Les liaisons fructueuses - RUIG-GIAN

V – Eclairages | Témoignage
Dongchang hutong, Bejing, May 2008. According to the research team, “the residents we interviewed believe they
will be evicted after the Olympic Games are finished, but no one was aware of the exact date”. The writing reads :
“Demolish”. Photo : COHRE/Deanna Fowler.
It was perhaps inevitably the case that those persons
involved in the work who were able to devote more
significant time and energy to the project provided
the project with its most positive impetus. These
tended to be persons close at hand, or generally and
previously involved in the human rights aspects of
mega-events implementation, or who became excited
by the project and its work as it went along.
The physical distance from Geneva of some of the
persons and entities involved in the project imposed
particular challenges which needed regularly to be
addressed, but in general the project benefited highly
from both geographic and disciplinary diversity.
This did not mean, however, that such diversity did
not at times give rise to issues within the project.
The bringing together of experts from across different
disciplines at times meant that, even when
speaking a similar language, persons were not always
successfully communicating. One aspect particularly
evident to the author was the gap between persons
aware of the complexities of human rights documentation
work undertaken first-hand, and those
with less direct field experience. These challenges
needed to be managed well. At times they were successfully
managed ; at other times, the project proceeded
with difficulty. In the main, as one might
expect, the project functioned more smoothly when
advisory panel members were able to convene together
with the project implementation team at one
table.
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