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“[T]he people here are wonderful, and they are like family to us. We never imagined we would live in Colombia because we had a good life in our homeland [Palestine], where everything was available. But Colombia is a beautiful country, and we are happy here,” Mohammad Zaid, a Colombian-Palestinian who left Khan Yunis for Barranquilla, the Mediterranean for the Caribbean, told Cerosetenta.
That’s how he obtained his first Colombian passport.
His precise voice and the unthinkable twenty-first century connection between my country and Palestine through the experiences of the Zaid family moved me. I thought of the resonance of atrocity—how a bomb in Khan Yunis reverberates in the warm port of Barranquilla, the largest Arab community in this corner of South America.
And I thought that if I can hypothesize that an atrocity can resonate worldwide, there is no one it cannot impact. To receive this resonance that comes to us from Palestine and Lebanon, from our Haitian brothers and sisters, from the Congo, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Burma, Ukraine, and the United States affects us all. And in these circumstances of life in the second decade of the century, I believe it must generate a new consciousness about humanity, solidarity, and—above all—about the meaning of care.
We need radical care at a time when fascist practices are emerging and while structural violence is perpetuated globally, especially because the history of global human rights accountability shows us that reparations come too late and healing may never come. This pace is odious not only because of its slowness but also for its painfulness.
This articulation of ideas came to me in the midst of editing the OGR series on war, conflict, and human rights. I prefer to call it curatorship because my intervention was limited, and the analysis is all from the authors who agreed to write. Therefore, I offer readers a way to read this series that gathers lessons to answer the question: what can explain the pace of human rights accountability about current atrocities?
To begin this overview, Almudena Bernabeu offers a key perspective. In the face of atrocities, there are three colluding human rights regimes: on the one hand, international human rights law; on the other, international criminal law; and finally, transitional justice. Each field has different conceptions of harm and of who should repair it. In this collusion, the responses of human rights bodies and courts are ambivalent at best, particularly because they seek different responses to cases of mass violence. For example, while international criminal law focuses on accountability anchored in the past, transitional justice theoretically seeks to transform the future.
This is a loophole that limits the ability to deal with the current atrocity. For this reason, Bernabeu speaks of the need for more circular legal thinking that understands accountability from its multiple purposes. This view, however, must be drawn from the very foundations of these legal fields. Therefore, in her contribution, Ntina Tzouvala invites us to look with suspicion at the global human rights system and its relationship with the deployment of war. From her perspective, the affinity with neoliberalism and the Western cultural chauvinism that the legal history of human rights encloses illustrate why there is no international intervention in accordance with the urges of the humanitarian catastrophes caused by current violence.
Maha Abdallah discusses these catastrophes in her contribution by asking: how and by whom has the value of humanity been developed within the human rights project that fails to stop the atrocity? Taking the cruel reality of Palestine, Abdallah recognizes in the anchored identitarian positions of the human rights project a political shield that gives the “gift of time” to some states to maintain systems of oppression on a global scale.
These roots of the human rights project show that the pace of accountability for human rights violations has a complex origin that is difficult to resolve and tends toward perplexity and inaction. Thus, to elucidate possible paths, the contributions of Kathryn Sikkink, famous for her theory of the justice cascade, and of Gabriel Pereira, Leigh Payne, and Laura Bernal-Bermudez, for their theory of the Archimedean lever, offer us a reality check on what to expect from the global accountability agenda. Taking as a reference the evolution in addressing gender-based violence and corporate violence, respectively, a clear conclusion is reached: accountability takes decades and only partially arrives.
And it comes if at least one characteristic is present, that there is a union of actors that can reverse the status quo of violence and impunity while exposing its root causes—what Abdallah refers to as an “interconnection of struggles.”
Thanks to OGR for their invitation and to those who have read these valuable reflections during these months. The pace of accountability is objectionable, and the call is to accelerate it from all our positions due to the awareness of the care we owe to other people around the globe with whom we share this moment of life.