Introduction--Rights Choices: Dilemmas of Human Rights Practice

From the outside, the work of human rights activists can seem to have an absolutist quality. The public claims and demands of human rights organizations and movements appear coherent and uncompromising, clearly articulating the right and wrong of a given situation or policy, unambiguously demanding a remedy, showing little doubt, speaking truth to power; human rights may be the weapon of the weak, but they are claimed with confidence and certainty. Yet from the inside, the world of human rights practice is fraught with dilemmas. Across all aspects of human rights activity, tensions between absolutism and pragmatism, radical and gradual changes, long-term and short-term gains, or assistance to individuals versus collective changes, abound. Different policy goals often clash with each other: better protection for the rights of some may have negative effects for the rights of others; limited but immediate gains may hinder slower but broader change. Such dilemmas, resolved through hard-fought debates and agonizing compromises, are a major part of the daily work of human rights practice, but often remain under-documented and overlooked by writings on human rights, which frequently focus on the more abstract legal and philosophical analysis of human rights. These dilemmas speak to a complex world of ambiguities, trade-offs, tensions, internal debates and ‘roads not taken’, which forms much of the experience of human rights work. In the world of humanitarian agencies, the inherent and central role of dilemmas has been acknowledged and thoroughly discussed since the 1990s (e.g. Hendrickson 1998; Weiner 1998; Vaux 2006; Terry 2013), but in the context of human rights organizations and activism it seems that thus far at least there have been fewer systematic attempts to analyse the role of dilemmas.