Knowledge management in the United Nations human rights program is a
relatively recent phenomenon. It may be said to be symptomatic of the evolution of human
rights activities over the years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in 1948. This evolution may be classified into three distinct phases. The first
phase was the phase when the United Nations system was busy setting standards. The second
phase is that when the system was seeking ways and means of obtaining the implementation
of the standards, and the third phase is that when the system started to look at the ways
in which it could apply its experience towards creating conditions that would enable
governments to prevent negative situations of human rights from further deteriorating or
from developing. The first phase takes us till roughly around the second half of the
seventies, the second phase would take us to somewhere around the mid-eighties, and the
third phase brings us to today.
In the first
phase the characteristic of the flow of information was more or less outward: we had a
core or nuclear idea which needed to be shared and developed into international standards
of human rights. These standards would be universal standards and would apply to all
persons. This first phase took about 25 years, and consisted very much of the process of
defining where the sum total of the national values met around a common denominator, which
was reflected in the standards of the Universal Declaration. So, this was a period of
reflection, consultation, negotiation and formulation, and was dedicated to the immediate
process of setting of standards. But it really never touched people; it really never
touched the individual.
In the second
phase we started to get close to realities. It was the time when we were first authorised
by the Commission on Human Rights and later by the General Assembly to gather information;
to go to countries to meet individuals. We were able to inform ourselves directly of
realities in human rights situations and we started to bring that back and apply it to
testing the standards that had been developed over the previous years. Of course, the
situations that we tested were the very denial of the situations that were envisaged by
those standards. So the gap was immediately apparent; seemingly impossible to bridge. This
was the time when it was fashionable to call human rights situations, situations that were
anything but human rights situations since, in fact, they were situations of violations
of human rights. So we went around in a number of countries, all impossible human rights
situations. This period taught us a lot in terms of the gap that we had to bridge between
those realities and those standards and also it taught us the need to reflect on ways in
which this gap could be bridged.
The second
phase was interesting also because at this time we experienced a dramatic increase in
information emanating from local groups, non-governmental organisations, both
international and local. They were not all the most objective of sources, but the quality
of the information was generally authentic, and in any event most useful in
re-constructing the factual situation when direct access was denied us. To some
governments, these were subversive or opposition groups, and hostile sources. We did not
really let the terminology affect our work, because for all we knew, both sides were
right. What interested us at this phase was trying to record and to get an idea of the
experiences that were actually being made by people on the ground, and the reasons for
those experiences.
This led us to
the third phase, where we started to apply this knowledge that we were deriving from the
information we were collecting, in order to try to find ways and means of addressing or
redressing these phenomena. It should be understood that what was happening was an all
around evolution and not an invention of the international bureaucracy. It was the
international political consensus, if you like, the intergovernmental common denominator
that was enabling us to move from the earlier stages of discussing theory to the testing
of these standards against realities.
It is at this
third phase, with the procedures that had developed over the years, that knowledge
management became a necessity. These procedures all depend on the receipt and application
of information. Since they had been developed over a number of years and through different
processes, it was necessary to provide a common pool where this mass of information
generated by these procedures could be located in order to facilitate its use.
What are these
tools and where are these information sources? At the core is the human rights programme
of activities and at the core of these activities are those necessitated by the six main
international conventions. Of these conventions, we have the two covenants, the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The fact that
there are two covenants—as distinct from one Universal Declaration is, of course, the
result of an aberration that took place in the fifties, the division—artificial
division—of civil and political rights from economic, social and cultural rights, a
division that never reflected realities.
In addition to
these two covenants, we have four conventions: the Convention on Rights of the Child, the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention Against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
The two
covenants and the other four conventions each have their own treaty monitoring body,
consisting of a group of experts elected by the States Parties. These treaty bodies review
information contained in reports presented by States Parties and other sources; they are
intended to conduct their work through dialogue with representatives of States submitting
reports and in certain cases, with inter-governmental bodies and non-governmental
organisations. They meet at regular intervals throughout the year and from time to time
issue General Comments or make Observations intended to aid with the interpretation of
provisions of the international instrument in question.
In addition,
there are extra-conventional procedures, which are heavily dependent on information since
they are fact-finding in nature. Today there are something like 50 such procedures, also
known as ad-hoc mechanisms, that consist of Special Rapporteurs or Working Groups,
some dealing with situations in specific countries, and others looking into certain
phenomena. These have thematic mandates, so they look into such allegations as those of
disappearances and arbitrary detentions, etc. They are intended to buttress the
conventional implementation that I have just described.
The third
procedure developed over the years, and most recently, is that of technical cooperation,
under which the United Nations provides assistance to governments directly through the
human rights programme, and less directly, through the rest of the United Nations system,
to create conditions, build institutions, and strengthen institutions within their society
for addressing potential negative human rights situations. Technical cooperation is, like
the other procedures, heavily reliant on information and analysis.
It is relevant
to mention here the developments that led to change in the support of these three
principal procedures. These developments may be summarised by referring to four decisions,
all of which were taken in the mid-eighties.
The first is
the decision of 1986 to adopt the Declaration on the Right to Development—you would
have heard a lot about it and some of you who are more familiar with human rights will
wonder why on earth I am mentioning this one. Then there was, in 1987, the decision to set
up a Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation, which permitted the possibility of applying
extra-budgetary resources to institution building. In 1988 came the decision which
authorised for the first time the undertaking of human rights education and training. This
decision enabled us to develop the tools by which we could deliver the technical
cooperation support. The fourth decision was in 1989, to convene the World Conference on
Human Rights that took place in 1993, the second World Conference on Human Rights that had
taken place in the history of the UN.
The reason for
the convocation of a World Conference was the need for agreement on the priorities to be
set in the search for the realisation of international human rights norms. The
international community, having finished with the formal Conventions, having more or less
saturated the potential for extra-conventional mechanisms, having tried technical
cooperation, found the need to see where the international system was going; and during
the three years of my life between 1990 and 1993 when I had the doubtful honour of
coordinating the World Conference, we saw emerging around various regions this energy, as
it were, to do something about human rights standards. In Asia, for example, the regional
meeting in preparing for the World Conference in 1993 was the first meeting ever of the
Asian Governments around a human rights agenda. The African regional meeting spun off some
of the richest non-governmental organisations in human rights that we had not seen before.
The same may be said with regard to the Americas; the regional meeting in Costa-Rica.
The preparation
of the World Conference was a process which took the shape of a pyramid, consisting not
just of intergovernmental meetings, not mere statements and declarations, but which took
place through a very hard fought blow by blow process around the world in various
manifestations. By 1993, when the World Conference adopted its Declaration and Programme
of Action, it had in it a number of elements that enabled us to turn to a wider, more
meaningful implementation of human rights standards. This was essentially inspired by the
fact that by that time the knowledge of the realities was such around the table that
nobody anymore could deny that these issues could be seen as something that they were not.
So you had a situation where, for instance, an inter-governmental body like the Commission
on Human Rights took up issues which a few years earlier were unheard of. When I started
as Secretary of the Commission on Human Rights in 1978, it was my duty to advise the
Chairman to stop a speaker, to cut the microphone for any speaker who mentioned a country
by name. Today, virtually any human rights situation, any situation that has a human
rights aspect to it, one way or the other is taken up in the same body: it is not solved,
but it is addressed and the governments concerned respond on the merits. Even though some
issues may not lead to decisions of substance because of procedural preferences they are
on the table and they are addressed in substance.
The World
Conference produced a clear priority for democracy, development and human rights.
Governments gave themselves an agenda—whereby they could now address human rights in
a much wider, a much more total context. What was missing was the institution and that was
taken care of a few months later when the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
was set up, in December 1993. This created the vehicle which would clear the way for this
process to realise itself.
As soon as this
institution was set up, it became necessary to re-structure the secretariat to enable it
to support the High Commissioner’s mandate in addition to carrying out its earlier
functions. It was possible for us to start examining that information and that knowledge
that we had acquired over the preceding years with a view to applying it in a constructive
and forward looking manner.
In order to do
that we devised this tool called "Huricane", which stands for Human Rights
Computerised Analysis Environment. Huricane was set up in order to enable us to marshal
the information that we had been accumulating over the years; to set up a system for
receiving information in order to create a common pool to serve all the activities of the
human rights program. Moreover, it is intended to serve as a tool for monitoring the
status of realisation of the right to development.
Huricane
consists of eight databases serving as baskets for storing information. These eight
databases, once Huricane is complete, will be interrogated by a search engine that we are
developing, that would enable us to re-construct the picture in regard to the situation of
civil, cultural, economic, political or social rights. This would enable us to assist
governments in their efforts to create the conditions to enable them to meet their
international human rights obligations.
(The order of
the rights—alphabetical—that I have just used is, in itself, significant, since
it underlines the integral nature of the five groups of rights. It is worth mentioning
here, by way of parenthesis, that the resolution establishing the High Commissioner for
Human Rights was the first in several decades that used this order. In the last decades it
has become accepted to refer to human rights in two distinct groups: civil and political
rights on one hand and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. The significance
in the use of the alphabetical order is in the fact that this was symptomatic of the
change of culture of human rights that was taking place—the return to the
"integrated" approach to human rights.)
Huricane is
made up of two types of information. One is the information that exists on the public
media, such as the World Wide Web and the other public sources, and the other one is the
information on our Intranet, the internal web where we store our own information. The idea
was to try to bring the information more or less on the same manageable level. So we had
to identify the common attributes, such as the human rights subject, the mandate or
legislative authority, and the country concerned. In order to obtain a first list of
relevant subjects, we examined the work of the Commission on Human Rights over the
preceding 20 years and drew up from the work of the Commission what we felt were the
key-subjects that the Commission had taken up over that period. Hence you will find a wide
range of subjects like asylum, internally displaced persons, fair trial, right to food,
etc.
Having done
that, we then identified its components. Component number one was our Treaty Body system.
It should be kept in mind at all times that the raison d'être of the United
Nations human rights programme is the international legal regime of the International Bill
of Human Rights. Governments ratify conventions and undertake obligations under which they
have to report, and it is our duty to make sure that we make this process fair and
feasible for governments. Now, during the early years, when the treaties were still in
their post-adoption stages, the focus was on ratification by governments. There was
therefore a need to provide governments with the knowledge and means to meet the
obligations that they undertake when they ratify an international human rights treaty.
Thus, this first database in Huricane contains all the information relating to the status
of these treaties, such as details on each of the ratifications, including reservations,
reporting status, and so forth. The full text documents are then included whenever they
make reservations etc.
The next
database contains the second component. This is made up of documents prepared for the
so-called charter-based bodies, viz. the Commission on Human Rights and the General
Assembly. This one is designed in three languages and it has the possibility to
incorporate internal documents such as reports that we get from our field offices (there
are 22 such offices), reports from evaluation missions, and other such internal reports.
The third
component is our digital registry. This contains incoming mail and copies, or evidence of
the follow-up that is given to this mail. This is done by scanning in the hard-copy mail,
which enables it to be accessible to everyone on his or her screen. So far this covers
mail coming in through the mail-room. Correspondence coming in through fax lines will be
integrated through the installation of a central electronic fax server that will receive
messages and direct them into the registry system. This will also have the advantage of
avoiding the diffusion of multiple copies of hard copy of the fax traffic. It ensures
monitoring of correspondence for follow up and continuity. It also makes it possible to
follow correspondence attributed to others; these views are organised by the date of the
registry, by registry number (the date and number are entered electronically), by the date
that it was sent, by sender, by country or by mandate (subject).
The fourth
component is the News/Statements Database where we have selected certain news sources
which are relevant to the subjects making up the menu that I referred to earlier. The
other components are:
Thematic
Mandates Database. This database contains the material that comes in from the so-called
Athematic mandates. These are procedures established by the Commission on Human Rights to
look in to allegations of violations of certain rights, and include allegations of
enforced and involuntary disappearance, arbitrary detention, summary or arbitrary
execution.
The sum total
of information stored in these databases embraces human rights standards across the board.
The multiple database search engine makes it is possible to draw up a profile that enables
a reconstruction of the sum total of the human rights picture.
The search
engine enables two types of searches, one by country or human rights subject and the other
one permits full text retrieval.
Now you see, in
fact, what we are doing is simply organising and applying the experience that we had made
over the years. I will wind up with one example. In developing our tools for
training—we were only authorised to do so as of 1988—we had to start with those
sectors of society that were more likely, by virtue of their office, to be in contact with
larger groups of people. So we started with the Administration of Justice sector, and
specifically, law enforcement. In this group, we also had to address the human rights
training of the armed forces. This was in 1994. This represented a formidable task,
knowing full well how difficult the military culture, the armed forces culture, had been
for us traditionally to assimilate to the respect for human rights. Thus, in order to
overcome this barrier, the first thing we did was to look at the experiences that had
accumulated over the preceding twenty years, which would show what we considered as
negative situations of human rights resulting from or attributable to, in one form or
another, armed forces behaviour. Having done so, we brought together twenty or so military
persons, of various ranks and backgrounds, for a week to Geneva and we shared these
experiences with them. From these discussions there emerged three types of situations
where military behaviour was directly related to human rights situations, and which could
form the basis of a human rights training program for armed forces personnel. The first
was the situation illustrated by the Chile case. Chile was a very good case history
because you had a government that was taken over by the military and substituting the
government structure. You had generals who were government department ministers. This was
hypothesis number one. Hypothesis number two was when the armed forces were called in to
perform what were normally considered as police duties, like crowd control, where, being
trained as soldiers, they applied their training and caused loss of life and limb. And the
third sector was the behaviour of armed forces in peace-keeping operations, where, even
though the colour of the cap had changed, the training had not—and therefore the
resulting behaviour was still not very different from what it would have been during
normal service, at least in some instances.
This exercise
consisted of—no more and no less—simply sharing with them what we knew from the
preceding twenty years. And they did not like that, since their military training and
culture was intended to prepare them for loftier goals. Since that time we started working
on developing a module for training. What had seemed impossible became very likely, simply
by the application of facts; letting the facts speak for themselves.
This is the
philosophy behind Huricane. Its purpose is no other except to enable governments to
ascertain for themselves the relationship between a given situation and the international
standards to which they have adhered, not in an accusatory or punitive sense, but in the
sense of prevention, of enabling the creation of conditions to address and redress
negative situations of human rights. |
