Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World
Elaine Pearson
Simon & Schuster Australia: 2022
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You can feel Elaine Pearson’s passion for human rights work even from the first few pages of her memoirs, Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World. It’s no easy undertaking: human trafficking, for instance, is an extremely complicated problem that invites controversy over sex work and consent. Enforced disappearances, women’s rights, prisoners’ rights and refugees’ rights are also no walk in the park, but she has tackled such issues across different continents too. With more than two decades of experience under her belt, Pearson—now the Asia director of Human Rights Watch—does an excellent job in this book of depicting the difficulties of conducting human rights research while maintaining a high degree of professionalism.

Over the two decades in which I’ve been involved in human rights research and advocacy, I’ve regularly had to deal with the dilemma of getting interesting testimonies from victims—which can then be crafted into compelling advocacy campaigns to catch the attention of the easily distracted public—and protecting the best interests of the victims and survivors I’ve interviewed. One needs compelling ‘characters’ that the public will care about, yet security concerns and other considerations often restrict how far one can go. Pearson, for instance, spoke to members of the Ethiopian diaspora community in Australia about the threats and retaliation they’d faced for protesting against the Ethiopian president back home, a situation similar to my own experience of working with Chinese dissidents outside China. We want to make their stories as engaging as possible, yet these sources often have to be anonymised for their own protection. Deciding what information can or cannot be made public is also a tricky exercise.

Alive to these concerns, Pearson writes about how she preps for interviews by talking to local NGOs and people familiar with the local situation before reaching out to potential interviewees. Most importantly, she doesn’t treat the people she encounters as mere victims in need of international sympathy and attention, but as full human beings who are well aware of the challenges they’re facing and have their own agency in choosing between available options (limited though they may often be). In Chasing Wrongs and Rights, she makes their situational and psychological challenges legible to readers.

 

• Tags: Elaine Pearson, Issue 31, Patrick Poon