I found in discussions that if I led with, say the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or something, I would get a reaction about how the UN and the agencies that have created these international human rights standards were politicized and how they're dominated by certain great powers that are active in the region, and so on and so forth, so I quickly found an approach where I started from the ground up rather than the top down. I would start with looking at the policies of the Bisha mine, which are quite extensive, and have actually quite pragmatic and operational focus on the principles that you would find in the international covenants and the international labour declarations. I talked about that because that is something that had been negotiated between the government and Nevsun. We could really get into a meaty conversation and not get into abstract conversations about the politics of the UN.
The next level up would be to talk about the national legal framework. In some cases we know that the constitution has been suspended, so that's not really on point, but for instance, on many issues the labour proclamation in Eritrea has things that you could cut and paste from an international labour declaration. You could have a very good conversation about that.
It's not to dismiss the importance of the international declarations as the overall framing of my work, but to have a constructive conversation, I found it easier to start at the references that people were familiar with and accepted at the ground. Then we're not into existential or political conversations, but rather something focused and pragmatic.