An international NGO representative in Colombia: reflections from practice

Certain contexts render particularly challenging the disjunctures and discontinuities between international NGO (INGO) headquarters and in-country operations, as this Christian Aid case demonstrates. Torn loyalties result when seeking to discern how best to work with partners in a human-rights crisis in a middle-income country. Navigating these challenges requires a critical interrogation and radical practice of partnership. With many INGOs partially or wholly decentralising operations, and in anomalous and complex INGO programme contexts like this, it is vital to analyse the disjunctures and to support in-country staff to respond creatively to them, to do justice to programme potential and partnership principles.     

Beyond Couples

Two elderly sisters who lived together complained of discrimination on the ground that, when one of them died, the other would face a heavy inheritance tax bill, unlike the survivor of a marriage or civil partnership who enjoys a “spousal exemption” under the Inheritance Tax Act 1984. They lost in both the lower chamber of the European Court of Human Rights and on appeal to the Grand Chamber. At first instance, discrimination was found but held to be proportionate and justifiable; in the Grand Chamber, no discrimination was found, as siblings and spouses/civil partners were held not to be in an analogous situation. As an attempt to avoid a tax borne only by the comparatively wealthy, this case might not naturally engage feminist sympathies. But it demonstrates how unworthy claims can produce positive results by drawing attention to society’s dismissive treatment of old people and calling into question the legal and economic privileges enjoyed by legally-bound couples at the expense of everyone else.