The Backlash against Human Rights

Remarks by Andrew Gilmour, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights

Dublin
24 November 2017

The following is a transcript of remarks made by Assistant Secretary-General Gilmour at an event organized by the Institute of International and European Affairs, Dublin

I’m assuming that - given my rather lugubrious choice of title for today, “The Backlash against Human Rights”, which contains its own spoiler alert (I mean it’s not exactly “whither human rights - forwards or backwards?) - I’m assuming that nobody here dropped in for a shot in the arm of optimism to start Thanksgiving weekend with…

Before getting to today’s backlash, perhaps I could give a short, subjective and slightly simplistic history of human rights over the past century, to help explain how we got here.

Recent history of human rights

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights came after the horrors of world war and genocide, as well as the Great Depression.  So it was designed to reflect the entire spectrum of rights: civil, political, social, economic and cultural.  But the Cold War had the effect of significantly dampening the new human rights spirit, as well as dividing many of its remaining adherents into advocates either of negative civil-political rights, or else positive socio-economic ones - but all too rarely both at the same time.  

But by the late 70s, things were starting to change.  As a student member of Amnesty in 1979, I remember being assigned two prisoners of conscience, representing both sides of the Cold War.  One a Soviet dissident condemned to a psychiatric ward in the Gulag; the other a Jehovah’s Witness imprisoned by the Greek “colonels” for being a conscientious objector.  But within a decade, both sets of repressive regimes had disappeared - both the right-wing dictators of Latin America, Greece and elsewhere, as well as the Warsaw Pact regimes.  The result was a flowering of rights in many parts of the world, the ending of several proxy wars, and an advance of rights and liberties on a whole range of issues.

This lasted over two decades, until the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 checked the progress, as many rights seemed to go into abeyance as several nations focused on counter-terrorism.  The actual backlash against human rights seemed to kick from about 2012, but it’s not possible to give a precise date.

So that’s the backdrop to the backlash. Next I’d like to demonstrate what I think the backlash actually looks like.  And after that, I will suggest some ways to resist the backlash. But - second spoiler alert here - I’m not optimistic that you will consider my suggested solutions to be commensurate with the scale of the problem.

What the backlash looks like

Let’s start with Europe.  Hardly the worst place, but obviously the closest.

Hungary and Poland are two countries where fellow Europeans and we have serious concerns about the growing authoritarianism, “illiberal democracy”, and a general push-back against rights and minorities. 

Then there’s the rise of the far-right in many countries.  Yes, Marine Le Pen lost to Macron.  But she still got 10.5 million votes, and the concerns of her supporters are still very much alive.  There are also issues with the far-right in Germany and Austria.

And we can hardly claim that in our collective response to the migrants and refugees that this has been Europe’s finest hour (coming on top of longer-term issues of discrimination, such as against the Roma) – though I would like to pay tribute to Chancellor Merkel’s leadership and generosity when it came to welcoming refugees in 2015.  We find particularly shocking the treatment of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Libya – those who have been intercepted are then handed back to Libyan authorities (assisted by the EU) and condemned to truly unspeakable conditions of detention.  And you may have seen the recent footage of the slave auctions in Libya.

While just across the Irish Sea, we have a nation in self-inflicted turmoil, involving threats to many things - including rights. Last June, in election campaign mode, Prime Minister Teresa May called for human rights laws to be overturned if they were to “get in the way” of the fight against terrorism. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid, rightly said, those remarks were “highly regrettable, a gift from a major Western leader to every authoritarian figure around the world who shamelessly violates human rights under the pretext of fighting terrorism”. Then we have the national disgrace known as the British tabloids, whipping up hatred of foreigners, Muslims, judges, liberals, even Conservative MPs who don’t support Brexit.

Anyway, that’s Europe — where in fact human rights are actually closer to the heart of political debate than in any other region in the world.

Let us look westwards now.  We had eight years of a US administration, which put human rights forward in a way that none of its predecessors had done, while encouraging the UN also to be active in this field.  That is no longer the case.  Now we have an administration where very senior figures say that they “like torture”. Not that they might reluctantly condone it as an operational necessity. But saying that they actively like it. And getting cheered for saying so. There are attacks on the press (“the mainstream media”), the judiciary, transgender people, international institutions, Mexicans (vilified with absolutely no evidence as being more likely to commit crimes than US citizens), and Muslims. There is continuous police violence against African-Americans, and an astonishing number of Americans behind bars: 2.4 million. Until last year, there was a budding bipartisan consensus that prison numbers should be reduced. But the new Attorney-General is strongly in favor of minimum mandatory sentences, which seems to make it unlikely that the number will come down.

Turning to the Middle East.  This June saw the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war, the start of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and a half-century of sustained and systematic denial of virtually every single human right spelled out in the Universal Declaration - the entire gamut of rights. In Syria, half a million people have been killed, 11 million displaced, atrocities and torture on a truly epic scale - both in numbers and the savagery employed - chemical weapons, barrel bombs, deliberate starvation by siege.  

In Yemen, a coalition of countries, supported by key Western allies, have bombed civilians for nearly three years and created one of the largest ever man-made humanitarian crises ever recorded, with millions threatened with starvation and cholera, as a result of blockade of ports.

Turkey has taken a turn for the worse - tens of thousands of people a have been arrested on the flimsiest charges imaginable, following the attempted coup of last summer, and there has been severe repression in numerous other ways, while the situation in the south-east of the country, in the country’s Kurdish areas, is serious cause of concern.

And then there’s Egypt, where the arbitrary arrests, levels of torture, and mass sentencing of prisoners to death is appalling, even if there is indeed the backdrop of a brutal campaign of terrorism in Sinai.

I won’t go through the whole world.  But I would just mention another point that’s very evident at the UN: the political, economic and military rise of China, and the growing assertiveness of Russia.  Yet the outward confidence of these countries appears strikingly at odds with the attitudes they show towards a free press, human rights defenders, an independent civil society and the global human rights agenda, all of which seem to be treated as mortal threats to be throttled.  

Now all that is my not very uplifting and very partial global survey of human rights today.

How the backlash is manifested

So how is the backlash actually manifested?  Well in many ways, and I will mention some of them.

1.   Civil society.   Many countries have passed harsh laws preventing the financing and functioning of NGOs, especially human rights NGOs.  This is a very serious problem that I will mention again.

2.   Reprisals against human rights defenders, which is a particular interest of mine, where I have some role in trying to mitigate this (and Ireland is extremely helpful in supporting that mandate). Two months ago, I presented this issue to the Human Rights Council, and - with apologies for quoting myself - told them “It is frankly nothing short of abhorrent that, year after year, we are compelled to present cases of intimidation and reprisals carried out against people whose crime - in the eyes of their governments - was to cooperate with UN institutions...  We should see these individuals as the canary in the coalmine, bravely singing until they are silenced by this toxic backlash against people, rights, and dignity - as a dark warning to us all.”  I will mention one case to illustrate this troubling phenomenon.  In September, Ibrahim Metwally – head of an Egyptian NGO for Enforced Disappearances - that he had set up following the loss of his own son (presumably to the security forces) was himself arrested on his way to Geneva where he was supposed to meet a UN body, on some charge of “terrorism”, and we are very concerned that he too may been badly tortured.  

3.   Related to reprisals against defenders are attacks on UN officials and other ways of restricting us - cutting our budgets or blocking us from speaking.  Just a few days ago Agnes Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who had raised the issue of the thousands of extra-judicial killings taking place in the Philippines of petty criminals, casual drug users and innocent passers-by, was publicly threatened by President Duterte (not long after he had encouraged his troops to rape village women - though “only” of three women each) that if he met her, he would slap her. 

4.   The backlash against women rights in many countries.  Women should apparently “know their place”, and not have control over their own bodies.  We are particularly concerned about this. 

5.  The cruel scapegoating of minorities. I’ve already mentioned Europe and the US.  But it’s not only there.  The treatment of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar is a particularly repellent example. 

6.  Counter-terrorism. We see country after country pursuing what perhaps we may call the “Strelnikov school of response” - after the best scene in my all-time favourite film, Dr. Zhivago.  Zhivago tells the Red Army Commander that he’d met people whose village had been destroyed.  Strelnikov replies it was punishment for selling horses to the whites.  Zhivago tells him he’d got the wrong village.  Strelnikov shrugs and asks “What does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. The point’s made”.  Zhivago bitterly retorts, “your point, their village”.  So many countries respond to terrorism in such a brutal and bovine way that they actually create more terrorists than there were before they started fighting terrorism in the first place. Bombings of civilians, mass arrests, torture, crushing dissent and civil society and the media - all the while under the guise of “fighting terrorism”. 

7.   The tendency to depict human rights concerns as illegal outside interference in their internal affairs; or as an attempt to overthrow regimes; or as an attempt to impose alien “Western” values.  And there are other countries that may not explicitly claim those things, but who still tend to dismiss human rights as something of a luxury; something that has to wait for the great moment when conflict has been ended, when security has been restored, or when development has been achieved, but not before then. This is entirely counter to our own way of thinking, which holds that peace and indeed development cannot be achievable - and certainly aren’t sustainable - unless they are grounded in human rights. I recently challenged some members of the Security Council, objecting to human rights being discussed, and asked if they could come up with any item on their agenda, and certainly any internal conflict, which didn’t have human rights at the root of their conflict (they couldn’t, or at least didn’t). The point being that if human rights is at the root of problems (and we certainly know that it is), then it’s surely also got to be part of the solution.

What we can do to resist the backlash?

So what we can do all about all this?  I mentioned earlier that the solutions I would suggest in order to cope with it all weren’t going to measure up to the scale what I’ve just set out. But we do have a few, and I will mention them.

1.  We must support NGOs and civil society, and defend the defenders of human rights, especially those most under threat.  But we need to do so in an intelligent way, otherwise it can play into the rhetoric of various regimes who try to claim that human rights NGOs are effectively foreign agents. Frontline Defenders, based here in Dublin, is a great example of an organization that provides crucial support to the heroic defenders of human rights in the most difficult circumstances.  

2.  Speaking out.  Now one can take the view that repressive regimes and other governments who wantonly violate the rights of their citizens don’t care whether we speak out or not.  But they do.  Egypt recently reacted with extreme anger to a report of Human Rights Watch illustrating the extent of torture being carried out. And I have to say that one of the few consolations of being regularly berated by angry ambassadors - the diplomatic equivalent of being taken behind the bike-shed - after we’ve issued a report or statement that’s critical of their governments, is that they are showing by their anger and by their complaints about my colleagues and me that we have struck a nerve in calling them out. And that in fact their anger shows that they do after all feel a modicum of shame. 

3.   Economic power. Consumer boycotts of goods or tourism, especially when government representatives invoke the need to brutally repress people in order to crush terrorists so that tourists can feel safe and bring in revenue.  When this happens, shouldn’t tourists be made aware that even while they’re idyllically scuba-diving or whatever, people may be undergoing unspeakable tortures a few miles away, and that tourism is in fact being used as one of the pretexts to do it?

4.   Funding human rights.  The key phrase from the 2005 UN Summit was “there can be no peace without development, no development without peace, and neither without respect for human rights”.  And yet of the three pillars, human rights receives only 3% of the resources.  It’s important to realise that human rights doesn’t come free, or even on the cheap. If the backlash is going to be confronted, then the human rights effort is going to need resourcing.  

5.   Actions - individual and collective. It sent a great signal when German citizens went to welcome the trains carrying refugees in 2015. And when thousands of Americans flocked to airports to provide legal support and other assistance to the desperate people caught up in the “Muslim ban” last January. And the women’s marches were inspirational too.  We are going to need more of all this. 

6.    We need to better understand what we are up against. And by changing our rhetoric to show that we understand, without compromising our values, why people are now turning towards xenophobic populists.  This is crucial.  Populists are always inimical to human rights because it appears that they have a need to pinpoint scapegoats (who are usually from the most vulnerable sections of society) to blame for society’s ills. Wringing our hands isn’t enough. We all have to show better understanding of why the populists succeeding in attracting people, and we need to come up with and propose credible alternatives to address the insecurities that currently leads people to the populists.  

7.   The human rights movement, through a variety of means - including human rights education, social media, the arts - has to show how human rights benefit those who consider themselves ordinary people. Human rights isn’t just about protecting prisoners, LGBTI, persons with disabilities, migrants and refugees. Crucial though it clearly is to keep all those categories at the forefront of our concerns, we also need to show people that human rights is vital for everyone, and that it’s not just a niche topic for beleaguered minorities and out-of-touch liberals.  

Conclusions

These are all thing we can do to address the backlash, and also the fact that, in High Commissioner Zeid’s words last month, “more and more leaders no longer even pretend to care about rights, seduced as they are by the masculine posturing of power relationships.”  

I’m a historian by training, but I never subscribed to the “Whig view of history” - that society inevitably progresses towards a better state. The current backlash against human rights is real, and I don’t know if it’s a temporary blip in a march towards further progress, or a more permanent reversal. What I do know is that the backlash can only be countered - the pendulum allowed to swing back to where we want it - if all those who believe in human rights are capable of showing as much determination and guile as those who palpably don’t. 

All right, it’s Friday afternoon, I’ve gone on long enough, and I should end on a note of optimism.  After all I wouldn’t want you to leave thinking that a weekend grappling with Finnegan’s Wake would be light relief by comparison to listening to me and my unremitting gloom.

Believe it or not this has been a good week for human rights. And I’m not sure I’ve ever said that before, so I assure you it’s not something I regularly trot out.  In two words: Mladic and Mugabe.  It’s been 22 years since Srebrenica, but the architect of that genocide was convicted for this crime this week. And it’s 34 years or so since the mass killings (maybe 20,000 of them) in Matabeleland. But the man who ordered them was kicked out of office this week. The wheels of justice indeed turn slowly but (to mix the metaphor) they got their man this week. So, as I said, it’s been a good week for human rights.  

I’m a Scot.  But tonight in Dublin I’ll be drinking your variant of our national drink (and trying to figure out what that redundant ‘e’ is doing there…).  But to paraphrase Churchill in 1942: “It’s not the end.  It’s not even the beginning of the end.  But maybe it’s the end of the beginning.”  I’m talking of the struggle to contain and hopefully reverse the backlash. I will be drinking to that vision this evening.  Thank for allowing me to tell you why.

Thank you.