The limits of leniency. Analysis of the handling of misconduct in an international humanitarian organization[Les limites de la mansuétude. Analyse du traitement de la faute dans une organisation humanitaire internationale]

In the humanitarian sector, dedicated to alleviating people's suffering, how to qualify a misconduct and impose a potentially painful sanction? How can one judge, i.e. consider that everyone is responsible for their act, in a working area based on the fact that human inequalities are partly due to social determinisms? To what extent tolerating deviance is exacerbated and sentences are attenuated if not lifted? Where do the limits of the acceptable stop? To answer these questions, we focus on an organization in the humanitarian sector, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and draw on situations from the thirty missions that the authors of this article have, between them, carried out around the world for MSF since 2010, and on a body of ethnographic material collected between 2014 and 2016. From these elements, it comes out that the treatment given to misconduct within MSF leads to a first leniency, at the core of the principle of justice in a collective, the rational leniency, the result of a benefit/risk calculation aimed at protecting the group. This primary leniency is coupled with another, more specific to the humanitarian sector, the compassionate leniency, which protects the individual. We then give evidence that, at MSF, this double leniency subsides and that a misconduct is eventually qualified where an individual interest prevails over the collective one.