[resource] Enhancing the quality and effectiveness of mediation efforts through human rights
[resource] Enhancing the quality and effectiveness of mediation efforts through human rights
Executive Summary
Human rights and mediation are inextricably linked. Both fields aim to prevent conflicts or bring them to an end by addressing core conflict drivers, including human rights violations. Nevertheless, human rights and mediation are sometimes portrayed as incompatible. This practice note outlines why such misconceptions exist and what human rights can tangibly offer the mediation field. It shows that human rights can serve as a practical problem-solving tool to support mediation strategies and assist negotiating parties to reach inclusive and sustainable agreements. Human rights are at the core of the United Nations. While this normative grounding is sometimes cast as a disadvantage when the Organization mediates, it is also a powerful source of legitimacy – particularly in the eyes of civilians. This note highlights that the human rights framework enables mediators to achieve goals such as addressing the root causes of conflicts, promoting inclusivity and participation, and ensuring accountability.
Mediators and other practitioners can make use of human rights to enhance the quality and effectiveness of mediation efforts, including by opening space for political negotiations, strengthening ongoing peace processes and reinvigorating stalled efforts. Human rights can set the ground for facilitated negotiations, for example, by establishing channels of communication; improving the negotiations context; allowing parties to test conflict resolution efforts; enhancing the credibility of the United Nations prior to mediation; offering mediators networks of interlocutors; improving the quality of conflict analysis; incentivizing parties to initiate negotiations on sensitive issues, including accountability for past crimes; providing entry points for conflict prevention and de-escalation; and building confidence between parties.
Once mediation efforts begin, human rights can further contribute by providing principles and standards within which to frame agenda issues; leveraging the power of economic, social and cultural rights; improving the inclusivity of processes, such as by enhancing the participation in peace talks of women, victims and survivors, Indigenous Peoples, minorities and other marginalized groups; reframing political grievances in human rights terms; drawing on the more neutral characterizations of conflict situations with which the international human rights system engages; helping to navigate the gaps between the parties’ framing of human rights and international standards; finding solutions to critical issues, including justice and accountability for past crimes; “bracketing” complex issues to allow parties to make progress on other issues; and fostering agreements that are sustainable and can be implemented.
This practice note is an outcome of a joint project between the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to better understand the constructive role that human rights can play in supporting mediation efforts, with the aim of improving the effectiveness of United Nations mediation, good offices and preventive diplomacy efforts.1 The project also seeks to enhance collaboration between the United Nations peace and security and human rights pillars, in line with the Secretary-General’s Call to Action for Human Rights.