Event Summary
The Kosovo crisis created enormous humanitarian and human rights challenges. To review lessons learned from reporting and advocacy during the crisis, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy convened a special roundtable of human rights practitioners in October 1999.
The intense day-long workshop, co-sponsored with Physicians for Human Rights, brought together representatives from major human rights NGOs, policymakers, journalists, and members of the academic community to examine the successes, failures, and lessons of the human rights community''s involvement in Kosovo. Aryeh Neier, President of the Open Society Institute, chaired the sessions.
Were human rights monitors able to gather facts, confirm atrocity accounts, and incorporate evidence into prescriptive advocacy? When the NATO bombing began, did human rights organizations tailor their advocacy to meet the changed human rights and humanitarian circumstances?
Were activists able to address the tensions between long-term human rights objectives and immediate violations of humanitarian law? These and other difficult questions were posed to the participants.
The closed-door event was designed to allow the participants to share experiences and lessons learned, and to critically assess their actions and responses in Kosovo.(www.ksg.harvard.edu/cchrp/)