Human Rights and the Do No Harm Framework

Marshall Wallace

This paper is collected in the Do No Harm Handbook.

In conflict and post-conflict situations, assistance workers (whether humanitarian or development) need to take several things into account. Among these are the impacts of their programmes on the context with regard to the conflict and the issues surrounding the conflict. Also among these, and especially important in conflict situations, is how their programmes address the human rights concerns of the people in the situation.

International Humanitarian Law clearly lays out the responsibilities of those in authority to their constituencies, while also dealing with the rights that people should expect to be able to exercise. International assistance must work within this framework, supporting both the efforts of the authority to meet its responsibilities and of people to exercise their rights.

Human rights, and the implications of assistance programming on the human rights situation, cannot be ignored.

The Do No Harm Framework was developed to analyze and review the impacts of assistance on the conflict. It was not developed to explicitly deal with human rights and, as such, it is not the human rights tool. There are other, better, tools for addressing the totality of the legalities regarding human rights.

Nonetheless, human rights are included in the DNH Framework. Human rights clearly and regularly arise in the Context Analysis section (Dividers and Connectors). On the positive side, human rights appear as shared values and experiences that connect people. They appear in the cultural and governmental systems and institutions that promote non-violent attitudes and actions and non-violent ways of resolving disputes. They appear in certain occasions and in symbols that people use to promote connectedness.

On the negative side, those elements of a society in conflict that are actively engaged in attacking human rights are Dividers (whether a discriminatory legal or education system, a particular warlord or militia, or direct attacks on officials responsible for human rights, for example).

The merit of the DNH Framework as it addresses human rights is that it looks at human rights in an immediate and operational fashion. What do people do to demonstrate their support for human rights? How do they promote rights? What do people do to denigrate and undermine human rights? How do they attack them? Where and when do they attack them?

In the DNH Framework, “human rights” is not a concept to be considered in the abstract. The actual impacts of a conflict on people and on their human rights are taken into account in order to develop good and effective programmes.

CDA will continue to work on the implications of human rights within the context of the DNH Framework.

One particular finding of our recent efforts to think more explicitly about human rights in the context of the DNH Framework intrigues us. The DNH Framework encourages us to think more systematically about potential responses to human rights violations. What are the options for dealing with violations? DNH does not pre-judge, nor does it prescribe a single response, but instead it deals with actual situations and examines options for accountability on the basis of existing and identified connectors.

We have been struck by the range of options that people and nations use to address violations of human rights that occur in their conflicts. People are simultaneously extremely creative and forgiving. They know what systems of forgiveness and punishment will and will not work in their communities and they almost always work to promote activities to heal their societies. This strikes us as profoundly hopeful, and also, as outsiders to these societies and the direct effects of their conflicts, extremely humbling.