Interview with Anders Pedersen, UN Human Rights Division

Angola is emerging from three decades of civil war, in which one of the first casualties was the human rights of its people. As the country begins the task of rebuilding, the United Nations has engaged the authorities in a process aimed at establishing a climate of human rights protection. IRIN spoke to Anders Pedersen, the chief of the Human Rights Division of the UN Mission in Angola, on the challenges and expectations of the strategy. QUESTION: How do you make protection work in a country like Angola which has endured three decades of civil war? ANSWER: I think first of all one must look at the whole concept of protection. In my view there's a great deal of misunderstanding when we speak about protection. There is a myth that protection only equals the kind of work done by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Now they have a very legitimate and important role to play, that's very clear. But when we speak as the UN in Angola about protection this is not what it's primarily all about. For me protection is something that has largely to do with capacity building, with a variety of actors, in particular of course the government, making them able to assume their responsibility in terms of making citizens' rights a reality. So the core of protection for me is capacity building, with government partners and other partners, in order to [strengthen] the institutions, that will make protection a reality for ordinary people. Q: Why is it so difficult to get that accepted? A: Well, there are certainly many constraints to that. And of course there are situations, especially conflict situations, where people have an immediate need for a physical kind of protection. Now I think we have to be realistic, that it is almost impossible in many situations to provide this. But this is not to say that we cannot make a significant impact in terms of better protection of people by working with all those other methodologies, all those other ways that I was alluding to. But yes, there will always be a core if you want to put it that way, in areas of human rights protection that will be extremely difficult to achieve. But this said, there is already within the UN system protection mechanisms related to the Commission for Human Rights [but], unfortunately I think we also have a situation where many people do not really know the system sufficiently well and know what mechanisms are already in place at the global level, where even individual complaints can be taken up. Q: Just to talk about very briefly the protection mandate in Angola which was instituted in August. What does it actually mean, what is your office meant to do, how does it fit into the UN structure? A: In the UN Security Council resolution that set up the current UN Mission in Angola there is a provision on human rights protection. Now, protection in this regard is, as I said, not about the question of identifying particular actors as responsible for violations. We basically interpret protection and our mandate as a way to monitor the situation in order to guide our work and our partners' work in order to increase the protection of people on the ground. So it's very much to be seen as one element within a capacity building strategy. Q: Isn't there a natural tension between the immediate needs of protection and the longer-term need of building capacity? A: I'm the first one to recognise that this is not perfect, I'm the first one to recognise there are very few situations of a perfect protection strategy. But I also think that we have to be clear, as the Swedish say, that the perfect should not defeat the good. I think that's very much what it's all about. We can do a lot in increasing the protection of citizens' rights without necessarily having to include that element that is extremely sensitive and difficult. Q: With the current ceasefire do you think we've moved into a new stage of the protection work that needs to be done? A: Oh yes, and I believe it's fairly remarkable what's already been done with particular government partners in terms of increased protection for Angolans. But still as we've said several times it's not perfect, but a very significant step forward has been taken together with the government which has been coordinated by OCHA [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] on the UN side to actually put in place a framework which makes protection a reality for a significant number of people. But of course, this is not to say there are not still outstanding issues, of course there are outstanding issues. Q: How do we deal with an example of say some policemen getting drunk and beating up people, raping women. How does it work, what happens then? Is that just seen as a civil problem or do you see that more as a structural problem of impunity within the security forces? What do you do about those types of cases? A: Again I think there are no quick fixes. In this case if that policeman is acting not in a private capacity but as a policeman it's of course a human rights issue ... I don't think we should fool ourselves, there is no single way at present of addressing that except that it has to be brought into the normal justice system. And I think that's very much what we would try and do to actually capacitate, to train, to sensitise the existing institutions on their human rights obligations. They are moving in the right direction, they are becoming more sensitive to these kinds of issues, [and in this kind of situation to encourage them] to move in, to get the prosecutor-general at the provincial level to actually bring up the case and give those people a fair trial. That's the way, I think, to operate. It's not for the UN to step in and take over any of those responsibilities from any government partners. Q: You said you monitor and report, who do you monitor and report to? A: When I speak about human rights monitoring and human rights reporting let me make it clear. We are not looking at ourselves publicising reports on the human rights situation in Angola, that's not where we are at this stage. As I've said, human rights monitoring primarily at this stage is a way to guide our capacity building efforts. To make us know better where we have to focus our attention, and this is whether we work with our government partners or any other partners. So we see this as a collaborative effort between us and any one that is out there. I think really that it has to be stressed that there is no other way, there is no other sustainable way to make protection a reality than to work with our national partners. They might be instances on the ground where someone could step in, in a pragmatic way, and make an individual feel that he or she has been given some kind of justice in a situation. But fundamentally, I don't think that this is what it's all about. We have to realise, we have to accept the limitations of the kind of work we're doing in protection, but while making full use of all the other possibilities that we have. That's maybe where I feel we are still limiting ourselves. So much can be done with the existing framework, being very pragmatic about things, being very down to earth about things, where actually if you look at what the individual wants, what the individual actually has the right to. We can move things forward and I think that's been shown in Angola, that things can be improved, even in complex situations.