Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Regional Office for the Pacific - Suva, Fiji       

Integrating human rights in natural disasters management in the Pacific

(Tanoa Plaza , Suva , Fiji Islands 9-11 May 2007)

Opening statement by Paulo David, Regional Representative for the Pacific

Ladies and Gentleman,

Dear Participants,

• Welcome

On behalf of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) I wish to warmly welcome you all to this workshop. We are extremely happy to have among us participants from many parts of the Pacific: Australia , Fiji , Papua New Guinea , Samoa , Solomon Islands , Tonga , and Vanuatu and from a variety of local, national, regional and international organizations and settings. We also are proud to have with us participants coming from other regions of the world, including the Caribbean and Europe.

I wish also to strongly acknowledge the excellent partnerships that have formed around this event. Since my Office initiated this project last year, UNDP's Pacific Centre has immediately demonstrated its interest and commitment to its aims and objectives. I wish to thank both its Manager and Staff for agreeing to co-organize this event and for their expert collaboration at all levels. Further, I also wish to thank the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for its support along the way and UNIFEM for its gender expertise. Finally, I also wish to thank (in advance) Anissa Toscano for agreeing to be our lead trainer for this meeting and process and sharing her unique knowledge and skills in this area.

Some of you might remember that this workshop was initially planned to take place in October 2006, but unfortunately the lead trainer had to cancel at the last minute his participation due to a serious health accident. Thereafter we once again had to postpone this event due to the political instability in Fiji . For these cumulated reasons you will certainly understand that we are delighted to be finally here today with all of you!

• links between human rights and natural disasters management

I think we need to be frank: a little more than a decade ago it would have been completely unthinkable to organize a regional or international meeting on the relationships between two fields that at the time were perceived by most as completely unrelated: human rights and natural disasters management. Several years - and regrettably also many natural disasters - later, it is now increasingly acknowledged that human rights have a significant importance in the ways one deals with natural disaster management. Human rights and humanitarian assistance workers have long been separated by radical clichés: on one hand human rights workers were often seen as "intellectuals" unable to move from words to action; on the contrary humanitarian workers have long been labeled as "modern age cow-boys" obsessed by rapid action and neglecting the long-term consequences of their interventions. Today these clichés are fading rapidly and both communities are increasingly speaking one common language and acting together.

Our conviction here today is that integrating human rights in natural disasters management in the Pacific is not a mere exercise of trying to push the human rights agenda in a specific and specialized working field. Our motivation is fueled by the robust belief that in integrating human rights in the humanitarian field we will be ultimately in a better position to offer improved quality of preparedness, response and recovery to potential and true victims of natural disasters.

• OHCHR mandate to mainstream human rights in all work of UN

In 1997, the United Secretary General mandated the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to mainstream human rights in all the organizations work. This workshop is placed in this framework: human rights are a core foundation of the work of the UN at large and needs to be reflected in all aspects of its work, including advocacy, programming, political negotiations, economic aid and trade, provision of technical advice and emergency responses.

• OHCHR experiences (2003 Pakistan - 2004 Si Lanka)

My Office has been working since the late nineties in integrating human rights in natural disasters management. During the first years, our work was mainly focusing on advocacy in and outside the UN and on norms and standard setting. Our first full operational experience dates back to the gigantesque earthquake that stroke Pakistan in 2003. Today we still have a human rights advisor in this country working full time on recovery issues. The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami was an eye opener for many - including for us - on the various links between human rights and natural disasters management. OHCHR has been involved here too in recovery work. The 2004 Tsunami clearly revealed the many and mostly challenging human rights dimensions of a natural catastrophe.

• Related standards and norms

One interesting aspect of bringing together human rights and natural disasters management are the international norms and standards that exist in these two fields. One particularity of human rights is that it is based on agreed international instruments, including nine core international human rights treaties. On the other hand, since a few years, many humanitarian international instruments have been developed. You are certainly familiar to ones such as SPHERE, Red Cross and Red Crescent Code of Conduct, MSF Red Flags, and the recently adopted United Nations Inter Agency Standing Committee Operational Guidelines on Human Rights and Natural Disasters. All these normative tools, and many others, are at the core of our workshop this week and inform us on existing points of convergence and agreements.

• aims and objectives of workshop: training and check-list process

This workshop is not a traditional one in the sense in this not solely focused on sensitization and training. One of the main aims of this event is to design human rights check-lists for practitioners involved in the Pacific region in the three principal phases of natural disasters management: preparedness, emergency and recovery. To achieve this objective we expect you all to be active participants and share openly your vast professional knowledge and experience. We thank you in advance for taking-up this challenge and enjoy the workshop!

Thank you.