Guide to International Human Rights Mechanisms - Brookings

Introduction
This guide
is meant for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and their advocates,
including representatives of civil society and the staff of national
and international humanitarian organizations.
By publishing it, the Brookings Institution-University of Bern Project on Internal Displacement
(“Project on Internal Displacement”) hopes to encourage and assist these people to use international
human rights mechanisms, both at the global and regional levels, when governments fail
to respect, protect and fulfill IDPs’ human rights. Few have taken advantage of these avenues to
date, despite the many and frequently extreme human rights violations IDPs face. While it must
be admitted that the power of most of the mechanisms is limited, they have nevertheless brought
tangible results for many of those who have used them in the past and they might well be able to
do so for IDPs.
This work was inspired by the publication of an excellent and comprehensive volume on this subject
edited by the late Professor Joan Fitzpatrick entitled: Human Rights Protection for Refugees,
Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons: A Guide to International Mechanisms and Procedures
( Joan M. Fitzpatrick, ed., Transnational Publishers, Inc., 2002). For a time, the Project on Internal
Displacement distributed copies of Professor Fitzpatrick’s book to partners in the field. However,
it soon became clear that there was need for an IDP-specific guide that would also serve the needs
of those lacking the time and inclination to become experts in international institutions and human
rights law. This guide attempts to meet these needs, drawing in part on the work of Professor
Fitzpatrick and her contributors.
Unlike Professor Fitzpatrick’s book, this guide does not address the issues of refugees or asylum
seekers and it therefore makes some different choices in the “human rights mechanisms” it describes.
It generally includes those that:
• identify themselves as human rights mechanisms,
• enjoy official standing vis-à-vis governments through their association with a particular
treaty or inter-governmental organization,
• are accessible to IDPs or their advocates, either for individual complaints or to receive and
act upon more general information about the situation of IDPs, and
• focus on issues conceivably of interest and use to IDPs.
This list being already quite long, a great many other international actors that can play important
roles for the protection of IDPs’ rights, such as United Nations humanitarian and development
agencies and non-governmental organizations, are not fully described. On the other hand, a few