ABSTRACT
The main purpose of the present chapter is to review and comment on the Statement of Ethical Commitments of Human Rights Professionals, which has been drafted and adopted in the context of the project ‘Consolidating the Profession: the Human Rights Field Officer’1 and is annexed to the present publication. As background information, I shall present an overview of the consultation and drafting procedure as well as some of the points of ambiguity encountered in the course of this process. However, before turning specifically to the text at hand, it will be opportune to briefly situate the very endeavour to develop ethical guidance for human rights professionals within the context, on the one hand, of what I call ‘the ethics of human rights’, and, on the other hand, of professional ethics generally. In fact, the present undertaking may be seen as located precisely at the intersection of these two distinct yet related discourses.
