Keeping Human Rights at the Heart of Development - Extended Interview

We recently interviewed Patrice Lenormand former Deputy Head of Unit in the Human Rights, Gender, Democratic Governance Unit, DG DEVCO, on the on National Human Rights Instutions and the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). You can read the Voices & Views: Keeping Human Rights at the Heart of Development. The full interview is below. 

Capacity4dev.eu (C4D): What is the EIDHR?

Patrice Lenormand (PL): The EIDHR only started in 2007, so it represents a new way of working. What it brings on top of what others are doing is flexibility, so we can contribute to the EU’s crisis reaction mechanism. For example, we can work without a partner country agreement, so we can work in more difficult environments, outside standard procedure. This enables us to carry out fast-track reactions and keep some activities out of the public eye to protect the people involved. 

Also, the EIDHR has a worldwide mandate. We do not focus on developing countries or a given geographical area. We have activities in 135 countries, including the United States and Japan on the death penalty and (South) Korea on economic and social rights. We also cover specific issues that nobody else is covering – such as torture, ill treatment and collective rapes as a weapon of war. 

C4D: What kind of operations does the EIDHR undertake? 

PL: You need to react fast. We are managing public funds, so we are bound by procedures that are set regarding the use of these, which is absolutely normal. But in time of crisis you have to go faster sometimes than open calls for proposals or public markets. It doesn’t mean you can do can do whatever you want – it has to be framed. But sometimes you need to act in a matter of days.

For example we have an emergency facility for human rights defender at risk. When there is a journalist whose life is being threatened, we need to take a decision in one day so that we can protect him and put him on a plane with his family. During the first insurrection in Egypt, we had 55 democratic leaders put in jail without any charge and outside any legal process. We immediately paid lawyers who freed them. 

In Congo Dr. Denis Mukwege was the object of attacks and his life was under threat. We flew him out of eastern Congo – first to Kinshasa and then to Belgium to save his life. We did that with this reaction mechanism. 

C4D: What about when a whole country or region is in crisis?

PL: When there was the French intervention in Mali, after the coup d’état in Mali, there was a quick need to re-establish some democratic transition. We went straight to Mali to help maintain basic services such as health, education and water supply.

Everything was collapsing, but we did not want to give budget support while there was such a difficult transition. So the EIDHR supported a roadmap to a democratic transition, facilitating peace negotiations, reconciliation and elections.

C4D: How is work split between Brussels and the EU delegations?

PL: I am like any civil servant working in the headquarters of an organisation. I would be crazy if I thought I knew everything about 135 countries. So we rely a lot on our delegations, which managed a large part of the activities directly. We run operations from Brussels when there is no delegation in a country, when a project is global in nature, or when it’s too sensitive for our delegation to handle. For example, Human Rights Defenders are sometimes threatened by a government. Then it’s better to manage the project from Brussels, so that our colleagues in the field are not exposed.

C4D: How do you work with local partners?

PL: Our delegations do not know everything either, so we work with partners on the ground. Then, an essential part of the work is choosing the right partners. With development, the result is something physical, such as a hospital, and it’s not so important who delivers this. But delivery in human rights is a political matter. Working on freedom of expression with the wrong organisation – say, related to a particular political party, a proselytizing movement or an authoritarian regime – is not delivering on the result. So the choice of partner is extremely sensitive, and we work a lot with civil society. Our colleagues in the delegations help us to identify the right partners on the ground. 

The other essential element is not endangering the people we are working with. So sometimes you need to be pragmatic, even cynical. When a country is changing its attitude to NGOs – let’s say Belarus at the time of election – you know that the people you are working with can be arrested. You need to slow down a bit in terms of visibility and adapt what you do. You need to move into a more secret way of working: if funding becomes an issue, you can wire money into bank accounts. You cannot expect a project to deliver as many results in a shrinking space, but you also know that it is essential to maintain it, and that the real aim is not endangering the partner – it is keeping civil society alive.

C4D: Is there ever a clash of values?

PL: Human rights are universal. It’s not about EU values or western values. Ethiopia was a founding country of the League of Nations at a time when some EU Member States did not even exist. There was a code for women in Tunisia that was more liberated when it was adopted in the fifties than most of the codes for women inside Europe. There was the right to free choice on abortion in Tunisia before the Netherlands. When you are in charge of developing human rights, you need to keep in mind that human rights are universal. So we work on all levels. We work to the multilateral level with UN and other relevant bodies. We also work with regional and national organisations.

C4D: What recent changes have there been in the EU’s promotion of human rights?

PL: The European Union adopted on 20 July the New Action Plan on Human Rights. Whoever reads this will see that the first action is to support National Human Rights Institutions, because if you believe in the appropriation of universal values by people, if you believe in the ownership of people of their own destiny – then you need to believe in their own administration and in the integration of human rights into these administrations. 

Then, we are not here to judge who are the right ones or the wrong ones. The NHRIs have decided to judge themselves, so they have self-established a process of peer review with categories A, B and C. A means fulfilling the standards; B means fulfilling on paper but not in practice, or in practice but not on paper; and C is for the ones that are not human rights institutes even if they have the name. 

We engage in strong support to national human rights institutes, to try to help this peer review mechanism, to try to help the C to move to the B, the B to move to the A. As an example, Chile adopted legislation to have a national human rights institute in 2005. After it started it was absolutely in conformity with standards, but they needed resources. We have been supporting them over the last three years, and now it has started to work. So Chile now has a public authority that is checking the laws, checking the administration and giving advice on how to respect human rights. 

C4D: Does this also help development?

PL: There has been an historical, artificial divide between development and human rights in the eighties and nineties, partly because people were focussing for a good reason on what they had to do. People were running to support dying kids to feed them. Or people wanted to promote democracy and human rights because they were deeply convinced that that was the basis for avoiding starvation or humanitarian crises. Both arguments are right.

These national human rights institutes are an extremely good symbol of the reconciliation between development and human rights. This is development, because they are nationally owned institutions handled by a country’s own citizens – and the mandate is human rights. We help their capacity and hope that they will be led and driven by the country.