Ben Rogers writes a lengthy piece over at Conservative Home urging an energetic approach by the new UK government on international human rights:

The Commission has also recommended the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Human Rights, who would work with the Minister of State to co-ordinate the efforts of diplomats and embassies in addressing international human rights, and oversee the work of a range of Special Envoys on thematic human rights issues – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; religious freedom; human trafficking; women’s rights, for example.

These could either be diplomats with a proven track record in these areas, or respected human rights campaigners from the NGO sector. The United States, the Netherlands and France have similar positions, and it is time the United Kingdom did too.

Such appointments would be an important demonstration of human rights being a centre-piece of foreign policy, not simply an after-thought. They would represent a serious expansion of the currently woefully under-staffed human rights and governance unit at the FCO.

While kindly agreeing with me on a number of FCO reform ideas, he disagrees over FCO bloggers:

I disagree, however, with Crawford’s suggestion that ambassadorial blogging should end. I believe in this day and age, such blogging – especially on democracy and human rights – is a very valuable source of information to the outside world, and solidarity with courageous dissidents and activists.

Our former ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, now in Zimbabwe, blogged regularly during key events such as Cyclone Nargis and Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, and I admire him for it. His successor Andrew Heyn has followed suit.

I also disagree with the idea of freezing all FCO training. I think preparing diplomats for understanding the key human rights issues in countries to which they will be posted is essential, and it needs to be strengthened not cut.

As for blogging, the main reason to end Ambassadorial and other overseas diplomatic blogging is that it arguably tends to reduce that Ambassador’s local impact where it matters.

Any host government, obnoxious or otherwise, is bound to start to wonder what the point of this person’s posting really is.

Is it to act as a means for hard-nosed reliable confidential communication between the two capitals? Or to make a public noise in favour of some or other pet project? Are all those blog posts meant to signify official UK government thinking, or not? What’s going on here? Ignore him. It’s not serious.

My point on freezing training was merely to identify in a ruthless way which training makes operational sense, and to dump junk training which does not.

What in fact is likely to make a difference in training young diplomats in being effective on human rights issues and so helping a feisty new ConLib government make a sustained difference in hard places?

Lectures from the human rights establishment on UN best practice and international conventions?

Tips from MI6 on how best to help hard-pressed local human rights campaigners without being too obvious to oppressive local authorities?

Lessons in good drafting technique aimed at helping get principles and detail reported back to London in an impactful way?

A case-study on the contrasting approaches taken by FCO legends Craig Murray, Charles Crawford and Philip Barclay in dealing with oppressive regimes as on-the-ground diplomats – what worked and what didn’t?

Not easy to give a simple answer.

But whatever the Policy, it all comes down to Resources – and Technique.