The International Human Rights Movement

A History

Aryeh Neier

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691200996
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti umani

A fascinating history of the international human rights movement as seen by one of its founders During the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in struggles against totalitarian regimes and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement, Aryeh Neier—a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement—offers a comprehensive, authoritative account of this global force, from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its essential place in world affairs today. Neier combines analysis with personal experience, and gives an insider's perspective on the movement's goals, the disputes about its mission, its rise to international importance, and the challenges to come. This updated edition includes a new preface by the author.

1

The Movement

ON THE MORNING OF JULY 15, 2009, NATALYA ESTEMIROVA, A 50-year-old researcher for the Russian human rights organization Memorial and former history teacher who had systematically reported on torture, disappearances, and murders in her native Chechnya for nearly two decades, was abducted as she left her home in Grozny and forced into a car. Her bullet-riddled body was found later by the side of a road. She had become a victim of just the kind of crime that she had so often documented.

For a brief period, the murder of Estemirova was an important news item worldwide. Few outside Russia had even known her name, but a great many now recognized that her death would have serious consequences. Chechnya has a well-earned reputation as a very dangerous place. An unusually large number of journalists, humanitarian workers, and human rights researchers have lost their lives there in the past two decades. Members of professions used to working in some of the world’s most dangerous places have learned to avoid Chechnya. Memorial’s researchers, led by Estemirova, were virtually alone by the time of her murder in keeping the world informed about the ongoing violent abuses of human rights in the territory. Would even Memorial be able to sustain that reporting after her death? “A question hangs over her execution, the most recent in a series of killings of those still willing to chronicle Chechnya’s horrors,” wrote a New York Times reporter, who described her as “both a trusted source and friend.” Is the accounting of the human toll now over? “Without her, will Chechnya become, like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, a place where no one risks asking hard questions openly?”¹

Though the murder of Natalya Estemirova soon disappeared from news accounts, overtaken by other outrages, among those who paid particular attention to her death and remembered it were thousands of men and women in all parts of the world who do similar work in their own communities. Though only a relatively small number investigate human rights abuses in places as dangerous as Chechnya, a significant number take the risk that they may suffer some form of reprisal: a threat, harassment by officials, a libel suit, an arrest, an assault, or perhaps an attack on a parent or a child. Murder is unusual—though there are a number of cases every year—because it focuses more attention on those intent on silencing their critics. Yet everyone taking on responsibilities like those of Estemirova is aware that it is a possibility.

The international human right movement is made up of men and women who gather information on rights abuses, lawyers and others who advocate for the protection of rights, medical personnel who specialize in the treatment and care of victims, and the much larger number of persons who support these efforts financially and, often, by such means as circulating human rights information, writing letters, taking part in demonstrations, and forming, joining, and managing rights organizations. They are united by their commitment to promote fundamental human rights for all, everywhere. In the period since the end of World War II those rights have been recognized in such international agreements as the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in a host of global and regional treaties. There is widespread agreement among those who identify themselves with the international human rights movement that the fundamental rights to which they are committed include a prohibition on the arbitrary or invidious deprivation of life or liberty; a prohibition on state interference with the right of all to express themselves freely and peaceably by speech, publication, assembly, or worship; the right of all to equal treatment and equal opportunity regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or gender; and a prohibition on such cruelties as torture.

Though identifying with the international human rights movement, many of its adherents may know little or nothing about those promoting the same cause in distant places or even in parts of the world that are relatively close at hand. Even so, a large number recognize that they are part of a struggle that is under way in many places and draw strength from their awareness that they are participants in a movement that does not have boundaries, that is likely to endure, and that values their contributions.

The foremost means of advancing the cause of the international human rights movement that has emerged in the past few decades is the gathering and dissemination of detailed and reliable information on violations of human rights wherever they may occur, including in such places as Chechnya. Information is the lifeblood of the movement. Without knowing her, others in the human rights movement in places remote from Chechnya counted on Estemirova. In turn, she counted on them. Despite the danger, she did what she did every day out of a sense of responsibility to the victims of the crimes she documented; to others in Chechnya, who were the families, friends, and fellow citizens of the victims; to her colleagues in Memorial, who looked to her for information on one of the most dangerous places in Russia; and to her counterparts in the human rights movement worldwide, whose strength as a movement depends on the courage of those like Natalya Estemirova who risk their lives carrying out their self-imposed duties.

The emergence of the international human rights movement as a force in world affairs starting in the late 1970s is not attributable to a single cause. A confluence of unrelated events in different parts of the world that took on added significance because of the Cold War helped to inspire many people to commit themselves to organized efforts to advance the cause. Among those events were the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, led by General Augusto Pinochet, and subsequent international outrage at the cruelties committed by the Chilean armed forces under his leadership and at the role of President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in supporting the Pinochet coup; the forced resignation of President Nixon from the most powerful post in the world in August 1974 because of his abuses of the rights of Americans; the adoption of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975—an East-West peace agreement with provisions calling for respect for human rights—and, much more important, the establishment soon thereafter of the Moscow Helsinki Group to monitor its human rights provisions. The formation of this group demonstrated that a spark of commitment to rights was alive at the heart of a totalitarian empire. Soviet authorities, however, responded swiftly by imprisoning most Helsinki Group members. Other events contributing to the advent of the human rights movement were the Soweto riots of 1976 and the murder, not long thereafter, of the young black African leader Steve Biko, which turned the spotlight of international attention on the denial of rights in apartheid South Africa; the advent of Jimmy Carter as president of the United States in 1977 and his decision in the wake of the ignominious end to the war in Vietnam to make human rights the basis for a new moral component within American foreign policy; the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International later in 1977, which gave added prominence to a pioneering human rights organization that had taken great care to be even-handed in denouncing abuses by governments of opposing geopolitical alignments and helped it to attract a global membership that today numbers in the millions; and the emergence of the Democracy Wall movement in China in 1978, evidence that even Chairman Mao’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, had not extinguished a concern for human rights in another totalitarian state that had, for an extended period, largely isolated itself from the rest of the world.

Like so much else in the Cold War era, many of the 1970s events that led to the emergence of the contemporary human rights movement attracted attention because of their apparent connection to the Cold War struggle. In addition, that context seemed to create links between these events that might otherwise have escaped notice. Resistance to communist and anticommunist tyrannies—sometimes simultaneously and sometimes not—became a defining characteristic of the movement in the years during which it rose to prominence.

The historian Samuel Moyn argues that the failure of the ideologies that lay behind those tyrannies is itself a reason for the emergence of the movement. “The ideological ascendancy of human rights in living memory came out of a combination of separate histories that interacted in an unforeseeable explosion,” he has written. “Accident played a role as it does in all human events, but what mattered most of all was the collapse of prior universalistic schemes, and the construction of human rights as a persuasive alternative to them.”² This view seems mistaken in likening the human rights cause itself to a universalistic scheme, implying that it includes a vision for the organization of society. It does not. On the other hand, Moyn is correct in suggesting that the emergence of the movement was aided by widespread disillusionment with other universalistic schemes. It did not provide an alternative to them, but it did highlight their shortcomings. And in so doing it contributed to their demise.

The emergence of the human rights movement in the 1970s, particularly in the United States, is also due in part to changes in the role of the press that began a decade or so earlier. Up until the Vietnam War, journalists had generally covered armed conflicts as partisans for their own side. During World War II, for example, British and American correspondents who reported on the Allied forces wore military uniforms.³ In Vietnam, however, many Western journalists—clad as civilians—questioned the conduct of military operations and, in the United States and elsewhere, helped to create public doubts about the war. Some of the American press skepticism about their own government reflected the experience of a number of journalists in Vietnam who had previously reported on the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and the early 1960s in the South. They had witnessed and reported critically on the performance of state and local law enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they were not ready now to accept on faith what they were told by military commanders in Vietnam. Their approach to their craft was also manifest in the way that the press at home covered the Johnson and Nixon administrations. It reached its apogee with the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” by the New York Times and the Washington Post and the reporting on Watergate by the Post that played a critical role in the forced resignation of Nixon as president in 1974. A new branch of the profession, “investigative journalism,” was born. Its targets soon included American participation in the coup in Chile and American involvement in human rights abuses in Latin America and in other parts of the world, such as the role of major corporations in South Africa. One of the early manifestations of the emergence of an American human rights movement was the divestment campaign on college campuses. It led to debates in many institutions across the country about whether their portfolios should include the stocks of companies that did business in the apartheid state and reflected the growing view that Americans shared in responsibility for human rights abuses in other countries.

Interaction between the press and the nongovernmental human rights movement has been an important element in the rise of the movement in many countries. Activists have promoted their cause by seeking media attention for rights abuses, and media exposure of violations and of those responsible for their commission has played an essential role in ending abuse. Simultaneously, in an era in which journalists see themselves in an investigative role, they themselves have taken part in the discovery of abuses and in the identification of those responsible. Often, they look to human rights activists as good sources for information in pursuing their own investigations. The New York Times reporter who wrote about the murder of Natalya Estemirova and described her as “both a trusted source and a friend” is typical of many journalists working in territories where it is difficult or dangerous to gather information. He established contact with someone on the scene who was ferreting out just the sort of data that he needed for his reporting, and no doubt she gladly collaborated with him because it was her best means to shine a spotlight on abuses that she had no other means to curb. In many places journalists and human rights activists have formed such symbiotic relationships. A shared sense that they could themselves become the targets of abuse has fostered their alliance. The consequent sharp increase in public awareness of human rights plays a leading role in the story of the rise of the contemporary movement and its influence.

Yet another factor contributing to the emergence of the movement has been the information revolution. As the most important present-day means of protecting human rights is the investigation of abuses, the efficient and rapid dissemination of reports on those abuses is essential. The rise of today’s movement took place during a period in which there was also rapid improvement in the ability to transmit information speedily and across borders. This has given the rights movement the ability to become aware of abuses as they take place and to respond instantly.

Today, organized efforts to promote human rights have taken root in most countries of the world. The principal exceptions are a relatively small number of the most repressive countries on earth, including North Korea, Burma, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan, where the authorities will not tolerate the emergence of such organizations. These are also places where it is not possible to engage in investigative journalism. However, in many cities and provincial towns in countries as diverse as Brazil, Russia, India, and Nigeria, local human rights organizations have formed to tackle such issues as police violence, the abuse of persons in detention, and denials of the freedom of expression, as well as other manifestations of official lawlessness. Despite harassment and repression, human rights organizations were active in all those Arab countries that saw political upheavals in 2011 and played an important role in articulating the grievances that led to demands for changes. The movement in such countries often lacks cohesion and a national structure, but it is not short of energy and, over time, it has grown in the sophistication of its methods and in its effectiveness. The extent to which the movement has matured in these regions, and the degree to which it is focused on matters that are universally recognized as core human rights concerns seem to refute the argument that human rights is a Western construct of limited application in other parts of the world. If all restraints on activities to promote human rights were suddenly eliminated in China, there is little doubt that an extensive human rights movement reaching into nearly every corner of that vast country would materialize almost overnight. In fact, wherever abuses are prevalent and mobilization is at least tolerated by the state, the chances are that the human rights movement has established itself.

It is the thesis of this book that the driving force behind the protection of human rights worldwide, today and for roughly the past forty-five years, has been the nongovernmental human rights movement. Of course, the development of international law and the establishment of international institutions to protect rights is an essential part of the history, and this will be discussed as well. But the emphasis here is on another part of the story, one that has received much less attention elsewhere. Intermittently during the last two and a half centuries, citizens’ movements did play important roles in efforts to promote human rights, as during the development of the antislavery movement in England in the eighteenth century and the rise of the feminist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century. The movement that has emerged since the mid-1970s, however, differs from its precursors in that it is global both in its constituency and in its concerns. It has enlisted far larger numbers of adherents than previously, and their efforts involve literally thousands of organizations that though diverse politically, structurally, and stylistically, and operating separately from one another, nevertheless share a sense of being part of one movement. There is little or no prospect that this movement will fade away or decline significantly when it achieves a particular goal, as happened, for example, to the feminist movement for nearly half a century after it won women’s suffrage. The contemporary human rights movement responds to victories and defeats by shifting focus from time to time, but it shows signs that it will remain an enduring force in world affairs.

Some accounts of the development of international norms and mechanisms for the protection of human rights suggest that this was a natural development growing out of certain religious and philosophical traditions, or that it was a consequence of historical developments that led states to agree on measures that restrain their authority. What is often missing from the analysis is the part played by those outside of government who cared deeply about particular violations of rights and, by making common cause with like-minded others, effectively required governments and intergovernmental bodies to protect rights. Efforts by those outside governments have been particularly important in extending the protection of rights beyond national boundaries, and it is in the present era that they have been most significant. While governments themselves played the leading role in the adoption of previous treaties to protect rights, it is widely recognized that such recent international agreements as the 1997 Treaty to Ban Landmines and the 1998 Rome Treaty that established the International Criminal Court were direct consequences of campaigns by nongovernmental organizations. Governments had to agree to these treaties, but the impetus for them came from citizens’ movements. The role of the nongovernmental movement is even more important in exposing abuses of rights and in mobilizing efforts to secure remedies and redress.

Most of the principal U.S.–based organizations concerned with human rights internationally—Helsinki Watch (which became Human Rights Watch), the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights (which became Human Rights First), the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Human Rights Law Group (which became Global Rights), Physicians for Human Rights—were formed in the late 1970s or at the beginning of the 1980s. At about the same time human rights associations organized on a national basis were established from El Salvador to Algeria to South Africa to Poland to the Philippines, and in many other countries in between.

There were much older bodies, of course. By far the most important was Amnesty International, established in 1961, whose selection for the Peace Prize by the Nobel Committee in 1977 was a landmark in the recognition of today’s international human rights movement. Going back even further, a small U.S.–based group, the International League for Human Rights, was formed during World War II at about the time that a commitment to promote human rights was being developed for incorporation in the United Nations Charter. The roots of the International League go back to an organization to promote rights established in France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus case of the 1890s and an international federation to protect rights, also based in France, that was launched in the early 1920s. Though subsequently eclipsed by other groups, the early participants in those organizations played an important role for a time as voices for human rights at the United Nations and had an impact both on the norms that were established in a number of agreements on rights adopted by the world body and on the development of its machinery for addressing rights issues. Yet the adherents of such early groups—and of an even earlier organization, the London-based Anti-Slavery Society (still in operation as Anti-Slavery International), which goes back to the 1820s—probably did not see themselves as part of a global movement. Rather, they were a small specialized lobby concerned with such matters as, in the case of Amnesty, freeing an individual who had been unjustly imprisoned for reasons of conscience or stopping a particular prisoner from being tortured. Such efforts remain an essential component of the mission of today’s movement, in which Amnesty—with scores of national sections and close to three million dues-paying members—plays an important part. But campaigns to protect individual victims of abuse do not constitute the sum and substance of the present-day human rights movement. Today’s movement regularly addresses broad issues of public policy that affect the rights of large sectors of the population.

A characteristic that distinguishes the movement that began to take shape in the late 1970s from what went before is that it has enlisted individuals such as Natalya Estemirova in places far from the headquarters of the United Nations and far from Western capitals such as London or Paris; and that those active in it have a strong sense of belonging to a global movement. An essential part of the work of contemporary human rights organizations operating at both the local and national levels is making their concerns and their findings about particular abuses of rights known to those active in international rights efforts. Similarly, organizations operating internationally seek relations with local human rights activists in the countries on which their work focuses. Though they may have little in common linguistically, culturally, or politically, a great many of the millions of persons worldwide who consider themselves human rights activists feel a kinship and seek ties to others within the movement. This helps them to overcome the often well-founded fear of many activists in repressive countries that they themselves may suffer reprisals at the hands of abusive officials.

Prior to the 1970s, the role of the United States in the development of the international human rights movement was not substantial. Both France and England played far more significant roles internationally. As mentioned, the organized movement got under way in France in the 1890s as an outgrowth of the Dreyfus case. It gained momentum following World War I with the establishment of the Fédération International des Droits de l’Homme in 1922 and again with that ...