Until only about a decade ago, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and humanitarian aid workers faced challenges mainly in protecting refugees who fled across the borders for safety from individual persecution or war between nations. But since the dissolution of the cold-war structures at the turn of the twentieth century, there emerged changes in the nature of conflicts from wars between states to conflicts within a state as well as to violence that impacted globally by transcending boundaries and borders as in the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the military engagements that followed....

On 19 August 2003 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed in a bomb attack on the United Nations (UN) building in Baghdad. As the world’s most prominent defender of human rights lay dead in the rubble, the world had good cause to ponder how the legitimacy and credibility of the UN could have been eroded to such a fatal degree that it could no longer protect those who served it. Discredited by its perceived vulnerability to pressure from powerful states, bypassed in the Iraq war and marginalized in its aftermath, the UN...

Since the conference from which this volume emanated was a tribute to Sergio Vieira de Mello, I would like to begin with the effect of the news from Baghdad on 19 August 2003. Once the tragedy was announced, and, especially when Sergio’s name was mentioned by CNN, I remained glued to the television, following the developments by the minute. The world waited with a mix of anxiety and hope; but then the tragedy hit—he was gone. Although we know that sooner or later we will all follow the same destiny, when death comes so prematurely and at a time...

If the hope for human progress and for a better world can be said to rest on anything, it rests on the great documents of international law that have been promulgated since the end of the Second World War. These include, first and foremost, theUnited Nations Charterand theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights. But while these two documents offer a global vision of what might be if humanity is lucky, it is the corpus of international humanitarian law, that is, the rules governing armed conflict, that have actually proved their utility over the course of the past half-century....

In this section five remarkably experienced humanitarians share the lessons they have learned working to rebuild communities in post conflict situations.

Mark Malloch Brown emphasizes the absolute necessity of proceeding only with local support: “Reconstruction and the choices that are made about priorities and the allocation of resources between different communities must be made by local or national government entities that enjoy local legitimacy. When foreign aid agencies seek to make these choices, however fair-minded they might appear to be, they generate controversy around the justice and legitimacy of the actions taken.” Arthur Dewey emphasizes the necessity for greater integration...

When i think of all that Sergio’s life encompassed—his life-long work to assist the world’s most vulnerable people in times of crisis—I know that he would have been pleased that the arrangements to remember him are not solely focused on his achievements, extraordinary though they were, but on taking forward the debates about humanitarian activities in today’s difficult environment. He would consider that a proper and appropriate way of honoring his life because in all the years he worked in this field, he was always asking questions, always wondering “what next?”

In fact he quietly chided me when...

In a statement at United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described Sergio de Mello as “a soldier in the cause of peace.” He was indeed, in all of his awesome humanitarian duties. He was also one of humanity’s great captains—and he joins that short list of eminent crisis managers and civil administrators. Each of these great captains had a technique that marked them and made them great. One of Sergio’s greatest legacies will be the “Sergio Technique”—in sum, a magnetism that brought all the parts together—especially the people parts at...

In post-conflict situations, the first challenge is to identify the sequence of events preceding conflict resolution, and how you classify what has apparently ended is of utmost importance. Was it really a conflict? Then, what kind of conflict was it? An international police operation, a foreign aggression, a regional war, a civil war, a state collapse, all of the above, none of the above? Depending on the answers to these questions, humanitarian conditions, popular perceptions, and the kind of post-conflict settlement one should work to devise and implement are substantially different in each case.

The Germans at the end of...

Few United Nations officials were more aware than Sergio Vieira de Mello of the extraordinary power of the international media to do both harm and good in the conflict situations into which the UN is thrust. This compilation would not be complete, therefore, without a brief appreciation of the role of the media in both promoting and combating conflict.

At the beginning of September 2002, I was in a television studio in North Carolina, in the southern United States, for an interview about the UN. While waiting to go on air, I was told with pride about a broadcast that...

It was in a tiny jungle hut in Oddor Meanchey Province, along the Thai-Cambodian border, that I first welcomed Sergio Vieira de Mello with a glass of coconut milk. In 1992, the two of us were working there to help repatriate over 300,000 refugees who had been living along the border for over 10 years. Our work was part of one of the largest United Nations missions in history, aimed at bringing democracy to Cambodia after decades of conflict. When I first met Sergio, I wondered whether I was speaking with the right person as he looked more like a...

When my predecessor as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was tragically and senselessly killed on 19 August 2003 in Baghdad, humanitarianism lost one of its finest advocates and practitioners. In a way that few have matched, Sergio combined in one person a deep and noble commitment to humanitarian principles with a hard-headed realism in his work to relieve human suffering in a messy and dangerous world.

This principled pragmatism found its expression in Sergio’s efforts to carve out, and maintain, humanitarian space in conflict zones. The dilemmas he faced are ones which he...

I would like to pay tribute to Sergio Vieira de Mello by first offering a brief historical note to the rules of law that should have protected him on his final mission. Then I shall pose a number of challenges that continue to face humanitarians in conflict zones.

During the summer and fall of 1991, the international debate on humanitarian action was intense. Paradoxically, the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s led to more civil wars and internal strife both in the Balkans and in Africa. Conflict resolution became even more complicated and civilian casualties even more...

With very few exceptions, it has been considered self-evident among those in the humanitarian community that to achieve a reasonable measure of success humanitarian action in conflict zones should be predicated upon notions of neutrality and impartiality. In recent years, particularly following the outbreak of numerous local and regional armed conflicts in places such as Angola, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Chechnya, Colombia, and East Timor, an increasing number of observers have challenged this traditional presumption of humanitarian action, arguing that “humanitarian actors are deeply involved in the political sphere.”¹

For anyone familiar with the...

The ability of an independent humanitarian organization such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to protect and assist people affected by armed conflict or internal violence depends first and foremost on the acceptation of the organization and of its activities by all parties concerned. Failing that, humanitarian action is either impossible or excessively dangerous both for the persons that are to be protected and assisted, and for humanitarian personnel.

Although the ICRC had experienced severe and murderous attacks on its staff in the past, 2003 was a particularly dark year for its humanitarian activities. Indeed, between March...

To attempt to assess the contribution of Sergio Vieira de Mello to the complex and difficult areas of justice and the rule of law is a daunting task. It is a challenge made even greater, as one of his close friends put it, by Sergio’s basic duality: his instinctive charm and trust, looking for the best in people while pushing often pragmatic diplomacy to its limits, with quite incredible success. And at the same time his longstanding devotion to vigorous good order and discipline, epitomized professionally by his consistent advocacy for international justice, especially in the form of the International...

Justice is the outcome of individual decisions. It does not exist in the abstract; it stems from the interpretation of laws. Justice is also one of the four cardinal virtues, along with prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Virtues that cover a person’s worth or merit cannot be absolute. They are of necessity qualified. Yet the quest for absolute or pure justice persists. There are qualities besides mercy which season justice and one of these is the ability to relate justice to reconciliation.

The theme—of how justice relates to reconciliation and reconciliation to justice in the pursuit of peace—was a...

There is no democracy in which justice and the rule of law are not axiomatically assumed to be foundational principles. In 1895, Professor A. V. Dicey, the great English legal philosopher, defined the principles of the Rule of Law. One of them, he declared, was that “no man is punishable or can be made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law.”¹ Almost a century later, Professor Archibald Cox expressed the opinion that it is “the genius of American constitutionalism which supports the Rule of Law.”²

TheSouth African Constitutionof 1996 was the product...