The Life and Times of Human Rights Organizations: Organizational Biographies and the Sociology of Human Rights

Contemporary assessments of human rights tend to diverge in increasingly polarized ways. Human rights are frequently labeled “the dominant normative or moral discourse of global politics” (Goodhart, 2009: 2), and for many, it had become axiomatic to observe that we live in an “age of human rights” (Golder, 2014: 78). Yet there is a parallel wave of pessimism, and many proclaim “the endtimes” of human rights (Hopgood, 2013). Claims that the human rights movement might be “part of the problem” (Kennedy, 2002) have long shadowed its research and practice, but the rise of populism and the 2016 Brexit–Trump moment contributed to making the critique of human rights and doubts over its power and mission much more prominent (Alston, 2017). Arguments that the human rights movement is at best an ineffective failure and otherwise a Western tool legitimizing Neo-Liberalism and colonial wars (e.g., Moyn, 2018), have become increasingly popular. Yet such arguments have also been challenged by authors maintaining that the human rights movement has retained its potential to fight against oppression and for social justice, and a wave of studies critiquing the critique of human rights has ensued (e.g., Alston, 2017; Dudai, 2019; Evans, 2021). Meanwhile, repressive governments, perhaps better judges of the potential of dissent than critical scholars, have been increasing their attacks on human rights defenders worldwide (Frontline, 2021). The oppression of human rights activists and their persistent campaigns both demonstrate a belief that human rights activism is a viable challenge to the status quo; a belief that many human rights academics seem to question.

Lynn Welchman's study of Al-Haq, the oldest and most prominent Palestinian human rights organization, is a major contribution to the debate on the strengths and limitations of human rights activism. It resonates with the sociological perspective on human rights, a fairly recent subfield (Hynes et al., 2012) that offers a more complex and productive outlook than either a triumphalist account or dead-end criticism (Dudai, 2019). This perspective considers human rights as a “powerful language for making demands for justice and respect” (Silk, 2021) but is interested mostly in how and why people and organizations use this language, and what are the effects, implications, and drawbacks of relying on human rights in political struggles. This also means focusing on the social actors creating and using human rights (Short, 2009: 96), and their strategies, compromises, and interactions with adversaries and allies (Martin, 2017).

Such research has to meet several challenges: to make real connections between abstract ideas of human rights and social practice; to draw broader lessons from specific case studies; and to strike the right balance between critical distance from the topic and tapping into intimate insider knowledge. I argue that a suitable and productive vehicle for navigating the complexities of such inquiries is the biographical study of human rights organizations. Welchman's study of the origins and evolution of Al-Haq (2021) is an effective illustration of the ability of such organizational biographies to expand our understanding of the practice of human rights.

In recent years, several monographs exploring the history of specific human rights organizations have been published, including, for example, Amnesty International (Buchanan, 2020, Hopgood, 2006), the ACLU (Cose, 2020), The Northern Ireland-Based Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ) (Beirne, 2016), or ACT UP (Schulman, 2021). These books have joined similar biographies of humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (Forsythe, 2005; Morehead, 1999). Welchman's study provides an opportunity for reflection on what this genre entails and the potential of “a biographical approach to organizational analysis” (Kimberly, 1979) to contribute to the sociology of human rights.

Welchman's subtitle—“a global history of the first Palestinian human rights organization”—encapsulates several of the important advantages of this approach. Treating a study of a single organization as a global history means attention to the broad context in which it has been operating—a “life and times” approach to biography, investigating significant events in the subject's life while placing them in a broader social and historical context. Thus, the study moves between different circles, from the sitting arrangements in Al-Haq's weekly staff meeting to the end of the cold war. To understand the sociological question—what do people, groups and organizations do with human rights—a researcher needs to move back and forth between these levels. Indeed, as Mills (1959) famously proposed, the “sociological imagination” entails making the connection between “biography and history”: identifying the relations between personal challenges and larger social trends. In this context, the sociological imagination means exploring the challenges, problems, and development of a human rights organization while linking it to broader and even global developments, as Welchman deftly does.

The focus on a Palestinian organization is also a key contribution. This is against the grain of much of the literature, which is focused on high-profile international organizations headquartered in the Global North, such as Amnesty International. As Silk (2021) argues, the focus on such organizations means neglecting some other vital human rights stories, resulting in a distorted account of human rights. Indeed, much of the critique of human rights advocates, who are often presented as exclusively Western and “producing” victims rather than representing them (Madlingozi, 2010; Hopgood, 2013), is of little relevancy to the experience of local organizations such as Al-Haq. In addition, insights about international organizations cannot be simply extrapolated to local human rights organizations, which are more closely embedded in specific social and political contexts, and often follow a different trajectory than that of international NGOs (Felner, 2012: 59). ¹ Focusing on Global South organizations allows exploring counter-examples and roads-not-taken relative to the familiar story of international organizations, as Welchman's study does.

As in any biography, the origin and formative period receive focused attention here. Al-Haq was established in the late 1970s through the meeting and efforts of three (still active) Palestinian lawyers and activists: Charles Shammas, Jonathan Kuttab, and Raja Shehadeh, the latter being perhaps the most well-known of them (at least outside human rights circles). ² Their backgrounds—middle class, Christian, with strong links to the US and UK—made their position both privileged and marginalized in Palestinian society. Perhaps the effects of this social position could have been explored a bit more. Their development of a human rights organization was shaped by several considerations. First, the repression by Israeli authorities in the occupied territories was highly legalized, and Al-Haq's founders sensed this could be a political Achilles Heel, as it enabled documenting, and later challenging, the repressive nature of the occupation. They were therefore drawn to law-based resistance: to use the law itself against the oppressors, by exposing how discriminatory and arbitrary their powers are. Second, and related to this, Israel's control of the Occupied Territories was, historically at least, sensitive to public opinion, unlike many other repressive regimes. Israel had sold the world (and itself) an image of a “benign occupier” and a moral military. ³ This provided a context and a motivation for Al-Haq's founders, who embarked on an approach of “taking seriously what the Israeli system […] said about itself in order to then face this system with […] the facts that contradict them” (2021: 65). The founders, who were not political activists (2021: 25), also aimed to create a new kind of activism, explicitly outside the existing Palestinian political factions and discourses. Finally, the founders also turned to established international organizations for initial support and alliances—the founding moment is a letter they sent to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), asking to become an affiliate. This was “for pragmatic assessment of the potential impact such groups offered” and based on the assumption that Israel would listen to their voices more than to others (2021: 21). All these set out the course for forming a professional organization, grounded in law, seeking to internationalize the Palestinian situation, and with complex relations with the national struggle within which it has been located. International human rights thus provided a normative and political platform to pursue the founders’ goals, though not a preexisting template of practice; Al-Haq founders and leaders had to shape the model of the local human rights NGO as they moved along.

Indeed, the main thrust of Welchman's biography examines the constant development of how human rights are understood, and what means are deployed to protect and promote them. This is essentially a story of human rights as a defensive construct, not a utopian one, shaped in particular ways by the injustices confronted. We can see from Welchman's narrative that human rights are not developed in some Rawlsian experiment of devising an ideal society, but by attempting to respond to forms of suffering and repression. It is interesting to note in this context that some of the major questions that have animated debates in human rights scholarship and in major international organizations—such as the status of social and economic rights, individual versus collective rights, the relations between international humanitarian law (IHL) and human rights—have a different character when examined through this prism.

Social and Economic rights, in particular, have been integrated with Al-Haq's work much before in Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. The structural context of occupation and its widespread effects meant that the violation of such rights has been key feature of Al-Haq's analysis from early on (2021: 113). For example, the right to education was explored in an Al-Haq report as early as 1986 (2021: 115), and labor rights in the late 1980s (2021: 174). This should correct the common assumption—based on an exclusive focus on major international human rights organizations—that the human rights movement discovered social and economic rights only in the first decade of the 21st century. It is no less remarkable that it appears that the combination of civil and political rights and social and economic rights in Al-Haq's work was instinctive and did not generate any major internal disagreements, as was the case in international organizations (Hopgood, 2006).

Welchman is clearly eager to show how Al-Haq has been “ahead of their time” in developing human rights thinking and methodologies (2021: 1), and demonstrates it convincingly. These findings can be taken even further, to reorient the accepted mapping of when and where modern human rights developed. Raja Shehadah and his comrades, as well as local human rights NGOs elsewhere (e.g., Felner, 2012), “invented” modern human rights advocacy as much as, say, the founders of Human Rights Watch; they did not borrow human rights work ready-made from the Global North, but were often equal—and at times leading—partners in creating it. This was true, as argued above, in relation to recognizing social and economic rights; in soliciting and generating new interpretations and applications of IHL; as well as in relation to the importance of reliable fieldwork (2001: 56). Al-Haq influenced international networks of human rights activists directly and indirectly. Welchman cites, for example, a former head of research at Amnesty International and senior UN official stating that discussions with Al-Haq ended-up influencing interntioanl thinking on IHL (2021: 128). Many former Al-Haq staffers, Palestinian and internationals, moved on to work in major international organizations. At the same time, many Al-Haq members studied law and human rights degrees abroad (2021: 181), and described being influenced and learning from colleagues working on human rights in Asia and the global south, contacts created in the context of major UN forums on human rights (2021: 176). In short, the direction of influence in the history of human rights activism has not been only North-to-South but also South-to-North, as well as South-South.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Al-Haq work has been the “enforcement project” (2021: 135–146). The difficulty of enforcing international legal rules has long been identified as one of the critical limitations of international law, and since the late 1980s, Al-Haq has experimented with novel ideas and tools in an effort to advance enforcement. The project, which has continued since in different forms and incarnations, was premised on activating the third parties, initially Israel's co-parties to the Geneva Conventions. The idea of making direct, law-based, claims on third parties was outside the mainstream of international law scholarship and practice at the time; Al-Haq was recognized as an “operational provocateur” pushing questions of doctrine through conferences and discussions with the ICRC and others. As in other issues covered here, the idea emerged from the exigencies of the situation and not from theoretical breakthroughs. As the project's architect explains: “largely untutored in the workings of international law, the Project's approach was based on logical necessity: we needed the law to work […] we had to work out how” (2021: 129). The project later moved to demand responsibility from EU states and bodies—am approach later adopted by other organizations—moving into technical areas such as trade law and “EU labeling of settlement products” to ensure they do not enter EU markets as “made in Israel” (2021: 142). While law is often seen by scholars as restricting potentially much wider political and social understandings of human rights (Stammers, 2015), here we see how the law—as set out in often-arcane corners of unfathomable international treaties—can actually be creatively mobilized to validate radical political claims.

One other major issue emerging from Al-Haq's story is the relationship between human rights activism and violence, which Welchman mentions but perhaps could have dug a bit more into. Commitment to nonviolent action has been key in the development of the modern human rights movement, beginning with the early 1960s genesis of Amnesty International in the campaign for the release of “prisoners of conscience”—a status from which those involved in violence were excluded. The contemporary concept of “human rights defenders”, as developed by UN declarations and guidelines, is reserved for those who act in a peaceful manner. This is a clear, distinct, aspect of human rights activism in the context of violent conflicts. For Palestinians struggling against Israeli occupation, human rights activism offers an avenue to do so without using guns and explosives. This of course at times placed Al-Haq at odds with their society; Shehadeh observes that “The nonviolent activities of Al-Haq did not impress the PLO” (2021: 84), which saw little value in anything but the armed struggle to liberate Palestine. Al-Haq, like other human rights organizations, defended the rights of all people not to be subjected to torture or arbitrary arrests, and many of those represented have been involved in violence, including against civilians. ⁴ But ultimately human rights activism has meant embracing the use of law, diplomacy, and public opinion as the means to fight injustice.

Yet positions on some forms of violence have been among the thorniest issues in Al-Haq's biography. Like many other human rights organizations, Al-Haq is not pacifist and did not condemn all violence. ⁵ But it came under pressure to condemn Palestinian violence against alleged Palestinian collaborators, ⁶ which reached extensive levels during the first Intifada. After prolonged debates, Al-Haq decided not to take a public position condemning such attacks, formally because actions by non-state actors fell outside its understanding of international legal obligations, but in practice also because condemning such violence would have alienated it from many sectors of Palestinian society (2021: 185). The decision drew criticism at the time from external actors who considered it politically biased. It is regretted, in retrospect, by some of Welchman's interviewees. These interviewees now believe the organization should have taken a public position against the killing of collaborators, as this would have constituted a powerful means of educating for the primacy of human rights standards, and worth the risk entailed in deviating from nationalist sentiments (2021: 187).

It is nevertheless crucial to observe that Al-Haq has otherwise consistently criticized the record of its own society; a far from obvious choice for an organization working in the context of occupation and a nationalistic armed struggle. In the 1980s, it started working on issues such as workers’ rights and women's rights within Palestinian society, explaining that “To ignore or postpone criticisms of violations within the society would not only undermine the validity and good faith of criticisms of violations perpetrated by others, but more importantly would endanger the nature of the society itself” (2021: 96). When the Palestinian Authority was established, Al-Haq engaged in debates on whether it should support or monitor it, ending up acting as both advisor and watchdog (2021: 210). Al-Haq's official explanation of its position was that human rights “should be applied to friend and foe alike” (2021: 209), a principled articulation of the universality of human rights, though that position was also costly and generated internal disagreements.

In pursuing these and other internal debates, Welchman relies on interviews as well as on internal archives containing protocols of meetings, correspondence, evaluation reports, and so on. Human rights organizations tend to generate plentiful internal paper records, much of it usually of little, if any, interest to anyone. The biography turns these ephemeral miscellanies into data, key for understanding issues such as organizational strategy and decision-making. Such internal documents, as well as interviews, help expose the “hidden transcripts” (Scott, 1990) of human rights activism: what activists think and talk about with each other “backstage”, but do not expose in their public face. The critique of human rights tends to be based on public materials, often sketching activists as over-confident absolutists; they are in fact often reflective and struggle with doubts and dilemmas (Dudai, 2019). This is clearly exposed through the biography form, which focuses on evolution and change over time and thus brings to the fore critical junctions and ensuing dilemmas. ⁷ These often show human rights activists as well-aware of the limitations, contradictions and sometimes counter-productive effects of their work. ⁸

The intimate knowledge of human rights work exhibited here, and the desire to pursue a concrete case study rather than develop grand theory, means that while Welchman's work explores the limitations and drawbacks of human rights work it avoids the generalizations that too often underpin the critique of human rights. What emerges perhaps most clearly from the analysis is the pragmatic use of human rights. As one of Al-Haq's founders explains “we all wanted to effect change in situations we saw around us […] We were pragmatists, and law and human rights was a tool to use…None of us started as human rights people” (2021: 66–67). Human rights activism is increasingly berated for being absolutist, legalistic, and too principled to the degree of ignoring political realities (Hopgood, 2013), and there is, in response, a trend of advocating more pragmatism in human rights advocacy (Golder, 2014; Dudai, 2019). The story of Al-Haq exemplifies such pragmatism. It has adopted the human rights framework for pragmatic reasons, as discussed above, and instrumental considerations affected its choices of methods: “the question of ‘what works’ very much defined what it did […] informing the direction and methodologies” (2021: 108). As McEvoy et al. write in relation to a type of cause-lawyers in conflict societies, Al-Haq leaders can be described as “principled pragmatists”, engaging in “‘trial and error’ problem solving, argument, and renegotiation on ‘lines to take’ in a given context” (2022: 50). For example, the crucial value of the credibility of the information presented, a key aspect of Al-Haq's work, was developed because of understanding that in order to influence international decision-makers and withstand Israeli counter-claims, “rigor had to be the basis of everything [Al-Haq] did and said” (2021: 56). Pragmatism means in this context more than making strategic calculations. It underpins the approach to human rights (as norms and as tool): few people, and the organizations they establish, decide to engage in human rights activism and then search for suitable causes; people become human rights activists through struggling against particular injustices and adopting and adapting aspects of the human rights machinery and ethos in aid of these struggles. ⁹

But does such activism actually achieve anything? In October 2021, shortly after Welchman's book was published, the Israeli government designated Al-Haq, alongside five other Palestinian civil society groups, as a terrorist organization. Israel provided no evidence for its claims; European countries initially suspended funding of Al-Haq but after carrying out their own investigation decided to reject the designation and continue funding and collaborating with the groups (McKernan, 2022). The logic behind Israel's actions is not entirely clear, but many commentators agree that Al-Haq's involvement with the investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the main reason for it being targeted. After years of advocacy on international criminal law, Al-Haq, alongside other Palestinian human rights organizations, submitted complaints to the ICC, focusing on Israeli army war crimes in Gaza (2021: 217). ¹⁰ Unlike many critical scholars, then, the Israeli government appears to believe that international law is not useless, and that human rights organizations can be dangerous. This, in an ironic way, is a powerful tribute.