28 May 2013 – Georgette Gagnon's resume reads like a who's who of the globe's most prominent danger zones. With past experiences across hot-spots in Africa and Bosnia, the Canadian-born Director of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan's (UNAMA) Human Rights Unit is now leading the effort to raise the bar on respect for human rights in the South Asian country.
“The human rights situation here is fraught with challenges,” she told the UN News Centre in a recent phone interview, before listing an array of problems ranging from the continuing armed conflict to violence against women.
Ms. Gagnon, who is also the Country Representative for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, faces a daunting task in bringing human rights issues up to speed in a country tortured by decades of war and abuses against the civilian population.
Based in the Afghan capital Kabul, Ms. Gagnon oversees a mostly Afghan staff of 71 human rights officers across eight UNAMA regional offices. These human rights staffers work to provide advice to the mission's leadership, Afghan authorities, and civil society actors on four specific priorities: the protection of civilians in armed conflict; violence against women; detention and torture; and peace and reconciliation.
“The challenge has been attempting to document very clearly and very accurately what the situation is for the Afghan people; what types of human rights violations they are experiencing,” she explained.
“And then, of course, taking that to the Government and international partners and working with them on agreeing to different kinds of recommendations and solutions and then trying to implement them.”
Among the most pervasive and serious human rights violations that Ms. Gagnon and her team regularly confront are issues relating to women and, in particular, violence against women.
Despite a 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women Law, which criminalized many harmful practices, including a whole array of domestic and workplace abuses as well as forced marriage, child marriage, and honour killings, she pointed out that gender-based violence still remains “very well entrenched in the culture and society.”
With the law in place, the UNAMA human rights officers monitor the implementation of the law by the police, judges, prosecutors and other Afghan institutions to see whether people are actually resorting to the law and whether it is producing a reduction in the level of violence women experience.
Their work often extends to investigating claims made by civilian groups over human rights violations committed against them by combatants in still-volatile areas such as the country's northeast which, Ms. Gagnon said, had recently experienced an upsurge in violence.
“A routine day would find me at our office in Kunduz, or Jalalabad, or Khost, which are quite remote places and I would go out and be with the team there or the human rights officer there for a few days and we would get quite a steady stream of people coming in from civil society who have been experiencing abuse,” she continued.
“We spend several days just interviewing the men, women and children who have fled and were displaced, some of them with just the clothes on their back. And they tell us about how the fighting occurred, whether they had family members who were killed, whether a mortar landed in their yard, whether those detained experienced abuse.”
The result of much of this frontline, on-the-ground annotating and documenting ultimately ends up in UNAMA reports which seek to impact how the Afghan Government and international forces approach human rights issues in the country. In one particular instance, Ms. Gagnon recalled that a decree issued by Afghan President Hamid Karzai against detention and torture in local prisons “mirrored” the UN's own recommendations.
“In my experience, what I've seen in working with the UN, especially in Afghanistan, if it's done properly, the UN can get the change in policy and practice because the Government listens,” Ms. Gagnon added.
“We've been able to develop a team that's very agile and committed and professional and expert in what they do and over the last three years we've been able to really do what I consider to be excellent human rights work which has achieved results for Afghan people.”
At the same time, amid continuing conflict between Government forces and insurgents, the imminent withdrawal of international troops in 2014 has raised the question over whether all the gains made by UNAMA's human rights team can survive what may be a dramatic period of transition.
Ms. Gagnon is worried about a “likely disintegration” of the human rights situation following the pull-out and adds that the Afghan government's ability to deal with the increasing levels of insecurity also remains “an open question.”
“But we've been pushing the Afghan security forces very hard to put in place a whole number of mitigation measures to protect civilians and ensure that the procedures and the systems and the training are all in place and so that they are protecting civilians.”
Given these not inconsiderable challenges, when asked what brought her to war-torn Afghanistan, Ms. Gagnon demurs. “I just wanted to be back in the field.”