Interviewing Vice President Riek Machar while covering the South Sudan referendum for The Washington Post
Rebecca Hamilton is a Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law (WCL), where her research and teaching focus on human rights and informational technology, national security law, international law, and criminal law.
A backgrounder on how climate cases came before four international courts, with a summary of issues each court has been asked to address, offers a one-stop resource to refer to as opinions are issued in the weeks and months ahead. Read … Read more >>
The silence emanating from the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, is growing louder by the hour. Three full days after Hamas perpetrated atrocities inside Israel and took civilian hostages into Gaza, Khan has … Read more >>
In its public-facing quarterly financial reports, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, labels all countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as the “Rest of World.” Although one-third of Facebook’s … Read more >>
B.C. L. Rev (2022). Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day, across the globe, the corporations that run these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. … Read more >>
Harv. Int'l L. J. (2021). Social media platforms are the public square of our era – a reality that has been entrenched by the widespread closure of physical public spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And this online space is global … Read more >>
Rebecca Hamilton, User-Generated Evidence, Col. J. Transnat'l L. (2018) Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. Smartphone apps designed to allow Users to record material that will meet evidentiary … Read more >>
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Questions for the advocacy community: Q2 – Nasredeen Abdulbari :الضجة مقابل السياسة السؤال رقم 2
Q2: Is citizen advocacy at its most effective when it generates maximum “noise” on an issue , or do citizen advocates need to attach particular policy prescriptions to the noise they make?
Nasredeen Abdulbari:
Politicians are usually pretty overwhelmed with their political activities and work, and rarely do they find time to lay down concrete plans to deal with problems that are not of their direct concern. They usually focus on the issues they take initiatives on.
When a group of citizens under any modern democracies draw the attention of their representatives to an issue, I think they need to detail at least the general steps they think their representatives should take. This way, they help them act faster and, at the same time, ensure their representatives do the appropriate thing.
ان السياسيين غالبا ما يكونون مشغولين بعملهم واتشتطهم السياسية, وقلما يجدون وقتا لوضع خطط متينة لمعالجة مشكلات ليست من مشغولياتهم المباشرة. هم غالبا ما يركزون على المسائل التي يبادرون بها هم.
عندما تقوم مجموعة من المواطنين في اي من الديمقراطيات الحديثة بلفت نظر ممثليهم الي مسألة معينة, فانهم في اعتقادي في حاجة على الاقل لتفصيل الخطوات العامة التي يعتقدون ان على ممثليهم اتخاذها. بهذا الطريقة, يساعدونهم على التحرك بصورة اسرع ويتاكدون, في ذات الوقت, ان ممثليهم يقومون بالشي المناسب.
فلربما يكون سياسا ما مضغوطا من دائرته الانتخابية بان يدفع اطرافا متصارعة في منطقة ما للتوصل لاتفاقية سلام لانهم يريدون ان تتوقف الحرب بتلك المنطقة. هذا السياسي ولكي يرضي دائرته الانتخابية سوف يعمل بلا هوادة من اجل, بالمعنى الحرفي, اي اتفاق سلام يوقف الحرب. ان الناشطين سوف يكونون اكثر فاعلية لو امدوه بخطة مفصلة عن المسائل المركزية التي يريدون لاتفاق السلام ان يحلها. ان المناصرة المواطنية في هذه الحالة تعمل كالمنظمات الدولية. ان منظمات كهيومان رايتس واتش و منظمة العفو الدولية في اغلب الاحيان تمد الحكومات و جهات اخرى بسياسات ومطالب محددة لمعالجة مشكلة معينة. هذا يسهل على الحكومات وممثلي الحكومات التصرف بطريقة اكثر ملائمة.
A politician might be pressured by his constituency to push conflicting parties in a certain area to conclude a peace agreement because they want a war to stop in a certain region. The politician in order to satisfy that constituency would recklessly work for, in a literal sense, any peace agreement that would stop the war. The activists would be more effective if they provided him with a detailed plan about the central issues they want the peace agreement to solve. Citizen advocacy in this case works as the international NGO do. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International very often provide governments and others with certain policies and demands to deal with a certain problem. This makes it easier for governments and government representatives to act in a more appropriate way.
Nasredeen Abdulbari is a Harvard Law School Human Rights Program Satter Fellow and a lecturer in law at the University of Khartoum Faculty of Law.