Someone makes a complaint at work, and before anyone has examined it, the conversation turns to their personality. They have always been difficult. They take things personally. They could have raised it more politely. Perhaps all of that is true. It still leaves the complaint unanswered.
There is a comfortable way of supporting human rights which never gets close enough to disturb our own arrangements. We approve of protections in principle, then become surprisingly inventive about exceptions when the person seeking protection is someone we find exhausting.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has reported a final communiqué from its 89th Ordinary Session. The supplied report identifies the communiqué but gives no account of its contents, so it cannot support claims here about particular decisions or their effects. Its publication does, however, invite a question that belongs well beyond a formal meeting: what happens to our commitment to rights when honouring it becomes inconvenient?
In ordinary life, we often have some influence over whether another person gets heard. A manager can allow a complaint to be examined or quietly turn the complainant into the problem. A relative can listen to an uncomfortable account without immediately defending the family. These situations differ enormously from the work of a human rights commission. They are nevertheless places where our stated commitments acquire consequences.
There is an obvious complication. Complaints can be mistaken. People can act unfairly while claiming they have been treated unfairly themselves. Taking an account seriously cannot mean accepting every part of it, and an accused person also needs a fair hearing. The difficult work is to resist letting sympathy settle the matter before the facts do.
That demands something more exacting than being a generally kind person. It may mean asking for an explanation from someone whose approval matters to us. It may mean keeping open a process we would rather see finished.
No household or workplace can substitute for effective public institutions. Equally, formal commitments cannot do all our thinking for us. When the next difficult person raises an inconvenient concern, there is a small but consequential choice: examine what they are saying, or make their manner the reason we need not bother.