Promoting Reconciliation and Protecting Human Rights: An Underexplored Relationship

Abstract

The United Nations (henceforth, UN) was correct in asserting that the absence of war ‘can only create a space in which peace can be built’. This chapter examines the challenges that exist in filling this space and particularly, in reconciling previously warring groups in ethnically divided societies. First, it argues that reconciliation can only be achieved when members of different ethnic groups rehumanise and start trusting each other. It then makes the case that reconciliation and human rights do not coexist in an easy relationship; rather, the connections between them are varied and often contradictory. On the one hand, human rights are indeed positively connected to reconciliation. On the other, the two terms can also be at odds with each other: human rights protection can undermine reconciliation, while the language of reconciliation sometimes derails the process of protecting human rights. In addition to these positive and negative connections between the two terms, it is also possible that human rights and reconciliation remain completely unconnected. While the former is well suited in inducing legal and institutional changes, it is social and psychological changes that the later requires.

These conclusions about a nuanced relationship between human rights and reconciliation directly challenge the UN orthodoxy. The long-standing assumption of the international community has been that there is an exclusively positive connection between the two terms and that reconciliation in ethnically divided, post-conflict societies always ‘requires that past human rights violations be addressed’. This is often treated as a self-evident truth and no attempts have been made to explain it in any more detail. It is merely sufficient it seems, to reiterate that ‘United Nations human rights personnel can play a leading role […] in helping to implement a comprehensive programme for national reconciliation.’ Challenging this orthodoxy about the relationship between reconciliation and human rights is not only an exercise of theoretical importance. Rather, it can have profound practical implications on how human rights are used in post-conflict societies themselves. Thus, I support my theoretical conclusions by using examples from four such case studies; Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and South Africa. These conclusions are of increased significance in light of the ongoing ethnic conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere and the prominent role that international peace-builders are likely to play in their aftermath.

Keywords: peace, reconciliation, divided societies, human rights