Human Rights Advocacy: Concerns and Challenges

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet and interact with Meenakshi Ganguly and Ali Dayan Hasan from Human Rights Watch. In my informal interaction with Meenakshi, I found her to be a keen observer and her previous career as a journalist convinced me of her astute sense of reasoned social investigation; a quality imperative for anyone working in the field with Human Rights issues. The interaction brought to light some interesting dimensions with regard to human rights in general and HR Watch in particular.

The HR Watch works through the ‘See it to believe it’ approach by placing human rights watchers and senior researchers in areas where field operations are conducted. This implies that for reporting on issues of human rights violations by the Pakistani or Indian Army in Lahore or Kashmir for example, HR Watch has people from the local population like Meenakshi or Ali to follow the case; observers are not flown in from Washington or Brussels or London to undertake the reporting.
HR Watch works through the strategy of ‘Name, Shame and Engage’. Going beyond reporting on human rights violations, HR Watch investigates incidents of such violations by interactions with both the victims and perpetrators. This leads to identifying the real perpetrators and subsequent reporting. HR Watch follows a novel approach with regard to human rights violations by seeking to engage with violators themselves. The purpose of these investigations is not merely to highlight who the violators are but also interact and reason with them. The idea is not to create a hate campaign against the violators but involve them addressing the problem. Meenakshi elaborated this aspect when she narrated how she was able to talk to an Indian Army Commander for almost four hours following the publication of her report on human rights violations in J&K. Following this meeting, she was invited for sessions with Army jawans for raising concerns and creating sensitivity on issues of human rights violations. But Meenakshi does not believe that such sessions alone would solve the problem. According to her the Army in J&K acts with a sense of impunity and reform of Armed Forces Special Powers Act need to be repealed for the situation to improve in the state.
On the issue of drone attacks and civilian causalities in Pakistan, Ali was of the opinion that HR Watch was not in a position of verifying claims made by any side. In closed military operations, like the drone operation in Pakistan, international forces might claim that among those killed only a few were civilians, while the local population may inflate the number of innocent deaths. According to Ali, it is impossible to corroborate the claims of either side and thus HR Watch is not in a position of reporting objectively on the issue.
Meenakshi’s encounter with human rights advocacy in India has convinced her that these issues get more attention when violations involve and affect the country’s middle class. But the discussions lead me to think about issues where human rights violations are not in the open and are perpetuated by the middle class itself. We can confront the Army for torturing innocent Kashmiris but what about the subtle deprivations faced by millions of children working as domestic help in middle class homes? Does giving them shelter and three meals a day gives the middle class license to exploit them? We can have elaborate reports on how unwanted is the girl child in India, but can anyone ‘name, shame and engage’ those middle class parents who continue to get rid of female fetus in lavish state-of-art hospitals?
Perhaps Meenakshi is right in saying that human rights violations matter to us only when our kith and kin are hurt by it; the denial of justice argument is made largely when the middle calss is involved. Since almost every family in J&K has encountered human rights violation in some form, the issue has greater currency among the common people in the state. Does it imply that human rights advocacy is possible only when the graph of violation rises? Will people have to be subjected to violations to realize the value of human rights? Is human rights protection an ex post facto exercise and not a preventive one?