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- Human Rights Defenders in the State of Guerrero - Mexico
1 July | PBI Mexico Project - Front Line Handbook for Human Rights Defenders: What protection can EU and Norwegian Diplomatic Missions offer?*
27 June | Front Line Defenders - The manual
28 May | - Might some aspects of our behaviour during our free time affect the image of our organisation?
22 May | - How do we treat the confidentiality of information?
22 May |
Side by Side : Protecting and encouraging threatened activists with unarmed international accompaniment
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International protective accompaniment is the physical accompaniment by international personnel of activists, organizations or communities threatened with politically motivated attacks. Peace Brigades International has been developing this tactic since the mid- 1980s, sending hundreds of volunteers into different conflict situations around the world. PBI currently sustains a presence of about 80 people working in several conflicts, responding to requests for accompaniment from all kinds of threatened civil society organizations. Accompaniment can take many forms. Some threatened activists receive 24-hour-aday accompaniment. For others the presence is more sporadic. Sometimes team members spend all day on the premises of an office of a threatened organization. Sometimes they live in threatened rural villages in conflict zones.
This accompaniment service has three simultaneous and mutually-reinforcing impacts. The international presence protects threatened activists by raising the stakes of any attacks against them. It encourages civil society activism by allowing threatened organizations more space and confidence to operate and by building links of solidarity with the international community. And it strengthens the international movement
for peace and human rights by giving accompaniment volunteers a powerful first-hand experience that becomes a sustained source of inspiration to themselves and others upon their return to their home country. This tactical notebook will analyze how protective accompaniment works, based on the substantial experience of PBI in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Sri Lanka and El Salvador. Since the 1990s, numerous other organizations have also provided protective international accompaniment in other settings, modifying the approach according to their particular identity and mission. In the final section of the notebook I will also offer a brief comparative discussion of several of these experiences.
What is protective accompaniment?
The accompaniment volunteer is literally the embodiment of international human rights concern, a compelling and visible reminder to those using violence that it will not go unnoticed. The volunteers act essentially as unarmed bodyguards, often spending twentyfour hours a day with human rights workers, union leaders, peasant groups and other popular organizations that face mortal danger from death squads, state forces or other abusers. The premise of accompaniment is that there will be an international response to whatever violence the volunteer witnesses. Behind such a response lies the implied threat of diplomatic and economic pressure—pressure that the sponsors of such violence prefer to avoid.
Design by Laurent Boucher | Concept SPIP by Rainer Müller
Copyleft 2006 PBI BEO | With the support of
