waggle tentatively. Each question was enunciated twice: the first time inaudibly and the second in a crackle of static and feedback once the secretariat member with the microphone had arrived at the correct row. After an age, the chairperson finally closed the session and sent the participants off to coffee, telling them they would reassemble in their working groups.

Kabir had requested in advance to be in the working group on Using International Complaints Mechanisms. He would have to find out where the group was meeting.

He filed out of the meeting hall to the cavernous atrium where coffee was being served, along with savoury pastries, sandwiches and sticky sweets, although they had all finished their breakfast barely an hour earlier. He had just been handed a cup of coffee when he saw Tendai and Alice making their way around the edge of the huddle of workshop participants. Kabir called out and started to move towards them. But he turned too suddenly and his cup teetered on its saucer. Time slowed down for the few seconds that Kabir watched his cup balancing on its rim before, inevitably, tipping and spilling its contents.

It could have been worse. Somehow the cascading coffee missed all the surrounding workshoppers – quite something, considering the tight press around the counter. It hit the floor and splashed up, causing the alert among them to jump out of the way. The only real damage seemed to be the droplets of coffee up the back of the long legs of a tall blonde woman who had been looking the wrong way. Kabir immediately proffered the paper napkin that had enwrapped his samoosa. The woman politely used the napkin to wipe streaks of grease onto her legs.

Kabir’s heartfelt apologies meant that the woman suppressed her irritation (although it would recur later when she discovered the greeny-yellow trail of ghee on her calves). She introduced herself. Her name was Eva and she was from Sweden.

“What did you think of the opening session?” Eva asked him.

Kabir hesitated. “It wasn’t, er, exactly what I was expecting,” he said.

“Oh, don’t worry. We get that every year. We just have to let Adebayo have his say. We’ll get down to the real stuff in the next session.”

Kabir asked her where the working groups were. Eva told him that membership of the working group was colour-coded. She pointed out the red border on his name badge. That told him which group he was in. Eva’s was red too – they were in the same group.

Kabir walked with Eva to the lift and they went up to the nineteenth floor where they would find their break-out room. As the others arrived, Kabir introduced himself politely.

The convener of the working group was a smartly dressed man called Jeff (or possibly Geoff). When Jeff called for a volunteer to be rapporteur – to deliver an account of proceedings back to the plenary – Kabir’s hand shot up. Jeff seemed to hesitate and looked around the room, but there were no other offers.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “So, the rapporteur for group 3 is er…”

“Kabir,” said Kabir.

Jeff explained that they were going to start with a brainstorm. As rapporteur it was Kabir’s job to record proceedings on the flipchart.

Jeff said that at this stage all ideas were equally valid, so people should feel free to share whatever was on their mind. Later it would be possible to unpack the ideas and draw the linkages, he said.

                                                                                                                     

Kabir was not entirely clear what was going on, but he felt that in the key role of rapporteur he was not really able to say anything. On Jeff’s instruction he wrote the single word “Benchmarks” across the top of the flipchart in blue marker pen. Then – in the initial moment of uneasiness and silence following Jeff’s injunction to “be prepared to think outside the box” – Kabir underlined the word. Then he underlined it again in red. And in green.

They were slow starting, but then they got going. Kabir could scarcely keep pace with the barrage of suggestions. He ended up with a long list: “Indicator. Quantitative. Qualitative. Standards. Core competencies. Synergy. Paradigm. Result-driven. Outcomes-based. Proactive. Empowerment. Mindset (how to change). Networking. Community of practice. Best practices. Sustainability,” the last of which he drew a ring round and highlighted with asterisks on Jeff’s instruction.

Kabir had assumed that they would start unpacking straight away. Indeed, he said as much when Jeff launched into an exposition of the “strategic priorities”. Jeff assured him there would be plenty of time to revisit this later. Kabir sat jotting the odd word on his hotel notepad, using his plastic hotel ball pen: “Contextualize. Touch base. Fast track…”

Finally, after an hour that mostly consisted of Jeff talking, it was lunchtime. Kabir felt out of his depth and he was unsure how he was going to report the discussion back to the plenary. He confessed this to Eva as they took the lift back to the ground floor.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Your job is just to reflect the discussion. Anyway, you won’t need to report until we have developed a checklist of recommendations.”

“Oh,” said Kabir. “That should be alright then.”

Apparently the group photograph was going to be taken now, on the first lunchtime. This was to allow time to print copies for everyone to take home with them. The other working groups seemed to have finished more quickly and Eva and Kabir joined the back row behind their colleagues and an unfurled conference banner. The official photographer arranged them, pulling in a few stragglers from the outer edges, and clicked a few times. Then came a clamour as smart little digital cameras were produced and handed to the photographer, often with whispered instructions about the machine’s technical eccentricities. Kabir politely asked the photographer to take one for him, proffering his own bottom-of-the-range model. The photographer obliged and passed it back to him. The group broke up in a desultory fashion before everyone’s desire for a memento was properly satisfied.

Kabir left Eva in earnest discussion with Jeff – they just needed to touch base, she explained – and went back inside to find the lunchroom. In the hotel atrium, he stopped and squinted at the picture on the tiny display screen of his camera. He was puzzled; something seemed not quite right. But he did not have a chance to work out precisely what, for at that moment he glimpsed Tendai and Alice across the atrium. Glancing quickly around to make sure that there were no hot beverages in the vicinity, Kabir started off towards them. They were making their way towards a room far away on the other side of the hall. Above the door was a banner with the UN symbol and this notice in clear black letters:

“UN Regional Workshop on Training of Trainers for Sustainable Human Rights Protection.”

Important decision on Iraq ill-treatment

Richard Carver writes:

I sat down this week to write a blog post about the new UK Torture Prohibition Network – an important topic, but one that will now have to wait until the New Year. (I am, however, illustrating this post with a picture from the public forum that followed the launch of the network in London last month.) The reason for changing topic was an extremely important judgment this week in the High Court in London. Mr Justice Leggatt found in favour of four claimants who alleged that they had been ill-treated by British troops during the occupation of Iraq.

Torture in the UK - public event to launch the Torture Prohibition Network

(l-r) Sir Malcolm Evans (Bristol University), Carla Ferstman (REDRESS),

John Wadham (National Preventive Mechanism), and Tom Pegram 

(University College London)

Last year, Lisa Handley and I published our book on torture prevention, which included a case study of the United Kingdom. The UK actually offers a generally positive lesson. Thirty years or so ago, torture, if not rife in the British criminal justice system, was certainly more than occasional, while less severe forms of ill-treatment were widespread. This picture has been changed as a result of radical reform, most importantly major improvements in criminal procedure and changes in interviewing techniques. There are now duty solicitors in police stations and all interviews are electronically recorded. Much less reliance is placed on confession evidence. This is all backed up by an effective system for monitoring detention and imprisonment and, of course, peace and fundamental police reform in Northern Ireland.

The big exception to this generally positive picture has been the behaviour of British forces operating outside our borders, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although offshore places of military detention should be subject to a similar monitoring regime, in practice they are not. The notorious “five techniques” of sensory deprivation, used by the British army in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ostensibly prohibited after that, resurfaced in Iraq. This first came to attention in the case of Baha Moussa, the Basra hotel receptionist beaten to death by British troops.

The four cases decided by the High Court this week are the first “lead cases” out of several hundred similar claims of ill-treatment by Iraqi civilians who were detained by British forces. Mr Justice Leggatt ordered the Ministry of Defence to pay compensation to the four men for treatment that included forced nudity, sexual humiliation, cigarette burns, sleep deprivation, and hooding. In one case, troops had run over the backs of detainees. The treatment “involved the gratuitous infliction of pain and amusement for the amusement of those who humiliated them.”

The claims were grounded on the twin legal bases of English common law and the Human Rights Act (which is the enactment of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law). Mr Justice Leggatt found that the men’s Convention rights had been violated, but also made repeated references to the military’s breaches of their obligations under the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law (or the law of armed conflict). The British government has suggested that in future conflicts it will derogate from the European Convention, so that it is not obliged to respect the human rights of civilians (or indeed of British personnel). This is legally illiterate – it is not possible in any circumstances to derogate from Article 3 of the Convention, which protects against torture and other ill-treatment. However, this case is a reminder that it is also somewhat beside the point, since the Geneva Conventions embody basic standards of humane behaviour – including torture prohibition – precisely in situations of armed conflict.

While these cases – and possibly more to come – offer the prospect of some limited financial redress for the victims, they do not bring accountability of those responsible. However, there is some positive news on that front too. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court recently announced progress in the preliminary investigation of a large number of cases of alleged ill-treatment by British personnel in Iraq, concluding that there is a “reasonable basis” to believe that they committed “war crimes” including murder, torture, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape or other forms of sexual violence.

The only way is ethics: accountability in human rights investigations

Richard Carver writes:

Last week Cathrine Brun questioned whether the ethical signposts that guide modern humanitarianism are adequate for many of the new challenges faced. This week, I return to the topic of ethics, but at a much more elementary level. For non-practitioners it is probably baffling that human rights work has no agreed ethical code to guide those who are working in the sector. Of course, it could be argued that the whole body of human rights is itself an ethical code, but that argument seems dangerous. The fact that human rights practitioners claim to uphold human rights – they would, wouldn’t they? – does not exempt them from independent ethical scrutiny and accountability.

When I first started working as a human rights researcher in the 1980s, I was surprised that there was apparently no agreed code of conduct for people doing my job. My employer, Amnesty International, had very clear rules on one or two issues, such as confidentiality of information collected in the course of our work, but little beyond that. I had previously worked as a journalist and, as a member of the National Union of Journalists, I had committed to be bound by the union’s code of conduct. As a human rights investigator, I suppose I continued to follow the same precepts but nothing was clearly spelt out.

This large gap was drawn to my attention once again last year, when I conducted a training workshop for national human rights institutions (NHRIs) on how to conduct investigations. Participants asked what ethical standards should guide their work and I had to give the honest answer that there was no single agreed code for human rights investigators (and indeed that most NHRIs had no code of conduct at all). An interesting discussion followed and I concluded that future training sessions needed to consider the main ethical principles guiding human rights research.

A year later I found myself in a yurt, half way up a mountain in Kazakhstan, delivering another training session on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme, to investigators from Central Asian national human rights institutions. This time I was better prepared. In the absence of any coherent template of a code of conduct, I looked at a number of other professions that are guided by codes of conduct and where there might be overlaps with the issues posed in human rights investigations.

The first and obvious port of call was the legal profession. Many NHRI investigators – perhaps a majority – are lawyers. They will be regulated by national accreditation bodies that usually require, among other things:

·       Adherence to the principle of legality and the obligation of lawyers to uphold the rule of law at all times;

·       Protection of the best interests of the client (as far as consistent with the principle of legality);

·       Protection of lawyer-client confidentiality.

Medical practitioners are another group with well-known ethical obligations. Physicians swear the Hippocratic Oath, but this is probably of little relevance, except when the human rights investigator is herself a medical practitioner. However, another principle of medical ethics, “Do No Harm,” may be highly relevant. This is not, as is often supposed, part of the Hippocratic Oath, but is nevertheless a fundamental ethical requirement. Doctors may not embark on reckless treatment that may harm a patient. This is a principle that has been adopted by humanitarian practitioners, since Mary Anderson’s 1999 book of the same name. Perhaps human rights researchers also need to consider its relevance.

Academic researchers have constructed a rather complex edifice of ethical rules. The underlying principles here are autonomy, beneficence, and justice. These refer respectively to voluntary participation in research, the obligation to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits for research participants, and fairness in the selection of participants. Of these, voluntary participation may be of particular relevance for human rights investigators. In academic research this is underpinned by the notion of informed consent – that a research subject voluntarily agrees to take part in research, in full knowledge of what this entails, and with the capacity and competence to make such a judgment.

The next set of ethical codes that I consulted took me back to the beginning of my own career in human rights. Journalism is not usually considered as particularly relevant in this context, but the declaration of principles of the International Federation of Journalists contains several useful pointers:

·       Respect for truth and the right of the public to truth;

·       Only report facts where the origin is known;

·       No suppression of information or falsification;

·       Use fair methods to obtain information;

·       Protect confidential sources.

Finally, another group that is not often considered in relation to human rights investigations: police officers. In fact, the process of accumulating evidence and reconstructing past events can be very similar and statutory human rights bodies may even have some of the same powers as police. As an example, the England and Wales College of Policing has an ethical code that contains a number of relevant provisions for human rights investigators, including, once again, protection of confidential information and non-discrimination and respect for equality.

For the purposes of my training event, I compiled a highly provisional nine-point list of principles that could constitute the basis for a code of conduct for human rights investigators:

      ·       Independence and impartiality;

·       Do no harm;

·       Protect safety and security of those affected by the investigation;

·       Informed consent to participation in the investigation (although this will not apply where an NHRI uses legal powers to compel the production of evidence);

·       Confidentiality;

·       Data protection;

·       Compliance with human rights standards;

·       Reliance on objective and verifiable facts;

·       Refusal to be influenced by threats or inducements.

What do readers think? Feedback would be very welcome, either in the form of a comment on this blog post or a direct communication (rcarver@brookes.ac.uk). I would particularly like to hear from NHRIs anywhere in the world that have experience of addressing these issues.