February 22, 2019 – Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU) hosted Roueida El Hage, regional representative of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) for the MENA region based in Beirut, to discuss potential partnerships between the OHCHR and NDU. El Hage has 21 years of experience in human rights, including 14 years with the OHCHR and the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) in MENA, Asia and Africa. She has been deployed in regions as diverse as Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, the Philippines, and Western Sahara.
She has extensive experience with monitoring and reporting, capacity building and legislative reforms, and knowledge of international law and political affairs with the United Nations, particularly in the MENA region, Asia and Africa. In person, El Hage carries herself with a quiet intensity as she walks through some of the challenges she has faced in her line of work.
Recalling a time in Afghanistan where she had to bring her message of human rights to a Mullah, she says: “I had to convince them that I’m here to try to inject some of the principles of human rights in the community, try to convince them to do some capacity building. He would never look at me, I was gazing at him and I said, ‘sir I won’t start unless you look in my eyes.’ He put his pen on the table and replied, ‘so what do you have for me? Convince me.’ I started telling him what we’re preaching for, the human rights norms, is not a contradiction with the norms that Islam are preaching for and giving some examples here and there, and then he led me to a place where there were 20-40 mullahs waiting for me to receive the same explanation. They ended up opening all the doors for us. I was a woman standing in front of all these Mullah and Mawlawi where they do not even accept normally to be in the same room with a female. I am a UN staff member, a woman, and a foreigner. I don’t speak their language and yet it was a successful outcome in the end.”
Discussing the message of human rights that she and her team try to spread, El Hage says: “The principles are universal but you always have to inject some of the specificity between universality and some of the identities, you have to take into consideration, which does not prevent you from being totally in compliance with international norms.” El Hage places particular emphasis on this context, because human rights are universal and there are ways to implement them while accepting the culture in which they are being applied, so the approach for each place is very different.
When asked how young people and students can get involved, El Hage is adamant that self-belief and a desire to change the world are the strongest factors. El Hage herself has a background in Fine Arts, a passion she still maintains, but that did not stop her from pursuing her career promoting human rights because of her desire to affect meaningful change in the world. Education is essential, which is why the OHCHR maintains ties with institutions like NDU, who aim to empower their students to affect the same kind of change on the world.