Human rights have gone from being a ‘weak flower to a human rights establishment’, said Lord Malloch-Brown in his Master Class on 24 October.
He described the challenge of dealing with human rights abuses in Uganda as junior staff at the UN during the 1970s, when the UN Human Rights machinery was ‘frustrated and gridlocked’, to establishing a Human Rights Council with Kofi Annan as his Chief of Staff in 2006. At each stage, he witnessed disparities and variety between nations on the priorities and very meaning of human rights: between a concept of individual or global rights, and the sometimes conflicting rights to stability or freedom.
Having been Deputy Secretary General of the UN and now Chairman of EMEA at FTI Consulting, Lord Malloch-Brown’s roles have spanned the public, private and third sectors. It is at the intersection of all three sectors that he told students the future of human rights rests. ‘Normally one might think of humanitarian work solely in the domain of NGOs and international organizations, so I appreciated his insight that a career in human rights could (and, potentially, should) span multiple areas’, said MPP student Nico Barawid.
To those seeking to follow him into a career advocating and defending human rights, Lord Malloch-Brown had clear advice, not to be trapped either by a narrow western concept of human rights as individual political rights, or by complacent cultural relativism. Instead he urged students to use their skills and the opportunities presented to them to seek to restore a universal concept of human rights, broadly acceptable across regions and cultures, without diluting its purpose.
Mark Malloch-Brown is Chairman of EMEA at FTI Consulting. Formerly he was UK Minister of State in the Foreign Office, Deputy Secretary General and Chief of Staff of the UN under Kofi Annan, Administrator of the UNDP and Vice-President of the World Bank. He is a founding board member of the International Crisis Group, and is a Distinguished Practitioner at the Blavatnik School of Government.
