hello again, and in the previous sections, we've talked a lot about the hard choices the ethical dilemmas many of the risks of being being pushed or being conscripted or being threatened with expediency and a lot of problems making this making the decisions now in this section, we're going to talk about some of the help is available and making ethical decisions in difficult situations. So let's talk about moving from these kind of principles that we talked about to the ethical guidelines and codes and perhaps the first set of really strong ethical guidelines that were universally respected were the Geneva conventions the Hague law human rights law and so forth that grew out of these and the movement in Switzerland in the middle of the 19th century, but more recently. We have the universal Declaration of Human Rights 1945. And this interestingly enough was the first time that the term Human Rights was used in a publication or in a by a big organization. So this now in many ways sets out a lot of the guidelines of how we have to apply these ethical principles. Then there's some newer guidelines. There are the Red Cross and red crescent code of conduct and although it has the Red Cross and red crescent in this this is now been widely accepted by many non government and Civil Society organizations. And there's some other ones that have followed. There's this fear humanitarian standards. There's a humanitarian Charter there. Are they minute Aryan standards on quality and accountability. Leti the principles of good donor ship and there's the people in Aid code of good practice and there are others that are evolving all the time. Now before we go on from here, let's just stop for a moment and say these are standards but when they become standards they after a while they become accepted as best practices and it's not a big jump to move from there to soft International humanitarian. Law, so these might be kind of customary are soft law. So in the area of accountability and organization might be faulted because it failed to observe these type of principles, even though they're not enacted by any type of legal body. They are the best practices and so they're accepted as common accepted principle. So even though you might not see them as legal. Principles they're very important to pay attention to because they are widely respected and you may be judged about against some of these principles that have been set out in these codes and guidelines of best practices. So let's talk about the Red Cross red crescent code of conduct. This is the oldest of the humanitarian codes. Not really that old but the oldest of them and most ngos have signed on to these and it builds very heavily on the 1965 Red Cross humanitarian principles and we'll go through a few of these but I would encourage you to pursue these on your own and you can find these easily on the web. So one of the first principles is the humanitarian imperative comes first said A little bit about this already, but this means that the right to give and the right to receive humanitarian assistance is top of the list and whatever we do. We remember this is number one on the list a second principle is that Aid is given regardless of race Creed nationality of recipients and without Adverse distinction of any type so we can't say this group belongs to this particular card part of the country or this ethnic group. And so therefore they have a lower or higher expectation of Aid. This is not the principle the principle is that Aid priorities are calculated on the basis of needs alone going back to the ethical principle of the greatest assistance for the largest number of people. People or Aids based needs based decision making consequential decision making the next point eight will not be used to further a particular political or religious standpoint. And right now we have a number of issues because much of the humanitarian assistance is provided by faith based organizations. And in fact in the United States, the two largest organizations providing assistance in crisis situations, Humanitarian situations are both faith-based organizations. One of which being Catholic relief services based in Baltimore. So these organizations have developed an approach that will be one that provides assistance that does not reflect the particular religious beliefs or political beliefs of recipients. The next point is that organizations will endeavor to and not act as instruments of Permit foreign policy again, there's some real problems because the majority of financial assistance to address humanitarian needs comes from governments. So how does one do this without reflecting foreign policy? There's always tensions here and governments are always trying to use assistance to foreign to support various policies. So there's a issue there. The next one is we shall respect custom and And we already addressed this by saying we got some problems with this because custom and culture is not always what we as humanitarians or we as organizations want to support but we have to respect it nevertheless. The next point is we shall attempt to build Disaster Response a local capacities sounds really good on paper. But what happens if local capacities are weak and we are strong. Oops. We have some problems like in Haiti or a lot of local capacities that were judged by the international community's to be week. In fact, they were not but they were judged to be weak and they were bypassed in the assistance. We have another issue where in as a humanitarian organization based in Baltimore or wherever We're providing tuberculosis program and we have the latest medicines. We have the latest algorithms and protocols. And by the way the local country who are working in they have a lot of outdated and obsolete approach it but they're still using it. So we're going to use our new much better approach and we're going to bypass this old obsolete Approach at maybe the local people will learn from our new wisdom from Baltimore. Okay, we've got conduct difficulties there. There's ethical issues. You have to think about there. Another principle is we will involve program beneficiaries in the management of relief a well. We're not just asking opinion. We're asking management. We're asking planning. Okay, some ethical adjustments have to be made at times relief Aid will strive to reduce for future vulnerabilities now here we have also potential issues because there's sometimes short-term approaches that might get in the way of long-term planning here another point. We will hold ourselves accountable. Okay, here's the accountability. This accountability is not coming from outside. This our accountability comes from ourselves and we will make ourselves accountable to both the people that were providing assistance to as well as those from whom were receiving assistance. And finally we have a point that's really important in our information and our publicity in our advertising activities. We will recognize disaster victims as dignified. Human beings and not as hopeless objects that need assistance from Baltimore. And in fact, even with this principle people are already back away say the term victim is not the kind of thing that we should be using already. We have 10 degraded these people and indicated they need assistance. So we're now saying that these people are recipients or beneficiaries, but try to avoid the term victims. So this means that we should be very careful in the kind of photographs that we use and the of descriptions that we use playing on people's sympathy to give or organization money or there were seeking assistance because look at all the terrible things that are going on in this country here. We have pictures on the television to show this so something we have to be careful with This slide. I've listed the URLs for the humanitarian Charter and the code of contact. So if you enter these into computer are go to the course materials, you can click on this and this will take you to those sites. Now in the last few slides, I want to talk a little bit about the humanitarian Charter because much of our thinking in providing assistance comes from this humanitarian chartres. And this is the commitment to the relief of human suffering through protection and assistance and it's meeting the basic needs of the affected Community. This is going to be our responsibility. This is not an option. This is something we do. This is in our DNA as an organization and as an individual the needs and capacity Local people and their governments will be respected. All right, we've talked about that already. We want to build on the capacities people have we don't want to bypass them or try to undermine them in some way and Central to the care for population are the common rights of this population the right to life with dignity and the right to receive humanitarian assistance. So this is not an option. This is something that people have as a human, right? To receive this humanitarian assistance. There's a right to protection and security we mentioned that already not only for us as organizational humanitarians, but also the population themselves, there's a concern for civilians in armed conflict and this concern is reflected in the Geneva conventions, particularly the Fourth Geneva conventions, which sets out the responsibilities that the various armed factions have to protect The civilians who are not parties to a particular armed conflict. Another point is that this assistance will be people-centered sounds like a bit of a kind of a euphemism, but we're really focusing on the needs of the population to be sure that what we're doing is in their best interest. What we're focusing on is to be building their capacity to make their own decisions and make their own choices about how they're going to be assisted. And to be sure that we have best interest of all parties involved when we do our assistance planning and our assistance evaluations, and finally the efforts will be made to minimize untended unintended Adverse Events or effects. Now every type of activity we have will have some unintended effects. Some of them will be positive if we have our monitoring focused on what are these positive unintended? X this may be able to influence our programming but there will be some unintended negative effects. So we have to see can we find these as soon as they occur and can we take actions to stop these as quickly as possible? The protection principles again are to enhance the safety and dignity and the rights. So avoid exposing people to harm. So here there is a lot on risk assessment something public health does a lot of trying to understand who's at risk and where vulnerabilities are and how do we build people's own capacity to look after their protection, which is important and then being sure that there's an access to assistance according to need and without discrimination we've covered this from Several angles before but looking at those threats the deprive people of their independence their autonomy create greater need and we want to be sure that our support does not discriminate and does not create discrimination in some way. If we don't have an understanding of a culture or environment we can create discrimination in a big way without really understanding what we have done. There is assistance to people to recover. So it's not just helping them when they're in a difficult needs fill situation, but we're in the recovery stages as well physical recovery as well as psychological recovery, and we're talking more and more about how we deal with psychological effects of being threatened of course, Shannon of deprivation and so forth. So being very active in that it's not just kilocalories is helping people to recover psychologically. We're also looking Yet how do we direct people to to assistance? So many things we cannot do ourselves, but we can get people to move to a place that they can receive support or they can be enrolled in programs. We want to Halt exposure to further abuses and look at how do we support recovery with dignity and with their with attention to their human rights in many situations. There are plenty of resources to support people's. In rights, but helping people to access these is sometimes fairly difficult because they may not be aware of their rights to redress or their rights to assistance. One of the areas might be the documentation of birth in a another country. So if your parents have fled to another country you're born in that country. You have no documentation that you are born in a particular place. No birth certificate so some Of documentation. So later on when you return to your country and you want to go to school you want to have a passport you want a government job. At least there's some kind of documentation who your parents were and your basic ethnicity and background. So in summary ethics permeate decision-making in humanitarian situations, but these issues have to be thought about and thought about very carefully before crises develop to allow organizations to prepare their thinking and their various possible routes of action humanitarian ethics started with a Geneva Conference of 1863, which initially focused on the war injured these humanitarian principles and they've expanded over a period Time include political principles dignity and stewardship as ethical principles which apply in many conflict and disaster situations. There are many external factors which cause ethical decision making to be difficult and we have to think about these in advance to understand how to work our way through these difficult dilemmas providing assistance and protection can be full of dilemmas and hard choices and we need to know that there is a difference between these and how to apply these kind of principles is one of the major things that we hope that you will learn from this lecture the more principles which apply In a specific situation the greater the potential conflicts are between these various principles and guidances. There are common humanitarian situations with recurring ethical problems that we see them in virtually every humanitarian crisis. So these are things that we need to be familiar with ahead of time. The established guidelines do exist and knowing these and you think these will help facilitate the ethical decision making process. So this brings us us to the end of this discussion about humanitarian principles. We hope you found this to be a useful discussion and that you'll be able to apply the principles we've discussed in your future work and your future thinking process.
