Here at Missing Perspectives, we don’t want to run your average run-of-the-mill careers section on our website. We’re on a mission to platform incredible young women making waves, and a massive impact, in their respective industries.
This week, we’re profiling Belkis Wille – an Associate Director currently working in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch. Belkis has had quite the career path – documenting laws of war violations around the world, in places like Gaza, Israel, Sudan and Ukraine.
One thing Belkis said in the interview really stuck with us.
“As a woman you are uniquely placed to be able to not just document on broader violations affecting the whole community, but really to very specifically document those abuses being suffered by women and girls,” she told us. “Because you have access to spaces that women and girls inhabit and are able to build up that level of trust in those spaces to be able to do the work and be able to do it in a responsible and sensitive manner.”
This is exactly why we need more women working in the humanitarian space – so we really hope that you read this conversation feeling both challenged and inspired.
You’re currently an Associate Director in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch. Can you share a little about your career path to date, and how you ended up in this role?
I went to college in the United States at Harvard University, where I did an undergraduate degree but took a few courses in the space of human rights, including a course called Anthropology of Human Rights, and at the same time studied Arabic – because in those years, it was 2004-2008 I thought there would be an opportunity to do more human rights work in the Middle East.
After, I did a law degree and a legal Masters in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, both in the UK.
In between, I did various internships and fellowships in the space of human rights, all in the Middle East utilising my Arabic. Then ultimately got a job with the World Organisation Against Torture, an organisation running a torture prevention program in Libya in 2012. I was hired by Human Rights Watch in the beginning of 2013 to be the organisation’s first Yemen researcher.
This was after the Arab spring and the first time Human Rights Watch was able to have a fixed presence in Yemen, which is why I took up that job. After several years of being the organisation’s Yemen researcher, and also working on several other Gulf countries at the same time, in 2016 I moved to becoming the organisation’s Iraq researcher.
I worked on Iraq from 2016 onwards for several more years, and then a few years ago I moved into another team within Human Rights Watch, the Crisis Conflict and Arms Division. That move was based on the expertise that I had developed over the years working in Yemen and Iraq, in the armed conflict context, and documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Since 2022 you have documented human rights violations across countries like Gaza, Israel, Sudan and Ukraine. Can you share any experiences from your work that have had a lasting impact on you, particularly relating to women’s rights? How do the experiences of women and girls differ in conflict zones?
What I think strikes me most about the work that I’ve done is that, on the one hand, how it is really women and girls who pay the price in the context of armed conflict.
They’re often in a far more vulnerable situation; and at the same time when we look at accountability, one doesn’t see enough being done to ensure that perpetrators who victimise women and girls, particularly victims of sexual violence in the context of armed conflict, are held accountable.
What I’ve really benefited from is the fact that I am a woman. That has given me unique access to women in the countries that I’ve worked on, and it’s meant that I can do lots of work documenting a range of abuses against women and girls, whether that’s forced marriage, female genital mutilation, or things like sexual violence, and rape in particular.
One area that I think is very important, and one that has been understudied by the scientific and health communities, is the experience of pregnant women during war.
Pregnant women obviously have very specific vulnerabilities, and the types of experiences that people have during the war, things like being displaced repeatedly, being cut off from food, water and medicine, these are things that acutely affect pregnant women above other members of society and where there are very serious consequences including potentially losing a pregnancy or losing a girl or woman’s life while pregnant.
I am very happy that Human Rights Watch is looking at this area. In particular, we are soon going to be publishing a report looking at the experience of pregnant women in Gaza, and very much hoping that is going to lead us to publishing more material in that space.
But in the context of that research, as I was doing a literature review to see what studies have been done into the effects of exposure to conflict for pregnant women, that there is very little out there, including looking at the increases in rates of miscarriage and early delivery, and babies with low birth weight, so that’s clearly an area where more work needs to be done, particularly by the health and science communities.
Can you walk us through your process for gathering evidence and ensuring accuracy in such volatile settings?
In terms of processes, Human Rights Watch has very specific methodology. We base all of our research on first-hand victim and witness testimony. In the context of armed conflict, the methodology is the same, but it means there might be limitations to access, particularly physical access to areas where we are trying to document abuses.
This could be because there is ongoing fighting, people have been displaced from that area, or there is a new armed actor in control that isn’t giving us access. In cases like that we need to go to where people have fled to, sometimes that is in a nearby location across another border in order to get that victim and witness testimony. Sometimes we need to interview people over the phone, because we can’t physically get to them and with that we need to make sure we’re doing so safely, like using applications such as Signal to avoid surveillance.
In addition to that, particularly in these armed conflict contexts, we spend a lot of time analysing satellite imagery that allows us to have eyes on the ground in places that we can’t physically get to, or we get to them much later, and so we want to see what was happening on the ground maybe a week, month, or years ago.
We also spend a lot of time analysing and forensically verifying videos and photos that are coming out of conflict zones. We might interview people telling us about a massacre, or security forces firing at protesters for example, and we’ll interview lots of people telling us what they saw and heard at the time, but then we might be able to supplement their info with photos and videos from that very incident. This is really important evidence that can build a fuller picture of what happened.
What changes have you observed over time in international communities’ approaches to gender-based rights violations in the regions you have worked in?
In terms of observations of the international communities’ approaches over time to gender based violence and sexual violence – it hasn’t been that long, only two or more decades, that there has been a broader appreciation and understanding that sexual violence can and is used as a weapon of war.
And that should be recognised in terms of things like the Rome Statue [of the International Criminal Court] and in terms of what people can be prosecuted for, things like war crimes and crimes against humanity. That’s a development that has been extremely important, and yet unfortunately, we haven’t seen a huge increase in the persecution of perpetrators for rape and other forms of sexual violence in war crime proceedings around the world.
How crucial is content preservation by social media platforms for war crimes investigations, and what challenges have you encountered in this area? And how can social media companies better support the work undertaken by organisations like HRW?
Social media platforms are very important in our investigations. This goes back to the point I was making of using photos and videos as potential evidence of abuses.
However, at the same time, what you’ve had over the last 5 or so years, is that countries and governments have put a lot of pressure on social media companies to take content off their platforms that represent graphic violence. Now, some of this content is indeed very graphic and shouldn’t necessarily be left online for the broader public to engage with.
However, it can also sometimes represent very important evidence. And so what we have been trying to advocate with these companies for many years now, is the creation of an archive. This would be an archive of taken down content. They could take down content and store it in this archive and give access to that archive for international war crimes investigators, prosecutors working at the International Criminal Court.
There is a mechanism for national law enforcement to request access to taken down content from companies within 30 days. They need a subpoena or some other type of court order. But there is no way for international investigators to get access to that content. That’s both investigators from the ICC but also from the many UN mechanisms that have created that focus on documenting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other very serious crimes against humanitarian law. So we continue to push for the creation of such a mechanism.
What advice would you have for young women interested in working in human rights advocacy and humanitarian fields?
One important thing is to think about what region you want to work in and really focus on ensuring you have the requisite language skills. That to me is one of the most practical skills that one can acquire early on, and one can use time at university to do.
And then I think it’s very important to get field experience. One thing I noticed is that because I had had field experience before law school and before my legal Masters, I had a much easier time getting a job right out of those degrees compared to classmates of mine who didn’t have that prior field experience.
They were then required right out of their degrees to do unpaid internships, for a year or more, which of course was very difficult for many of them to afford. And I was lucky I didn’t have to do something like that at that stage in my career and I was able to jump right into a job.
The other thing, which touches on the comments I made earlier, is to really use the benefits of being a woman in this space.
As a woman you are uniquely placed to be able to not just document on broader violations affecting the whole community, but really to very specifically document those abuses being suffered by women and girls; because you have access to spaces that women and girls inhabit and are able to build up that level of trust in those spaces to be able to do the work and be able to do it in a responsible and sensitive manner.