The Challenge of Protection

If authorities want to violate, marginalise and impoverish people, then humanitarian workers are not particularly well placed to stop them since protection activities will be working against the intentions of the legal or de facto groups perpetrating these abuses. Humanitarian personnel will be seen more as a threat than an ally by such negative authorities. Inevitably, room for manoeuvre will be restricted and the strategies and modes of action will be politically complicated. These situations are more likely to raise difficult programming choices between access, compromise and confrontation.

In some wars, civilian suffering may be an unintended consequence and regretted by one or more of the belligerents, who may then seek to assist the civilians. For example, some parts of the state authorities will be deliberately perpetrating violations while others will be genuinely trying to mitigate extreme state policies and improve people’s conditions. The same range of abusive and protective intent can exist within an armed group. Understanding the range of intentions within a given authority becomes a critical part of protection analysis and response. Who has responsibility for ensuring that atrocity and deprivation do not happen in war?

There are cases that rival political or armed groups are carrying out vicious and indiscriminate attacks on populations in their respective territories since both sides are avoiding attacking each other’s forces, hence, are instead deliberately directing their violence against populations consisting of civilians from the opposing group.

The law, the legal principle of primary state responsibility and the mandates of humanitarian agencies offer civilians important legal protection in war and disaster. However, people are not actually protected just because the law says that they are. Therefore it is not lack of laws that people are exposed to abuse rather the will or power to enforce the law. Often laws are broken and rights are violated most by state authorities with the responsibility. In other situations, states that are willing to abide by these laws lack the power or means to do so.

Securing people’s protection, with impartiality, when abusive groups familiar with local machineries, are set to wipe them out or to discriminate against them is a highly complicated task. It can verge on the impossible and routinely involves a number of strategic risks for humanitarian organizations, the increased risks to victims that fact-finding, activities and behaviour may present.

Insensitive or unprofessional behaviour and advocacy by humanitarian staff can also expose particular individuals and civilian communities to heightened risk by leading to punitive backlashes or retaliation. More generally, aid assets and sanctuary can be abused by belligerents. Corruption in aid distribution can also render civilian populations vulnerable to extortion, threat and deprivation.

Aid workers unable to see the political intent behind the atrocities run the risk of inadvertently legitimising violations or perpetrators. It is also crucial to avoid extreme measures in protection efforts in order not to politicizing humanitarian action in the eyes of belligerents

Overall protection programme should try to answer the following questions.

• Who are you trying to protect?
• From what are you trying to protect them?
• What capacity do people have to protect themselves?
• How will you help them?
• What resources will you use?
• Who will you do it with?
• How will you know if you have succeeded?

Protection programme meets these challenges by coming up with:
• the best possible response to people’s immediate protection needs
• the best possible long-term reduction of threats and violations
• the best possible reduction of people’s vulnerability to those threats
• the best possible development of people’s own capacities.



Protection Assessment

The importance of information in any type of successful protection work cannot be underestimated. Information can save lives and is very much two way between civilian communities and humanitarian agencies. Information that passes from affected civilian communities to humanitarian workers can help agencies to understand how people are suffering and coping, so informing and guiding the appropriate design of protection and assistance programmes.

The process of collecting information as part of a protection assessment is often much more sensitive and delicate than in other areas of humanitarian work. Many of the techniques of information gathering may be the same but the highly political and dangerous environments in which you are using them makes information gathering highly risky for you and the people you are trying to help.

Information sources are likely to include key informants in government, armed groups, the media, academia, civil society, religious or humanitarian organisations. They will also include secondary sources such as published reports. But it is often the people at risk who know most about their predicament and have the greatest insight into the threats against them.

Many of these activities will require discussion with the victims of violations. Whenever you or your staff are consulting with people, it is vital that you enable them to describe their experience of suffering and threat directly, that you record it accordingly, and that you cross-check it.

Another key part of any protection assessment is to identify who actually, or potentially, has the necessary desire and ability to protect people from the threats they are facing. The ability of a state authority, organisation, community or individual to protect is determined by a mixture of the resources it has available, political attitude and personal conviction.

This process requires examining a range of actors, including the different organs of the relevant state authority; armed forces and armed groups; individual commanders and fighters; war-affected communities and individual victims; other states; multinational companies; and international organisations, humanitarian agencies, and human-rights organisations. The aim is to understand where protective will exist, where it is being blocked and how best it might be mobilised and supported.

People caught up in violent conflict make calculated decisions all the time about the relative risks of the often dangerous options and dilemmas that are open to them: to stay at home or to flee, to plant crops or to hide the seeds, to join the militia or to stay out of the conflict. These decisions are made on the best information available to them – information that is frequently incomplete and inaccurate because of restrictions on their movement or because it is deliberately manipulated for political reasons.

What is waiting for me if I return home, and if I stay here what will happen to the camp? What legal right do I have to compensation for the loss of my land and how do I go about exercising it? Am I entitled to any assistance and who should I contact to get it?


Monitoring

The key question to shape the monitoring might be: how much is what we are doing, and encouraging others to do, helping to keep people safe, to preserve their personal dignity and integrity and to realise their economic, social and cultural rights?
Answering this question requires that you constantly monitor two main variables:

1 the changing nature of the threats and violations ranged against the particular population (the situation)

2 people’s experience of your strategy and activities (the results of your agency’s actions).

This means taking the collection and analysis of protection indicators seriously, regularly reporting on what you find, and, wherever possible, involving protected persons in the process. While every effort needs to be made to involve people in need of protection in any monitoring process, wherever possible you should also try to involve the responsible authorities or abusing parties as well. Actively engaging them in protection monitoring, or at least being able to meet them to discuss your findings, is a vital way of holding them accountable.

Agency personnel are also a valuable source of monitoring information. Staff can be vital for informal monitoring and adapting particular strategies in accordance with certain key questions about improvement. More qualitative indicators which require real listening and empathy to capture the subtleties of people’s experience and their sense of security must be collected by highly sensitive staff members.

It may be useful to return to the basic protection equation:
risk = threat + vulnerability × time
and to select indicators which relate to each part of the equation in the given context.

Protection focused policies can often sound very state-centric but wherever access and contact permits, humanitarian protection work is also about working directly with affected communities to identify and develop ways in which they can protect themselves and realise their rights to assistance, recovery, and safety. It is vitally important that people in need of protection are not seen just as the objects of state power but also as the subjects of their own protective capabilities. In many wars and disasters, people survive despite the state.




Sources:
Protection, An ALNAP guide for humanitarian agencies, H. Slim, A. Bonwick, ODI. 2005

Bonwick, A. (2006) Who Really Protects Civilians? Oxford: Development in Practice, Oxfam

Roche, C (1999) Impact Assessment for Development Agencies: Learning to Value
Change. Oxford: Oxfam