A happy ending for Eurovision?

by Rhodri C. Williams

I promise that this will be my last ever word on the Eurovision song contest. There are any number of good reasons for me to move on, not least the fact that Eurovision seems to move me to rant, which is honestly not my strongest ouevre. However, the best possible reason was handed to me on a plate by fresh-faced Emmelie de Forrest, who took all the honors and moved them conveniently from one peaceful Nordic democracy to another one a forty minute commute away.

And there were moments, as Azerbaijan nudged within a few ‘dix points’ of Emmelie’s comely heels, where I saw an alternative, dystopic future – a future in which I would once again be compelled to wander the darkened streets of the blogosphere, bitterly denouncing the capricious demolitions of homes in Baku, casting aspersions upon the political naifs of the European Broadcasting Union, and railing against the hypocrisy of ostensible guardians of democracy such as the Council of Europe, long since tamed by a steady diet of inflated per diems and caviar. Thank you, Emmelie, for sparing us all that.

But before I bow out of the debate about Eurovision and human rights fully, a few observations. First, despite the welcome contrast between Azerbaijan’s structural aversion to human rights (universality notwithstanding, how is one honestly to go about applying them in a dynastic autocracy fueled by oil patronage?) and Sweden’s imperfect but earnest efforts, the issue did come up this year.

Breaking news – Dissident arrests, police abuse and mass evictions in downtown Malmö by Swedish Eurovision hosts

by Rhodri C. Williams

Okay, that was the first completely bogus headline I have ever run in TN. But I bet it got your attention. You were probably skeptical, and rightly so, about connecting the phrases ‘dissident arrests’ and ‘mass evictions’ with adjectives like, well, ‘Swedish’. Unthinkable, right? However, if ‘Eurovision’ seemed similarly ill-placed in such unseemly company, that’s where things get interesting.

In fact, it was only last year that Europe’s annual fiesta of pop-culture self-congratulation was hosted by Azerbaijan, a dynastically ruled pseudo-democracy where strategic location, deep oil reserves and self-interested support for the ‘global war on terror’ have bought the regime a near complete pass on human rights observance. Sound like Gaddafi’s Libya in late 2010? Well, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong there.

A key difference, one might argue, was that Gaddafi’s Libya was not eligible to join prestigious European regional organizations like the Council of Europe, which are meant to ensure mutual respect for human rights standards among their members. However, the performance of the Aliyev regime in Baku appears to indicate that Mr. Gaddafi’s problem was largely geographical.

In fact, last year’s Eurovision contest went boldly forward where no autocracy had gone before, bulldozing a shrill chorus of human rights criticism with Wagnerian pyrotechnics even as entire neighborhoods were razed to improve the view from an arena built with purloined money, protesters were roughed up by police and dumped at the edge of town, and political prisoners continued to rot in jail, unenlightened by Azerbaijan’s spectacular entrance into Europe’s vacuous pop culture scene.

New report analyses the rule of law in Libya (as the transitional vetting debate tests it)

I am very happy to announce that the International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC) has just published a new report based on the rule of law assessment I helped to organize last January in Libya. While I had a hand in writing the report, it is the product of a fruitful collaborative effort with the assessment team members, all of whom were experts representing ILAC’s member organizations. A pdf version of the report, as well as summaries in English and Arabic, can be accessed here.

The ILAC report focuses on the role of core rule of law institutions such as the private bar and judiciary, and sets out recommendations for enhancing both their independence and their effectiveness in a new, democratic Libya. A very important part of the report’s analysis focuses on how the legal system is affected by the current transition, and notes the dilemma for the judiciary in particular – in that regular courts are both saddled with the delicate task of bringing those accused of crimes in connection with the 2011 uprising to justice and are themselves likely to be the object of vetting efforts in connection to the role that some judges played under the Gaddafi regime.

Despite the rule of law focus, in other words, the report delves into a number of transitional justice issues, most notably prosecution and institutional reform. In this sense, it complements the earlier work I did for UNHCR on property and displacement issues, which approached the transitional justice debate in Libya primarily from the viewpoint of victims’ reparations. Our report also comes hot on the heels of the latest by the International Crisis Group (ICG), which focuses squarely on the current showdown between the state and judiciary on one hand, and revolutionary brigades on the other.

Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Customary governance, property rights, and state building in Afghanistan

by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She recently completed The Political Economy of Customary Governance: Informal Order and State Building in Rural Afghanistan (under review), and is finalizing Land, the State, and War (with Ilia Murtazashvili), on how conflict over property rights has shaped the trajectory of the Afghan state. She also co-authored “Community Documentation of Land Tenure and its Contribution to State-building in Afghanistan” in Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding with J.D. Stansfield, M. Y. Safar and Akram Salam, and provides an update in this guest posting.

Conflict over land is one of the most important, yet poorly understood, drivers of instability in rural Afghanistan. The Taliban, for example, has been active in trying to establish its credibility and authority as reliable mediators of land conflict as it competes with the Karzai government for legitimacy.

The solution offered by the international community to the problem of tenure insecurity is the promotion of formal, state-backed legal titles. The chapter I authored with J.David Stanfield, Yasin Safar, and Akram Salam, “Community Documentation of Land Tenure and Its Contribution to State-Building in Afghanistan,” suggests that customary forms of land titles may be more effective in promoting the legitimacy of the state than by simply issuing formal government deeds.

The state has very little credibility with most Afghans as it is largely viewed as a source of corruption rather than governance.  This is not to say that Afghans do not want government. On the contrary, many Afghans are in demand of government but want to have little to do with formal state authority as it is currently exercised.

Thus, current efforts to promote property rights by promoting an extension of state authority in Afghanistan are not viewed by many Afghans as a viable solution. Instead, by making them more dependent upon a corrupt state, property rights based on state-issued legal titles may threaten, rather than enhance, tenure security in Afghanistan. This is largely due to the fact that many Afghans, especially those in rural areas, rely primarily upon customary mechanisms for the mediation of land disputes.  Furthermore, as Doug Batson suggests in his chapter in the volume, formal land titles often fail to adequately account for forms of customary land tenure.

One of the reasons efforts to extend state authority in rural Afghanistan have struggled, is because state-builders (both in the international community and some in the Afghan government) view the relationship between customary authority and the state in zero-sum terms.

While some analysts of Afghanistan have argued that that customary governance has withered away, my own fieldwork has shown that such structures remain quite strong but have changed over time to adapt to new circumstances in the country. Due to war and displacement, customary structures are actually more representative and democratic than they had been in the past.

That 1990s feeling, or how conflict-related internal displacement never really went away

by Rhodri C. Williams

As we enter a series of twenty year milestones from the meltdown of the former Yugoslavia, it has been a bit too easy for many of us who came of age back then to reflect on internal conflicts – the crucible in which the internal displacement advocacy movement was forged – as a phase we were all moving beyond. Until recently.

Until recently, it was possible to think of conflict displacement as a ‘first wave’, still problematic in the sense that frozen conflicts from the 1990s had entrenched patterns of protracted internal displacement, but no longer of primary concern. With some of the initial nationalist spasms of the post-Cold War thaw exhausted and a practiced UN-led peace-building and mediation response at the ready, it has been easy enough to be lulled by the overall statistics on declining numbers of active internal conflicts.

Moreover, in the wake of the 2004 tsunami and dawning awareness of the effects of climate change, an effective advocacy campaign by then-Rapporteur on Internal Displacement Walter Kälin shifted attention firmly to rights-based responses to a ‘second wave’ of internal displacement, that caused by natural disasters. As reflected in the UN Human Rights Council’s recent undertaking to address internal displacement , the focus on disasters has come to define much of the advocacy in the field, to some degree eclipsing conflict concerns. Meanwhile, a third wave looms as pressure on land and natural resources gives a sharp new edge to the issue of development-induced displacement.

Reading all this, one would be tempted to take some relief in the fact that each new impending crisis appears to be accompanied by changed conditions or improved responses that help to ameliorate the last. If only it were so tidy. While the peaking of sectarian violence in Iraq after 2006 was a wake-up call to the persistence of internal conflict and displacement, it had begun to look like an isolated incident again until recently. However, with Syria now presenting a full-blown ‘human catastrophe’ and Burma accused of  crimes against humanity in Rakhine state, conflict displacement is once again center stage in all its awful glory.

Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: A new global standard for land administration

by Douglas Batson

Douglas Batson joined the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as a political geographer in 2004. He previously worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Department of Justice, and is now retired from the U.S. Army Reserve. Batson wrote on “Snow Leopards and Cadastres: Rare Sightings in Post-conflict Afghanistan” in Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, and provides an update in this guest-posting.

My chapter in Part 3 of Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding begins with an overview of the challenges faced by U.S. and coalition forces in rebuilding Afghanistan during the 2000s, and specifically the need for a cadastral system that records the array of relationships between people and land. It also discusses the problems of refugee resettlement in the context of the post-war population explosion and the environmental destruction from decades of conflict. The discussion of secure tenure to land describes local initiatives including dispute resolution and management of land resources. It concludes by underscoring the potential of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) to record heretofore undocumentable, orally defined forms of customary land tenure.

Shortly after the completion of my chapter, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) took up the LADM as a draft standard. I had the opportunity to advocate full adoption of the LADM as an ISO standard to the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee. This effort included addressing concerns about the cost of conforming 3,100 disparate U.S. county-level Land Administration Systems (LAS) to a new global standard. The LADM’s value, I argued, lies less in its utility for the U.S. homeland, than in its relevance for U.S. security, diplomacy, and development goals, in a context in which 75% of the world’s people-to-land relationships, or 4.5 billion cases worldwide, are not documented. This situation clearly invites land disputes, land grabbing, and violent conflict.

Safeguarding land rights: An opportunity for the World Bank to lead

by David Pred and Natalie Bugalski

Washington, April 13, 2013 - At the start of the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty this week, World Bank President Dr. Jim Kim made some welcome remarks about the global land rights crisis.   He did not respond directly to the withering criticism of the role the Bank has played in promoting land grabs.   But he did say that the Bank shares the concerns about the risks of large-scale land acquisitions, and importantly he acknowledged that “additional efforts must be made to build capacity and safeguards related to land rights and to empower civil society to hold governments accountable.”

What caught people at the Conference pleasantly off guard was the Bank’s statement that its own social and environmental safeguard policies, now under review, would be informed by the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Forest and Fisheries.

Inclusive Development International and Oxfam put forward a concrete proposal at the Conference for the Bank to do just that.  We presented a proposal for a new World Bank safeguard policy on tenure of land, housing and natural resources that draws extensively from the Voluntary Guidelines.

The proposal addresses major gaps in the Bank’s current policy framework that have left people affected by Bank operations unprotected from harmful impacts on their tenure rights.  If adopted, these policy measures would ensure that the Bank upholds its responsibility to respect human rights by safeguarding against the weakening of tenure rights, the instigation of land conflict and the exacerbation of inequality in access to land and natural resources by Bank operations.