Beyond Compliance Symposium – A Rights-based Approach to Addressing Harm and Need in Armed Conflict?

Editors’ note: This post forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualization of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address harm and need.

Switching on the television news or opening social media can immediately expose us to images of civilians in the most desperate straits. Be it in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, or many other conflicts, we see people being killed and maimed in real-time, denied access to humanitarian relief, and children unable to access schools and hospitals. But how do we understand the best way to address the conditions that civilians face in conflict?

Traditionally, a “needs based approach” meant that implementing agencies would invest in providing goods and services to alleviate humanitarian needs. The provision of food, medical supplies, school buildings, and sanitation systems are examples of critical needs being met. But without addressing the underlying causes of under-development and vulnerability, is addressing critical needs enough? This post examines the importance of moving beyond the paradigm of a needs-based charitable response to humanitarian need.

What Is a Rights-based Approach?    

Since the late 1990s,  international development and humanitarian agencies have increasingly applied a “rights-based approach.” Using this approach, international human rights standards are taken to guarantee the civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights of people who in this framing are considered as “rights holders.” Meanwhile, States and their component parts are considered as “duty bearers” holding the obligation to ensure the respect, protection, and fulfilment of such rights. Over the decades, States have agreed to multiple human rights treaties and conventions, guaranteeing the rights of people with disabilities, protecting women and girls from discrimination, and ensuring children can grow up healthy and safe.

The fundamental contribution of a rights-based approach is that it does not merely see people through the lens of their needs and the services they lack. It sets out a vision of what ought to be and of the conditions necessary for all human beings to live in dignity and thrive. Critically, it locates the responsibility on States, institutions, and the people in charge of them, to achieve these conditions.

While there is no universal recipe for a human rights-based approach, there are several core components that enable the identification of gaps and facilitate action. People, as rights holders, are considered to have a critical and active role to play in understanding and demanding their rights. Typically, a rights-based approach will involve supporting a group of people by educating them to understand their rights and enabling them to engage with authorities to call for them to be fulfilled. State authorities will then be engaged constructively  with a view to obtaining acknowledgement of the obligation and deliver on citizens’ rights and plans on meaningful action to do so. Such a dialogue seeks to foster relationship between citizen and state authority where  power and responsibility can be shared safely between all stakeholders, building accountability, and encouraging willingness to fulfil obligations.

In situations of armed conflict, a rights-based approach can illuminate the causes of both conflict and poverty and identify responses addressing both. A rights-based approach focuses interventions on the underlying causes of poverty, the uneven distribution of economic resources and social capital, and hence sharpens our focus on causes rather than only on symptoms. It enables us to understand and analyse power and structural determinants of conflict. For civilians experiencing conflict, engaging in such a rights-based analysis can be an empowering process, as it contributes to dignity and self-confidence.

Humanitarian agencies have highlighted that the rights paradigm can be healing. A rights-based approach considers a person as deserving a full range of rights as an active protagonist in the realisation of their full potential instead of being portrayed as a passive victim, beneficiary or recipient of aid. The advocacy that accompanies rights-based programming uses international human rights treaties and legal frameworks as a reference point to demand accountability from political leaders and governments. This is especially relevant in conflict situations where accountability is often lacking.

A Child Rights-Based Approach    

For War Child, taking a specific “child rights-based approach” focuses our programming and advocacy on the activation of the rights within the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child among other relevant rights frameworks. Using the tool of a “child rights situation analysis,” War Child staff work with children and youth in particular conflict settings to examine the extent to which children’s rights have been realized and identify the obstacles to fulfilling their rights through a process that listens to and prioritizes their views. Such an analysis focuses on a child’s right (including access) to quality education, protection from violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation, and health and social development. Furthermore, we address children’s right to be heard in families, schools, communities, and public decision making as well as within War Child itself. Such an analysis reveals which rights children consider their greatest priority, and the actions that duty bearers must take to fulfil any gaps.

Beyond addressing the immediate threats and vulnerabilities children face in conflict, War Child’s advocacy uses a child rights-based approach to assess the degree to which international allies of armed actors are fulfilling their obligations. Our advocacy reports have challenged global powers’ failure to uphold human rights obligations through military support relationships with rights-abusing State forces, and the treatment of children recruited by extremist groups. Hence, a rights-based approach allows us to champion a global rights eco-system in which the application of rights by all States influences others and builds positive global human rights norms.

Challenges to a Rights-based Approach    

Despite the importance of a rights-based approach in situations of armed conflict, challenging State authorities and armed actors by demanding that rights be fulfilled and protected is fraught with risk and may seem impossible. Moreover, in post-conflict or fragile States, it may be considered unreasonable to demand that global standards are met with minimal and damaged infrastructure. In such contexts, at best, steps can be taken to gradually improve conditions with external support that will enable improvements in the long term. Though human rights frameworks stand accused of pursuing a Western rights agenda, there are regional treaties such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights that clearly show the universal appeal of human rights. Be that as it may, an exclusive focus on legalistic solutions may be seen to ignore social, cultural, and political determinants of conflict and inequality. For individuals living through the horror of conflict, the focus on human rights may seem abstract as people may reasonably question the value accorded to human rights by the very institutions and States that insist upon them.

A Compass, Not a Map    

The development of the rights-based approach to understanding and addressing poverty and conflict has been a vital step in moving beyond the paradigm of a needs-based charitable response to suffering. A rights framework can serve a critical function, acting as a compass to help stakeholders, activists, and civil society to steer through the chaos of conflict and clarify what the relevant rights are in a situation and how such rights are being violated.

Finally, a rights-based framework, as opposed to a needs-based framework, clarifies what interventions will strengthen the exercise of these rights. An exclusive focus on rights is inadequate to illuminate the complex factors generating harm and need and motivating the behaviour of powerholders. The Beyond Compliance Consortium (BCC) seeks to look beyond international legal frameworks and understand what motivates harmful and protective behaviour. A sound understanding of rights underpins the BCC programme, but it is a starting point from which we will embark on an exploration of legal and extra-legal means to achieve fuller protection in war.

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Rocco Blume is the Head of Policy and Advocacy at the War Child Alliance.

Photo credit: Anmarrfaat via Wikimedia Commons