Noam Schimmel - Advancing International Human Rights Law Responsibilities of Development NGOs: Respecting and Fulfilling the Right to Reparative Justice for Genocide Survivors in Rwanda

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Many individuals in Rwanda and other countries have generously shared with me their life experiences, perspectives, community development efforts, educational programs, and business development projects that empower survivors and enhance their self-reliance and their resilience. I am grateful to all who recognize the unique needs and distinctive vulnerabilities of survivors and who honor their human rights and their dignity. Those individuals and organizations who incorporate them and ensure their full participation and integration in Rwanda on the basis of equity and equality and with the aim of enabling and realizing their right to reparative justice in its many, mutually reinforcing forms are often unsung heroes. Their work is done humbly, quietly, and with minimal resources and financial support. It sustains hopes, rebuilds lives, and enables dreams to become realities.

Taylor Krauss has been an extraordinary friend whose love, altruism, and generosity have been felt by me in myriad ways and whose kindness as a friend is protective, gentle, and powerfully present. His depth of care for survivors is exceptional, and he has devoted his life for over 15 years to working in partnership with survivors to enable them to share their testimonies of life before, during, and after the genocide through his organization, Voices of Rwanda. His love for survivors is more than a commitment to justice; it is an act of solidarity, compassion, and continuous presence and accompaniment and profound personal humanism of sincerity and humility. His work is often daunting and difficult. He continues to do it indefatigably with warmth, tenacity, and great courage in the face of the indifference of so many to the rights and welfare of survivors and resistance to listen to them, learn from them, and respect and fulfill their human rights.

Julia Viebach has done ground-breaking work at Oxford University with Rwandan genocide survivors on the ways in which they commemorate family and friends killed in the genocide. She makes her scholarship accessible to the public, and in so doing she amplifies the voices of survivors and increases public knowledge and understanding of their experiences and the history of the genocide and its consequences. Her work is exceptional in its moral integrity and psychological sensitivity and care for survivors. Its insistence on placing survivors at the heart of research, knowledge creation, and dissemination is a model of academic excellence and socially consequential research. I have been very fortunate to learn from her and with her and I am grateful for the ways in which she works so respectfully and in mutuality with survivors and for her warmth, friendship, and the conscience and compassion she shows survivors.