Mary Robinson

Two

years into her tenure as the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson is reevaluating herself. Having spent much of her career championing the cause of Irish national identity within Europe, she now finds these categorizations somewhat limiting. "I spend most of my time both thinking about and identifying with much less privileged regions of the world," she explains. "I'm Irish and European, but now a citizen of the world in the true sense."

Since her appointment as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Robinson has been a relentless advocate for the most vulnerable of her fellow citizens. With the same forthrightness that helped her imbue with authority the largely ceremonial role of President of the Irish Republic, she has remade the U.N. job in her own image. While human rights advocates have often focused on abuses by unfriendly regimes, Robinson has taken an unstintingly democratic approach. During NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, she questioned the operation's legality and criticized the civilian casualties resulting from the air campaign. "When you say that what you're doing is for humanitarian reasons, you must be careful not to make significantly worse the humanitarian situation of a high proportion of citizens," she cautions. Yet she was also unyielding in her condemnation of the "vicious abuses" of Milosevic and his troops.

And it is not just the headline-making causes that Robinson espouses. She has called for the overall conception of human rights to be broadened, with more attention paid to social, cultural and economic rights. Another theme she stresses is the increasingly important role of non-governmental and regional organizations. In Serbia, for example, where "people are starved of contact and support to help them build a society of human rights," she points to the importance of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in normalizing society.

Robinson's advocacy has turned her post into one of the U.N.'s most visible. She has even been mooted as a possible successor to Kofi Annan as Secretary-General--not an unreasonable prediction given her track record. In 1990 she was elected Ireland's first woman President. By the time she left office a few months shy of the end of her term to take up the U.N. job, her approval ratings had soared and she had won international plaudits.

Like most politicians, she is keenly aware of the media's persuasive force and has proved adroit at using it to her advantage. During a 1995 presidential tour of South America, she met former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, now in Britain fighting extradition to Spain on human rights abuse charges. According to her authorized biography, Robinson made sure Irish camera crews were removed from the room before she shook hands with Pinochet.

These days Robinson is usually more amenable to journalists' presence. "We're a small global office, we have to be modest about what we can do," she says. "We try to be a catalyst. Obviously, the media are an important dimension." As human rights become an increasingly contentious international issue, Robinson will have to strike the right balance between the medium and the message.