Human Rights and Natural Disasters: Mitigating or Exacerbating the Damage?
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Author | Salil Shetty |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00108.x |
Human Rights and Natural
Disasters: Mitigating or
Exacerbating the Damage?
Salil Shetty
Secretary General, Amnesty International
The past two years have been marked by several cata-
strophic natural disasters. These disasters were bracketed
by the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 which killed
an estimated 300,000 people and displaced more than
2 million, and the earthquake in Japan in March 2011
which killed an estimated 25,000 and displaced more
than 300,000.
At first glance human rights standards do not appear
to have a lot to say about natural disasters. Even if every
government was fully committed to respecting the full
range of civil, cultural, economic, political and social
rights, bad things would still happen and people would
still suffer. So most human rights organisations restrict
their response to natural disasters to urging govern-
ments and humanitarian aid organisations to ensure that
assistance is distributed without discrimination, that
communities are invited to participate fully in plans for
rebuilding, that police protect the community from
violence and exploitation which often arises in the chaos
following a natural disaster, and that governments that
are unable to provide for those whose lives have been
upended seek international assistance so that no one
suffers needlessly.
None of these calls on governments and the interna-
tional community is radical. Yet even these simple and
self-evident calls on governments are often ignored. The
Sri Lankan government failed to help Muslim communi-
ties living on the east coast of Sri Lanka who were par-
ticularly hard hit by the tsunami in 2004. The United
States government largely excluded African Americans
whose communities were devastated in Hurricane
Katrina from a key role in the rebuilding process. And
the rebuilding of their neighbourhoods was delayed in
comparison with other neighbourhoods in New Orleans.
The Haitian governments failed to take even the most
basic steps to prevent sexual violence and the trafficking
of children in Haiti after the earthquake. The Myanmar
government initially refused desperately needed interna-
tional assistance to help those stranded, injured and
displaced after Cyclone Nargis.
But what is striking as we examine the impact of these
natural disasters is how respect for human rights before
the fact could have mitigated the damage and signifi-
cantly lessened the human suffering. Again, human
rights cannot stop natural disasters from happening –
although as states continue wilfully to fumble their
response to climate change the role of human action in
triggering natural disasters may change, but that is a
topic for another article.
Imagine how different the situation in Haiti might be
now if in the years before the catastrophic earthquake
the government had prioritised adequate housing,
tackled corruption, thwarted the rule of criminal gangs,
eliminated child slavery and empowered women. The
devastation wrought by this natural disaster was exacer-
bated by the failure in Haiti to address entrenched pov-
erty, rampant corruption, underresourcing of housing
and health care, the failure of policing, pervasive insecu-
rity and systemic violence against women. The void left
by poor governance contributed to a far greater human
toll than there needed to be. For decades, the vast
majority of Haitians have lived with chronic insecurity
and with no expectation that their government would
respect their rights. As the subsequent outbreak of
cholera months after the earthquake and the attacks on
UN peacekeepers have so vividly demonstrated, there is
no statute of limitations on that failure when a natural
disaster strikes.
And it is not just the government of Haiti that has
repeatedly failed its people – it is also the failure of the
international community which seems content to ‘con-
tain’ the problems of failed or corrupt or conflict-ridden
states. In intervention after intervention in Haiti over the
last 20 years, and despite pledging billions in aid, the
international community has ignored its failure to effect
change in Haiti even as it has worked to ensure that
there is no massive flow of refugees from Haiti. In short,
the international community provided enough assistance
to Haiti to make certain that the internal chaos and
insecurity did not seep beyond its borders but never
Global Policy Volume 2 . Issue 3 . October 2011
ª2011 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2011) 2:3 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00108.x
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