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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Introduction

Author : Noam Schimmel

Published in: Advancing International Human Rights Law Responsibilities of Development NGOs

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s core research question: what are the potential responsibilities to respect, protect, and fulfill international human rights law (IHRL) of a particular class of non-state actors: non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? The chapter explains the book’s focus on those NGOs pursuing development in a post-genocide transitional justice context acting simultaneously in partnership with state governments, as proxies and agents for these governments, and providing essential public goods and social services as part of their development remit. It discusses the power and resources of NGOs and historical and contemporary NGO human rights failures globally, and the need for a soft law framework for human rights accountability for NGOs. It provides a preliminary discussion of the NGO sector in Rwanda and its failures to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of Rwanda’s Tutsi population and of survivors of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. It illustrates the resulting disadvantage and marginalization Rwandan genocide survivors face as a consequence of this neglect.

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next chapter Defining Reparative Justice and Global Examples of Its Implementation
Footnotes
1
See UN Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, General Comment 12, 1999, on the respect/protect/fulfill trichotomy.
 
2
Menno T. Kamminga, “The Evolving Status of NGOs under International Law: A Threat to the Inter-State System?” in Alston, (ed) Non-State Actors and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2005) 96.
 
3
This book focuses on development NGOs rather than bilateral and multilateral aid agencies such as USAID, DFID, agencies of the United Nations such as UNDP, UNICEF, and UN Women, and the World Bank. However, despite this focus, the arguments it advances are relevant to these agencies as well, although they may have different legal status as agencies of national governments and of the United Nations, respectively. I focus on NGOs precisely because they are not direct agencies of national governments and thus are traditionally considered to be outside the remit of international human rights law. References to NGOs in this book refer to development NGOs, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
 
4
Public goods and public services/social services have similar meanings; I use the phrase public goods which includes the provision of social services such as healthcare and education.
 
5
The UN Basic Principles will be analyzed in Chap. 3.
All online documents were accessed in the fall of 2019 and winter of 2020.
 
6
Menno T. Kamminga, ‘The Evolving Status of NGOs Under International Law: A Threat to the Interstate System?’
 
7
Adam McBeth, International Actors and Human Rights (Routledge 2010) 244.
 
8
Chris Jochnick, ‘Confronting the Impunity of Non-State Actors: New Fields for the Promotion of Human Rights’ (1999) 21 Human Rights Quarterly, 56, 59.
 
9
Alston, (ed) Non-State Actors and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2005) 5.
 
10
Ibid., 6
 
11
Peter Uvin. Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Kumarian Press 1998).
 
12
Ibid.
 
13
Ibid., 28. Uvin cites here the scholarship of Brusten and Bindariye, 1997.
 
14
August Reinisch, “The Changing International Legal Framework for Dealing with Non-State Actors” in Alston, (ed) Non-State Actors and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2005) 62.
 
15
See the annual reports and working papers of the NGO SURF Survivor’s Fund for details of the scale and scope of these injustices which will be discussed in detail in Chap. 6.
See also SURF’s Annual Reports 2009–2018:
Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein, My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity Cambridge University Press (2004).
J. Hatzfeld, The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007).
Zachary Kaufman, ‘Lessons from Rwanda: Post Genocide Law and Policy’ Stanford Law and Policy Review (2019).
 
16
Ibid.
 
17
Ibid.
 
18
Ibid.
 
19
For more on the legacy of sexual violence and its impact on Rwandan genocide survivors and on trauma generally in genocide survivors see Kaitesi, Zraly, Zraly and Nrayizinyoye, Schaal and Elbert, and Schaal and Dusingizemungu, as discussed in Chap. 6.
See also Rianne Letschert, Ed. Victimological Approaches to International Crimes: Africa. (Intersentia 2011).
 
20
Ibid.
 
21
Noam Schimmel, ‘International Human Rights Law responsibilities of Non-Governmental Organizations: Respecting and Fulfilling the Right to Reparative Justice in Rwanda and Beyond’ Cambridge International Law Journal (2019).
Noam Schimmel, ‘The Moral Case for Restorative Justice as a Corollary of the Responsibility to Protect: A Rwandan Case Study of the Insufficiency of Impact of Retributive Justice on the Rights and Well-Being of Genocide Survivors’ Journal of Human Rights (2012).
Noam Schimmel, ‘Failed Aid: How Development Agencies are Neglecting and Marginalizing Rwandan Genocide Survivors’ Development in Practice (2010).
Anne-Marie de Brouwer, ‘Reparations to Victims of Violence: Possibilities at the International Criminal Court and the Trust Fund for Victims and their Families’ Leiden Journal of International Law (2007) 207, 211.
SURF Annual Reports (see note 15 in this chapter).
 
22
Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck that Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). See also Mark Schuller, Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid and NGOs (Rutgers University Press 2012).
 
23
Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan (Picador 2011).
 
24
Schimmel, supra note 21 in this chapter.
 
25
Lisa Smirl, Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism (Zed Books 2015).
Patrice McMahon, The NGO Game: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond (Cornell University Press 2017).
David Kennedy, The Dark Side of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton University Press 2011).
Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, (Cornell University Press 2015).
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press 2013).
See also these older works but still trenchant and relevant critiques of humanitarian aid by
Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: the Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business (The Atlantic Monthly Press 1989), and Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (The Free Press, 1997).
 
26
See, for example, the annual reports of NGOs such as CARE and Save the Children, for prominent examples. For how NGOs can influence states that violate human rights to improve their human rights respect, protection, and fulfillment see B. Linsanes, H. Sano and H. Thelle ‘Human Rights in Action: Supporting Human Rights Work in Authoritarian Countries’ in Ethics in Action eds D. Bell and J. Coicaud (Cambridge University Press 2007).
 
27
Philip Alston, in Philip Alston (ed) Non-State Actors and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2005) 18.
 
28
A. Alesina and D. Dollar, ‘Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why’ (2000) 5 Journal of Economic Growth.
 
29
David Karp, Responsibility for Human Rights: Transnational Corporations in Imperfect States (Cambridge University Press 2014).
 
30
Ibid., 133.
 
31
Alston, (see note 27 in this chapter) 19. See Tams and Sloan for more on the evolution of international law and the International Court of Justice. Tams C and Sloan J (eds), The Development of International Law by the International Court of Justice (Oxford University Press 2013).
 
32
I refer to these organizations as NGOs for shorthand. The majority are also community based and grassroots in nature, and in effect are both NGOs and CBOs—community-based organizations. Most survivor centered NGOs in Rwanda that are operated by survivors for survivors to advance reparative justice and the rights and welfare of genocide survivors focus their philosophy, work, and mission in a local, community-based manner. We will discuss them in Chap. 6.
 
Metadata
Title
Introduction
Author
Noam Schimmel
Copyright Year
2020
Book
Advancing International Human Rights Law Responsibilities of Development NGOs

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50269-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-50270-6

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50270-6_1