About us >>Meet our Chief Executive >>Sarah Maguire


Every month we profile one of our consultants and this month, we are delighted to introduce our new chief executive, Sarah Maguire. An international lawyer with a wealth of development experience, Sarah started her career in nursing and then trained as a criminal defence and latterly, immigration and asylum barrister. In 1999, Sarah joined DFID as a Senior Human Rights Adviser in the Conflict and Humanitarian Affairs department, then in 2003, established herself as an independent justice and human rights advisor. She has worked extensively with UN entities, NGOs and the UK Government, specializing in the justice sector, gender and conflict, child protection, stabilisation and forced migration, with a focus on fragile states.

You are a defence lawyer by profession. How and why did you move into social development?

I practised at the Bar of England and Wales for about 10 years doing criminal defence and refugee law. I got involved in conflict-associated development in the Balkans. I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina with a colleague to support the work with women's organisations who had been dealing with sexual violence during the war. We were instrumental in setting up a string of womens' law centres across the territory. Later I was approached to run a small NGO working with displaced families from Srebenica and Zvornik. I did that for about a year before returning to the UK and starting to work for DFID as Senior Human Rights Advisor in the forerunner to the Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department.

Since then you've had a long and fairly varied career in international development. Is there a common motivation behind your work which holds all the pieces together?

I am at heart a human rights lawyer and activist. In 2003 I left DFID to become an independent human rights consultant working with different UN entities including UNICEF, UNIFEM, UNDP and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as well as DFID and the UK's Stabilisation Unit. Human rights provided an underpinning for all the work I did in the fields of child protection, gender, conflict, rule of law and forced migration. At SDDirect, I see all we do as promoting the realisation of human rights - that development is dependent on the protection and promotion of human rights. Take maternal mortality; providing the latest technology is all very well but it's useless if women cannot see a doctor because discriminatory practices prevent them from seeing a doctor or midwife, as in Afghanistan.

Can you illustrate how human rights have been the driving force behind your work in some of these areas?

Child protection would be an obvious example. I worked with UNICEF in West Africa, Nepal and Sri Lanka to develop their child protection strategies for those who'd been involved in armed conflict. The protection of these children's rights was front and centre of my work with UNICEF and its partners, whether to do with the release of the children from armed groups or to do with their lives after they were returned to their families or communities. Even where we encountered some resistance, we were able to take UNICEF programming to a more sophisticated level that was more responsive to the children who were being released. In Sri Lanka I worked with both the LTTE as well as the government on the release of children as well as reintegration programmes involving children who had already been released. Similarly in Nepal we were trying to advocate with the Maoists to honour their commitment in the peace agreement to release children they had recruited in the years beforehand and then set up reintegration programmes for those children and their families. Child protection was central to our work. For girl soldiers, in particular, returning home wasn't always a positive experience.

Tell us about your work in forced migration.

While at DFID and afterwards, I worked with the Brookings-Berne project on policy work around the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and at field level to make these a reality. I also represented the UK at UNHCR's Executive Committee on refugee protection. Forced migration, as well as resulting from human rights violations, makes people more vulnerable to further violations and it's important to prevent this, too.

Later on I have also been an expert witness in asylum applications for people from Darfur and in some gender-related cases. For instance, the question of whether fleeing the threat of female genital mutilation in Sierra Leone, or forced marriage for women in Afghanistan, would entitle a woman to refugee status.

Can you talk about some of your gender work at policy level?

Between 2005 and 2008, I conducted a series of training modules on implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 & 1820 on Women and Peace and Security for the UN Department for Political Affairs and Department of Peace Keeping Operations and for staff members of the Stabilisation Unit and DFID. These resolutions are about the participation of women in peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction and the protection of women during conflict.

The training was for UN and UK officials on how to apply the resolutions to their work out in the field and at headquarters in New York. We trained people working in the Israel-Palestine conflict, across Africa and South Asia, including Afghanistan.

What were some of the challenges your trainees encountered back in the field?

Many international officials cite lack of access to women as one of their biggest challenges. They often don't know how to access women's organisations or how women are organised. Across the globe, in all areas, there is still a tendency to regard dealing with women as an add-on extra burden of work rather than an integral dimension of development or peace-building.

How far do you think poorly-educated women in rural communities are aware of their human rights?

I think that, at an intuitive level, everybody knows when their human rights have been violated, even if they don't know about their entitlements. So for instance a 13-year-old girl who is in a forced marriage to a 50-year-old man knows that she's desperately unhappy and knows it is wrong but she may not know why it is wrong. She won't know that she's entitled to make choices about her life, or that she has particular rights as a child or as a girl.

Turning to the rule of law, does awareness come first or is the provision of sound legal systems equally important?

For me, the implementation of the rule of law is about supply and demand. There have to be strong national institutions and communities that can protect the human rights of the whole population and at the same time citizens have to be able to demand of those institutions and those communities. In order to strengthen the supply you need to strengthen the demand and vice versa. At ground level you need to educate children, women, fathers, religious leaders, government officials and politicians.

It is not enough to have institutions if nobody knows how to use them. A big shiny marble-tiled courtroom with judges in robes and wigs is only useful if people know that they are entitled to litigate and have access to justice. It's the users of institutions that make sure they are strong - by holding them to account.

Did you encounter this situation in your recent justice advisory work in Afghanistan?

There is an urgent need in Afghanistan's south, for an effective, strong legal system and independent judiciary. And there is a very urgent need for everyone in those communities to understand their own entitlements. The military I worked with came to understand that, in tackling the insurgency, it is crucial to target the key areas of social provision which the Taliban can provide and they do provide justice ... of a sort. They have courts and judges and people do come and ask them to resolve their disputes for them.

And what are your plans for SDDirect?

I am extremely enthusiastic about working with SDDirect; especially to be joining an organisation with such a reputation for excellence. I am confident that SDDirect will expand over the next few years both in terms of the amount of work we do and developing our strengths. I aim to make conflict an integral part of our work on gender and voice and accountability, as well as bringing justice into the voice and accountability work. I also intend to maintain our global reach.

As mentioned earlier, I would like us to articulate that the protection, realisation and promotion of human rights underpins all the work that we do. For instance, our work on voice and accountability is about enabling and empowering people to advocate for themselves with governments and non-state actors - to be able to realise their own human rights and to hold governments and other power holders to account. In gender work, if you don't talk about the human rights of women as well as men, boys as well as girls then it gets more difficult for people to understand why you're focussing on gender. 'Gender' is a rather nebulous and misunderstood term. So whether that's to do with a girls' education project or addressing the specifics of women in a post-conflict needs assessment, we come at that from the perspective of supporting women's human rights, including supporting their own abilities to promote their own human rights.

And finally, can you tell us a little bit about your life after work?

I'm a member of the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize group which aims to recognise, reward and remember women who do outstanding work on raising awareness about violence against women and children. It's not all work, though! I live with my partner who's also a lawyer and our cats and chickens. We love to holiday in England's countryside. Also, I've taken several classes in clowning. The world needs clowns.

Interview by Malini Tambyah