Hashimah Nik Jaafar, Malaysia NHRC
October 2009: The Commission’s new Secretary has a history of taking on challenging roles and delivering positive results.
Hashimah Nik Jaafar, National Human Rights Commission of Malaysia.
“I enjoy taking on new challenges. I like trying new things, working hard and coming up with solutions to different situations,” says Hashimah Nik Ja’afar.
This is no idle musing from the Secretary of Malaysia’s National Human Rights Commission (SUHAKAM).
Before working at SUHAKAM, Hashimah spent many years in the civil service coordinating the financial assistance the country received from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as well as managing bilateral development funding relationships with a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.
In 2006 she was given another major challenge: to head the ‘Visit Malaysia 2007’ tourism campaign.
“I was given a target to achieve 20.1 million tourists, compared with the 2005 figure of roughly 17 million, as well as boosting tourism revenue from 40 billion to 45 billion. It was a big jump,” she recalls.
“I was excited to take up the challenge. It pushed me to work even harder, especially as I was going into an industry where I’d never worked before.”
Her approach? “I just tried to put myself in the shoes of any visitor and work out what it is that I would look for and what I would want to see and do.”
A new challenge
With that project successfully behind her, Hashimah was invited to take up the role of Secretary for SUHAKAM in June 2008.
“I have a strong background in financial management, as well as organisational management, so when I looked into SUHAKAM I saw that I could make a positive contribution and help improve the organisation. That was my motivation,” she says.
One issue she identified early on was that a lack of career pathways for staff, leading to regular turnover of experienced SUHAKAM officers.
“When there is a high turnover of staff, you lose a great deal of knowledge and skills. You also lose the investment that you put into your staff through training and other support,” Hashimah says.
“To be focused and successful as an organisation, we can’t afford to go down this path. You have to be stable in order to move forward.”
Capacity assessment
Not long after she took up her post, SUHAKAM took part in a new capacity assessment program, organised jointly by the APF and the United Nations Development Program, which aims to support national human rights institutions consider steps they can take to be more effective.
“It was a very useful tool for us because it’s a self assessment process and it helped all of us, including the officers, to really analyse what we are doing and what we want to achieve as an organisation.”
“We realised we needed a strong strategic plan to guide our work, we needed to create an environment that motivates and inspires our officers and we needed to define the terms of reference between the Commissioners and the officers so they can prioritise their work.”
According to Hashimah, the final report developed through the capacity assessment project has provided SUHAKAM with a number of clear and concrete steps to address these issues.
“We’re currently developing a three year strategic plan, which I hope will be finalised by January,” she says.
“We have a new group of Commissioners who will begin their terms around that time. It will be up to them to expand or repriortise this plan, but at least we will come to them with a clear and focused direction for the organisation and our human rights work.”
Vision
Hashimah has a clear vision of what she hopes SUHAKAM will be able to achieve by the end of this three year period.
“I would hope that we will have a consistent, knowledgeable and experienced group of officers in the organisation, who continue to be committed to the work of promoting and protecting human rights,” she says.
“I also hope SUHAKAM will be operating more effectively and achieving more, in terms of our recommendations to the Government and the Parliament, and in terms of building a cooperative relationship with civil society, where they can give us their ideas and contribute to our policy making.”
In the midst of all this change, Hashimah says she has valued the opportunity to meet and talk with the organisational heads of national human rights institutions in other parts of the region, as part of the APF’s Senior Executive Officers Network.
“National human rights institutions are unique, both in the role they play and how they function,” she said. “It’s been very useful to be able to talk with people in the same position, discuss issues we have in common and learn from their experiences.”
