Indeed, if the issue is really about empowering those at the mercy of
contingency, there are other options potentially available to us in terms of
removing victims from the contingencies of charity, by placing the “humanitarian
international” within the auspices of more ambitious political projects, namely
universal human rights and global social justice. Perhaps the failure of humanitarian
accountability is due to a lack, rather than an excess of ambition?
II Human Rights
More substantial in its attempt to escape contingency, notably the contingency of
action ultimately determined by charity, is the putative elision between
humanitarianism, and one of the most significant crystallisations of the
humanitarian impulse, the attempt to define and protect universal human rights
through a comprehensive international regime. Hugo Slim sees the projects
examined above, such as Sphere, as indicative of a shift towards a rights-based
humanitarianism.^41 But often, as we saw above, though the language of human
rights may be used to describe the violations at stake, what is actually at issue is a
kind of “humanitarian right”, the scope of which is defined by the practice of
humanitarianism. The issue in this section is defining the practice more in terms of
the international human rights regime, which is effectively the question that
defined the debates on the so-called “new humanitarianism” at the turn of the
century: rather than constant palliation, humanitarianism should look to
institutionalise a much more preventative mode, and err on the side of a
determined protection of human rights, rather than adopting a strictly neutral
position. As Bronwyn Leebaw puts it: “[as] humanitarian organizations have
struggled to address the limitations of impartial activism, many have looked to
human rights as a basis for politicizing their work. The human rights movement is
appealing because it offers a framework for critical transformation, yet also claims
41
Slim, "Not Philanthropy but Rights".