Session 4: “Canary in the coal mine”?
Decreasing humanitarian space, increasing targeting of humanitarian aid workers, unwillingness of states to grant access to humanitarian crises: are these warning signs of a larger problem, namely the beginning of a breakdown in international consensus on the Protection regime which is founded on international law (IHL, refugee law, human rights law)?
Question: Protection is premised on the assumption that everyone agrees to the “rules” and the legal framework inside which “protection operates”. Is this assumption still valid and do we really have a global consensus? If this assumption is no longer valid, what should the new “protection architecture” look like?
Panelists:
Anne Edgerton, ChildFund International (view Talking Points: Protection, Access, and R2P)
Mitzi Schroeder, Jesuit Refugee Service
PDF of Session 4 Canary in a Coal Mine Discussion Notes
SUMMARY
Many themes emerged during this session, including relationships and values, a local framework, the risk of speaking out, an increasing number of so-called humanitarian players and a decreasing humanitarian space. The question of impunity was also discussed, with one participant noting that “the gap in the architecture is that which provides impunity to offenders.” Here are a few other questions and views expressed in the discussion groups:
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Is there a shared understanding of the word “humanitarian” with the emergence or expansion of new players on the international protection scene?
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Should we be skeptical of aid provided from an “unworthy” source?
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In many of the places we are going to, protection is more about relationships and not about values.
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If military and others are taking up humanitarian and protection space, our new space may be at the community level building local capacities for protection.
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Perhaps we need to focus more on the use of national legislation and regional treaties rather the broader international treaties. Rely on the power of local pressure, arm twisting.
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There are more players who don’t buy into the protection regime or even the entire system upon which it is built. These are nonstate actors such as the Lord’s Resistance Army or the Taliban and it’s a completely incompatible discourse with no way to find common ground.
1. Some of this dynamic is the classic difference between the frameworks on paper and their implementation.
2. At the same time, even as national legislation and policy tend to lag widely, protection frameworks, international and increasingly regional, seem almost ubiquitous at times and proliferating, in development and/or ratification. Most prominent among the examples are frameworks on human trafficking, on migrant victims of violence (especially women), and migrant children.
3. In the context of this effort at strengthening protection within existing or with new frameworks and implementation, one of the obstacles that has been most obstructive recently is the tyranny of the minority in intergovernmental processes committed to consensus, e.g., recent failures by UNHCR protection to even undertake Ex Com Conclusions on rescue at sea, livelihoods, refugees & trafficking; its current difficulty reaching “consensus” to finish the conclusion on protracted refugee situations; and separately, some fairly high profile EU and Council of Europe processes to design and implement standards for the care and protection of refugees and migrants hurt on boats or other border crossings.
4. Even as humanitarian space has shrunk and continues to shrink in a number of places, typically places of open conflict, there has also been a substantial rise in the number, nature and range of actors engaged in humanitarian space, if not traditional humanitarian activity or protection per se. It would be interesting as well to share impressions as to whether there has also been an important increase in the number of humanitarian tools, and their effectiveness.
5. One of the problems of our age is a babellian confusion of roles, cross-engagements and perceptions of these multiple (and at times, new) actors: private sector entities, military & UN-NGO; UN peacekeepers where there is no peace to keep, etc.