Threats assessment: Understanding threats in depth

The repression of human rights defenders is all about psychology. Threats are widely used to make defenders feel vulnerable, anxious, confused and helpless. Ultimately, repression also seeks to break organisations and make defenders lose trust in their leaders and colleagues. Defenders have to tread a fine line between careful and proper management of threats and maintaining a sense of safety in our work. This is also the main objective of this chapter.

In Assessing risks: threats, vulnerabilities and capacities, threats were defined as “the possibility that someone will harm somebody else’s physical or moral integrity or property, through purposeful, often violent action”. We also talked about possible threats (when a defender close to your work is threatened and there is reason to believe you might be threatened next), and declared threats (receiving a death threat, for example). We will now look at how to deal with declared threats.

A declared threat is a declaration or indication of an intention to inflict damage, punish or hurt, usually in order to achieve something. Human rights defenders receive threats because of the impact their work is having, and most threats have a clear objective to either stop what the defender is doing or to force him or her to do something.

A threat always has a source, i.e. the person or group who has been affected by the defender’s work and articulates the threat. A threat also has an objective which is linked to the impact of the defender’s work, and a means of expression, i.e. how it becomes known to the defender.

Threats are tricky. We might say with a certain amount of irony that threats are “ecological”, because they aim to achieve major results with a minimum investment of energy. A person making a threat has chosen to do that, rather than take action - a higher investment of energy. Why? There may be a number of reasons why, and it is worth mentioning them here:

• The person making the threat has the capacity to act but is to some extent concerned about the political cost of acting openly against a human rights defender. Anonymous threats can be issued for the same reason.
• The person making the threat has a limited capacity to act and intends to achieve the same aim by hiding his or her lack of capacity behind a threat. This limited capacity may only be temporary due to other priorities, or permanent, but in both cases things may change and lead to direct action against the defender later on.

A threat is a personal experience, and always has an effect. Or, in other words, threats always affect people in some way. One defender once said that: “Threats achieve some effect, even only due to the fact that we are talking about threats”. In fact, any threat can have a double impact: emotionally, and in terms of security. We will concentrate on security here, but we should not forget the emotional side of every threat.

We know that a threat is usually linked to the impact of our work. Receiving a threat therefore represents feedback on how your work is affecting someone else. If you look at it in this way, a threat is an invaluable source of information, and should be analysed carefully.