Ten principles for engagement

I have been engaged with human rights since the 1980s. I worked with human rights non-government organisations in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. I was a member of the first two Australian human rights delegations to China, in 1991 and 1992, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I was also a member of the first Australian human rights delegation to Vietnam in 1995. I worked with the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights during the Suharto dictatorship in the 1990s. Most controversially, I conducted human rights training programmes for government officials in Myanmar between 2000 and 2003. And so on. I hadn’t fully appreciated it until now, but what I have been trying to do for the better part of three decades has been Principled Engagement. Principled Engagement by definition must be based on principle. To ensure that its practice is clear it is important to articulate what those principles are. Drawing on my many years of experience of what I now know is Principled Engagement, I propose ten principles for this approach to human rights work.