GEORGETTE GAGNON: RAISING THE BAR ON RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN

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From: UNNews <UNNews@un.org>
Date: 28 May 2013 13:00:00 -0400
Subject: GEORGETTE GAGNON: RAISING THE BAR ON RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
IN AFGHANISTAN
To: news11@ny-mail-p-lb-028.ptc.un.org

GEORGETTE GAGNON: RAISING THE BAR ON RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN
AFGHANISTANNew York, May 28 2013 1:00PMGeorgette Gagnon's resume
reads like a who's who of the globe's most prominent danger zones.
With past experiences across hot-spots in Africa and Bosnia, the
Canadian-born Director of the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan's (UNAMA) Human Rights Unit is now leading the effort to
raise the bar on respect for human rights in the South Asian country.

"The human rights situation here is fraught with challenges," she told
the UN News Centre in a recent phone interview, before listing an
array of problems ranging from the continuing armed conflict to
violence against women.

Ms. Gagnon, who is also the Country Representative for the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, faces a daunting task in bringing human
rights issues up to speed in a country tortured by decades of war and
abuses against the civilian population.

Based in the Afghan capital Kabul, Ms. Gagnon oversees a mostly Afghan
staff of 71 human rights officers across eight UNAMA regional offices.
These human rights staffers work to provide advice to the mission's
leadership, Afghan authorities, and civil society actors on four
specific priorities: the protection of civilians in armed conflict;
violence against women; detention and torture; and peace and
reconciliation.

"The challenge has been attempting to document very clearly and very
accurately what the situation is for the Afghan people; what types of
human rights violations they are experiencing," she explained.

"And then, of course, taking that to the Government and international
partners and working with them on agreeing to different kinds of
recommendations and solutions and then trying to implement them."


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Among the most pervasive and serious human rights violations that Ms.
Gagnon and her team regularly confront are issues relating to women
and, in particular, violence against women. Despite a 2009 Elimination
of Violence Against Women Law, which criminalized many harmful
practices, including a whole array of domestic and workplace abuses as
well as forced marriage, child marriage, and honour killings, she
pointed out that gender-based violence still remains "very well
entrenched in the culture and society."

With the law in place, the UNAMA human rights officers monitor the
implementation of the law by the police, judges, prosecutors and other
Afghan institutions to see whether people are actually resorting to
the law and whether it is producing a reduction in the level of
violence women experience.

Their work often extends to investigating claims made by civilian
groups over human rights violations committed against them by
combatants in still-volatile areas such as the country's northeast
which, Ms. Gagnon said, had recently experienced an upsurge in
violence.

"A routine day would find me at our office in Kunduz, or Jalalabad, or
Khost, which are quite remote places and I would go out and be with
the team there or the human rights officer there for a few days and we
would get quite a steady stream of people coming in from civil society
who have been experiencing abuse," she continued.

"We spend several days just interviewing the men, women and children
who have fled and were displaced, some of them with just the clothes
on their back. And they tell us about how the fighting occurred,
whether they had family members who were killed, whether a mortar
landed in their yard, whether those detained experienced abuse."

The result of much of this frontline, on-the-ground annotating and
documenting ultimately ends up in UNAMA reports which seek to impact
how the Afghan Government and international forces approach human
rights issues in the country. In one particular instance, Ms. Gagnon
recalled that a decree issued by Afghan President Hamid Karzai against
detention and torture in local prisons "mirrored" the UN's own
recommendations.

"In my experience, what I've seen in working with the UN, especially
in Afghanistan, if it's done properly, the UN can get the change in
policy and practice because the Government listens," Ms. Gagnon added.

"We've been able to develop a team that's very agile and committed and
professional and expert in what they do and over the last three years
we've been able to really do what I consider to be excellent human
rights work which has achieved results for Afghan people."

At the same time, amid continuing conflict between Government forces
and insurgents, the imminent withdrawal of international troops in
2014 has raised the question over whether all the gains made by
UNAMA's human rights team can survive what may be a dramatic period of
transition.

Ms. Gagnon is worried about a "likely disintegration" of the human
rights situation following the pull-out and adds that the Afghan
government's ability to deal with the increasing levels of insecurity
also remains "an open question."

"But we've been pushing the Afghan security forces very hard to put in
place a whole number of mitigation measures to protect civilians and
ensure that the procedures and the systems and the training are all in
place and so that they are protecting civilians."

Given these not i
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