Interview with Binaifer Nowrojee
Binaifer Nowrojee is originally from Kenya and is a distinguished human rights advocate. She is a Human Rights Program Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School, and is currently director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa. Nowrojee worked for Human Rights Watch for eleven years, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Amnesty International and the Swedish NGO Foundation for Human Rights. Nowrojee is the author of numerous articles and books on human rights, including the areas of humanitarian intervention, gender-based violations, and forced displacement. She was a speaker at the Harvard Berlin Dialogues session on April 28, "Turning a Blind Eye: Genocide in the 20the Century."
Interview by Sabrina Dax
Could you give a description of your human rights work for our general audience?
I went to law school because I was interested in issues of justice, and found that much of law school is about the law, and not about justice. So I found my way out of legal practice. I never practiced law, but I found the human rights movement, so I started by working at the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights in New York on Africa and then I moved on to Human Rights Watch, where I was a researcher for eleven years, and now I’m a donor with a foundation called the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, which is based in Nairobi, and I give out funds to human rights and governance organizations.
Do you still bring your legal background to your work?
A little bit. Some of my work obviously has to do with international law in the sense that international human rights are based in legal standards, but generally I’m not a practicing lawyer. I don’t appear in the court room, I don’t practice law.
You have worked with organizations in both the United States and Africa. What are the cultural differences in the approach to/research on genocide you have experienced?
I would say that not so much between organizations in the US and Africa, but for instance, in the international human rights community, we’ve been very concerned with the issue of justice and accountability for perpetrators of genocide, and for the victims of genocide, although justice is important, it’s one many other priorities and it’s much lower on the list. Victims of the genocide have other much more pressing needs, such as housing, concern with poverty issues, health, etc. And so justice doesn’t feature as high on the list, and I think that in many ways there is a tension between the international community pushing justice as its predominant response to the genocide, and people within Rwanda asking for other needs, which they feel are more important.
You have worked with rape victims in Rwanda. How did you get involved in this topic?
I was working with the Women Rights Division at Human Rights Watch and much of my work at that time was dealing with violence against women in different forms, so I had done some work documenting sexual violence. I had also done some work on domestic violence and after the genocide occurred, it was clearly an area of great need, just because of the volume of rape and sexual violence that had occurred during the genocide. We decided to send a mission to Rwanda to look into it. At the time, I had no idea that what would be a basically a one-month trip to Rwanda would turn out to consume over a decade of my life in terms of efforts that I have undertaken in returning back to Rwanda, continuing to be in touch with rape victims, testifying at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I never envisioned at the time how much I would be involved and how much these women would impact and affect me in so many different ways.
What would you say are some of the challenges you have faced in your fieldwork?
There are always dilemmas and tensions between human rights workers going into a place and victims who are in a place, in terms of the relationship, in terms of how we use the information we get, in terms of responsibilities to the victims. Many of the rape victims, as I said, have other priorities, and for them, justice, while not unimportant, certainly wasn’t their top priority. They were asking for housing, they were asking for school fees, they were asking for medical care, and these aren’t things that a human rights worker can offer, so there’s that tension.
In so many ways, rape is stigmatized, and women who speak about rape risk being alienated from the community, being ostracized, being unmarriageable and so speaking about rape carries a very heavy personal cost. You’re asking people to trust you and these are people who don’t know you, who are meeting you for the first time, to tell you about some of the most intimate and violent things that have just happened to them, and that’s also difficult. It’s difficult for the women themselves to their stories, because they’re so traumatic. These are all the tensions and difficulties. And then the responsibility. I mean, in terms of the work I did at Human Rights Watch; when we went, we are looking some of the justice issues, but it was clear that the women were concerned with a lot of the other issues, such as, as I said, poverty, housing, school fees. The report that we finally wrote actually divided the report in two, into sexual violence during the genocide, but also into post-genocide issues. That was the direct response to discussions with women who raised these issues.
How did you gain their trust?
I think with any human rights victim, you need to come with interlocutors whom people trust. One of the things that we did was to identify people that these women trusted and knew, social workers, women from the community, nurses, etc., who felt confident that we were not going to breach the trust or have their best interests at heart, and who led us to these women and provided us the entree into the introductions for these women.
What advice do you have for young people interested in pursuing careers in human rights organizations?
I think that this is a field that you have to have a passion for and if you have a passion for it, you should definitely go into it. If you go to law schools, for example, there’s a lot of pressure to join a law firm or to go into private practice. In so many ways nothing is seen to be useful in law school about going into public service or interest. That’s slowly changing, but I think it still very much remains that the bulk of law students go into the private sector. I would say first of all that it is something that you have to pursue, to chart on your own, in terms of making that path and there’s more than one way to do it. There is no one route to being a human rights worker; There are many different things that you can do, but to prepare yourself, I think getting a degree in law or international relations is useful, I think studying a couple of languages if you can, learning what’s happening, interning at these organization, attending talks and courses that are offered on campus. These are all ways in which one can start becoming involved in human rights work, even as a student and then beyond.
What do people in the field usually study?
It used to be a range of things, although increasingly, you’ll find in the human rights organizations people with law degrees, which is not necessarily a good thing, but more and more you’re finding the field dominated by lawyers.
What are your own future plans in the field?
That I don’t know. Who knows what life will bring? We’ll have to wait and see.