Mary Lawlor, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, reflects on the international human rights system and the United States’ responsibility in protecting human rights defenders Monday evening at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She highlighted her concerns about the system’s lack of accountability. “But it is not just the United States that is turning away from human rights funding. It is the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, they have all announced reductions in their overseas development assistance budgets,” Lawlor said. “This deprioritization is happening at a time when rights in every region of the world are being rolled back….” | Photo by Maddie Mullikin.

UN official raises concerns over international human rights system in UMN talk

The advocate for human rights defenders emphasizes the need for binding international treaties that will hold countries accountable for funding human rights infrastructure.

By Maddie Mullikin | Reporter

Mary Lawlor, United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, met with 10 human rights defenders in Gaza about a month ago. She asked a mother how her day was going. The mother said that every day she wakes up to search for food and water, afraid that something will happen to her while she’s away from her son. That day she found food, but no water. The woman looked down at her son.

“She would say her child should be going to school and he should be playing football with his friends in a field, and instead, he’s hanging around dead bodies in a demolished rubble situation,” Lawlor said.

Roughly 10 days after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, a war that has been the center of human rights violations discussions, Lawlor spoke in the Stephen and Chacke Scallen Principled Voices Lecture in Human Rights. The University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Program established this annual lecture series, which was held Monday evening at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, in 2017. Most of the 250 seats were filled, however the first few rows were mostly empty.

“Today, there is an undeniable disillusionment with the international human rights architecture as it currently exists. It has proven largely incapable of protecting the world’s most vulnerable people….” — Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur

In 2001 Lawlor founded Front Line Defenders — the International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and was its executive director until 2016. She is currently an adjunct professor of business and human rights at Trinity College Dublin.

Lawlor’s speech emphasized her concern about countries withdrawing their financial support from human rights infrastructure.

“Today, there is an undeniable disillusionment with the international human rights architecture as it currently exists. It has proven largely incapable of protecting the world’s most vulnerable people…” Lawlor said. “The proliferation of armed conflict around the world feeds into this disillusionment. Indeed, there are more armed conflicts now taking place than at any other time since the Second World War.”

Lawlor isn’t the only human rights advocate concerned about the current state of international human rights. A legal defense attorney for accused detainees charged with war crimes in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, asked a question from the audience during the question and answer portion of the evening. He expressed worry over seeing parallels between current events in the United States and the “martial law court” he observed in Guantanamo Bay.

“It should be really chilling to people, and I think the important thing is people need to begin educating themselves (on) what’s really going on,” the legal defense attorney said.

The Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota hosts a reception following guest speaker and United Nations Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor’s speech for the Scallen lecture Monday night at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Lawlor spoke with University of Minnesota students during the reception and posed for photographs with them. | Photo by Maddie Mullikin.

But human rights violations aren’t just a concern in the United States, as Lawlor emphasized in her speech.

“Foreign agent laws also continue to be introduced, as seen recently in Georgia and in Serbia, and these laws require human rights defenders and organizations which receive funding from abroad, a right protected under the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, to register or to label themselves as agents of foreign influence, as if human rights are a foreign concept,” Lawlor said.

Ed O’Donovan, Lawlor’s senior adviser who supported her from the first row of the auditorium, said he helped about 200 human rights defenders and family members in Afghanistan find asylum after the Taliban took over.

Both Pierce and O’Donovan emphasized the need for the implementation of treaties and commitments that will hold countries accountable for respecting human rights, as international law is not binding.

“I mean, at the moment, it’s all done over kind of declarations and commitments. None of it is binding. So having some kind of binding mechanism to hold it down,” would improve the human rights system, O’Donovan said.

“No matter how strong this pushback is on human rights, it will not be successful in breaking the spirit of human rights defenders.” — Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur

Lawlor recalled when the UN Secretary General “warned last year that we cannot accept a world in which the grandmothers fear that their granddaughter will enjoy fewer rights than they have.…”

While she is concerned about the state of human rights, she is not hopeless. She argued that human rights development is not linear.

“No matter how strong this pushback is on human rights, it will not be successful in breaking the spirit of human rights defenders,” Lawlor said.

About UN official’s speech on human rights

• Who: Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur
• What: Plea for binding human rights commitments to hold countries accountable.
• When: Oct. 20.
• Where: University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
• Why it matters: There are currently the most armed conflicts globally since World War II, according to Lawlor. Lawlor is concerned that countries are neglecting to defend human rights.