but as emergencies become prolonged, it is a pretence that becomes harder
to uphold.^58As such, human rights might appear to represent the best available version of
humanitarian politics, one that humanitarians should embrace. However, there are
good reasons why professional humanitarians should be wary of defining
themselves by working backwards from accounts of universal human rights. Firstly,
there are some good practical reasons for this caution, to do with enabling a degree
of humanitarian space in difficult contexts: it may well be more expedient to agree
that a child is starving, than to agree that the child’s human right not to starve has
been violated by a particular agent, not least when that agent controls access to the
child. This is where David Rieff’s “bed for the night” is at its most plausible: buy
some time, keep the child alive while other, appropriate agents sort out the politics
of the situation. Professional humanitarians should guard against the danger that in
trying to do too much, they will end up doing nothing well. Rieff notes that “for all
the talk of human rights, the imperative for most NGOs that want to remain
operational is to cooperate with murderers and torturers. They have to do so to
help the victims, and, quite rightly they hate it”.^59
Furthermore, in grey areas of human rights practice, a clearer account of
humanitarianism, not exclusively based on human rights, might be possible. The
biggest example of this is of course war, in which humanitarian responsibilities are
much more clearly codified in IHL than human rights responsibilities (though these
are present, albeit to a lesser extent). A second example is International Refugee
Law, which in a sense represents the institutionalised recognition of the past,
current and future failures of International Human Rights Law: it comes into play
when people lose their “right to have rights”, to borrow Arendt’s famous phrase.^60
Another interesting tension is illustrated by the debate over slave
redemption among abolitionists. Slave redemption is the practice of buying and
then freeing a slave, and is still a point of contention in areas where slavery of
58
59 de Waal, "The Humanitarians' Tragedy": 135.
60 Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 327.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968).