Fighting for Human Rights

Paul Gready, Paul Gready

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134381111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a world that is increasingly disillusioned with formal politics, people are no longer prepared to wait for governments and international institutions to act on human rights concerns. This book identifies activism as a key means of realizing human rights and as a new form of politics. Fighting for Human Rights documents and compares successful high profile campaigns to cancel debt in the developing world, ban landmines and set up the International Criminal Court as well as emerging campaigns that focus on HIV/AIDS, environmental justice, democratization and blood diamonds.

1 Human rights and global civil society

On the law of unintended effects

Richard Falk

The rise of human rights

From the time international human rights became a topic of interest in the years following World War II, civil society was integral to the process, although global civil society was not even an imaginary in this early period. As time passed, and grassroots struggles to promote human rights deepened and widened, an impetus toward transnational collaboration evolved, and from this dynamic, in conjunction with some related civic initiatives associated with environmental activism, feminism, global economic justice, and, more recently, anti-globalization and anti-war militancy, there has emerged a historically significant social construction that can be duly named “global civil society” (Colas 2002; Edwards forthcoming; Lipschutz 1992; Kaldor 2003; Keane 1998). This chapter seeks to narrate the interplay of human rights and global civil society by depicting certain peaks and valleys that help shape our current understanding about how best to advance the international protection of human rights in the early twenty-first century.

There is an assumption that guides this inquiry to the effect that major geopolitical turning-points, such as the end of World War II, the Cold War and its abrupt ending, a decade of transition in the 1990s and the aftermath of the September 11 mega-terrorist attacks on the United States, bear strongly and distinctively on the pursuit of human rights. Attention will be given to how these shifts in the overall global setting seem to alter the outlook and priorities of state actors, international institutions and civil society actors. Global civil society provides multiple arenas within which creative perspectives on the future of world order are being fashioned, and offers a principal source of resistance to present trends toward global dominance associated with American behavior since 1989, but especially in the course of the presidency of George W. Bush (Broad 2002). The challenge confronting global civil society, at present, is to revive the forward momentum of the 1990s in the altered political setting of a global war against terrorism and an American political leadership that throws its weight around unilaterally, while opportunistically conflating “human rights” with the spread of universally valid “American values” by coercive means, as necessary.¹

But even aside from this issue of American dominance, the attitude of civil society actors toward human rights was complex from the beginning, and included some concerns. In the Cold War setting, leftist outlooks were suspicious of some prominent Western human rights groups that seemed to use their influence to mount anti-Soviet propaganda. At the same time, in the 1980s, civil society was the main force behind the European movement to promote détente-from-below, essentially a formidable movement for peace and human rights that innovatively linked activists in Western Europe with those in Eastern Europe (Kaldor et al. 1989). More problematic were the grassroots concerns throughout the South that human rights NGOs in the North did not regard economic and social rights with nearly the legal gravitas associated with civil and political rights, nor did they devote their resources or energies to such issues.²

A further set of concerns have been associated with recourse to “humanitarian intervention” in the years since the end of the Cold War. There was a certain skepticism among countries of the South that humanitarian pretensions were a pretext for a post-colonial reassertion of Western control. This concern mounted in 1999 when a NATO coalition, directed from Washington, bypassed the UN Security Council to avoid a veto by China and Russia, to conduct the Kosovo War, which was undertaken to save the Albanian Kosovars from the prospect of imminent ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbs, and in response to human rights atrocities attributed to the Serb rulers of Kosovo (Independent International Commission on Kosovo 2000). Civil society opposition to “humanitarian intervention” undertaken without a UN mandate reached a climax during the pre-war debate on Iraq policy, and was not assuaged by further evidence of oppressive practices of the Baghdad regime uncovered after the war. Especially in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the US government vigorously claimed that it had liberated the Iraqi people from an abusive government, even insisting that this rescue served as a sufficient justification for the war, an argument given added weight by Washington in view of its awkward failure to produce any proof that Iraq, in fact, possessed weapons of mass destruction. Recalling the Iraq threat associated with this weaponry provided the principal pre-war rationale for the war, argued with special vigor by the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in the course of the Security Council debate. Those who had opposed such a war all along as dangerous and illegal have become even more dubious about entrusting leading states, and particularly the United States, with the authority to wage wars for humanitarian goals (Chomsky 1999). There remains ambiguity because the UN and governing elites and citizenry of certain countries facing catastrophe call upon the United States to lead peacekeeping efforts, as in Liberia during the summer of 2003.

At this point, civil society, while not formally united on these issues, is overwhelmingly and militantly opposed to relying on human rights justifications for recourse to a war that lacks a Security Council mandate and seems inconsistent with international law on the use of force.³

These issues are complex, multi-dimensional and contested. The United States during the 1990s was often faulted for doing too little on behalf of vulnerable peoples, being especially criticized for its abrupt withdrawal from Somalia after encountering warlord resistance to its presence, its opposition to UN efforts to prevent, or at least mitigate, genocide in Rwanda during 1994, and its refusal to fund or authorize an adequate UN mission and capability in Bosnia to cope with ongoing Serb ethnic cleansing. The responsibilities of the UN system and the United States as global leader have not been clearly defined or agreed upon, and tend to shift from context to context (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001; Wheeler 2000). Since the Bush presidency, the issue has been further confused by the initial expressions indicating US reservations about the humanitarian diplomacy of the Clinton years, and the post-September 11 enthusiasm in Washington for the spread of American values to the furthest reaches of the planet, including the provisional acceptance of huge state-building projects in the shattered societies of Afghanistan and Iraq. There are widespread doubts as to whether the United States is prepared to pay the costs of such reconstructive efforts in Afghanistan, and even in Iraq there are growing concerns about the American willingness and capacity to restore Iraq to conditions of political normalcy. But the problems of sub-Saharan Africa still seem to place a premium on the willingness of the North and the UN, including the United States, to undertake humanitarian interventions to prevent dire suffering on a massive scale.

One of the persisting legacies of the 1990s was the expansion of the human rights agenda to encompass several high-profile topics additional to the development of an international law framework based on human rights norms and their implementation (Steiner and Alston 2000; also Falk 2000). Among these concerns were the inclusion of “international humanitarian law of war” (Geneva Conventions and Protocols and the customary law of war), individual criminal accountability for official wrongdoing (the Pinochet litigation), redress of historic grievances and, more controversially, humanitarian intervention (Barkan 2000; Minow 1998; Thompson 2002). This more comprehensive understanding of international human rights significantly reflects the success of civil society actors in promoting a multi-dimensional global justice movement, acting both as an innovative locus of agency in international life and in creative collaboration with socially minded governments (Keck and Sikkink 1998; also Risse et al. 1999). But this success seemed, in part, a reflection of the geopolitical pause that was occasioned by the end of the Cold War, producing a ferocious backlash among American neoconservatives that long before the al-Qaeda attacks succeeded in reestablishing the primacy of “power politics” and a related preoccupation with global security issues as a result of George W. Bush's contested, yet operative, electoral victory in the 2000 elections (Project for a New American Century 2000). Whether this shift in the global policy climate is a temporary aberration or represents a more enduring return to the more habitual structures of power and authority relating to the control of human behavior is impossible to anticipate at this point. But the resolution of this uncertainty is central to the assessment of whether human rights will again flourish in the years ahead, and how civil society will pursue human rights in this altered atmosphere. As of late 2003, defensive concerns about the abridgement of domestic liberties and fears of a global fascist future are dominating the efforts of human rights activists, especially in the United States (Falk 2003a; Leone and Anrig 2003).

The demise of Westphalia: the escape of the human rights genie

Ideas matter, but not necessarily or automatically, and certainly not often in the manner expected by the original proponent. The launch of “self-determination” by Woodrow Wilson in the setting of the peace settlement after World War I surely helped subvert the world colonial order by changing the calculus of legitimacy as between the status quo and its opponents (Danspreckgruber with Watts 1997). And yet Wilson had no such intention, seeking mainly to influence the shape of political communities emerging out of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, arguably with the rather cynical objective of discouraging the expansion of European colonialism in the Middle East at the expense of emerging American global interests. That the ethos of self-determination would go on to have such a tempestuous journey was due to many factors, mostly unforeseen, including the rising nationalism of the non-Western world, the weakening of the colonial order brought about by the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, and evolving political support for a consensual and humane relationship between governmental authority and the territorial society.

Human rights has had a comparable journey, and indeed has partially, although ambiguously, incorporated the self-determination idea.⁴ When World War II ended there were somewhat opposed political imperatives: the overriding structural imperative was to establish order on the basis of sovereign states treated as black boxes not to be opened, whereas a parallel strong ethical imperative was to project a future world order in which oppressive regimes would not be free to hide behind the walls of sovereignty while abusing their citizenry in the extreme manner associated with the Nazi experience. To pursue this latter goal seemed to require some sort of commitment with respect to the internal relations between state and society, an undertaking at variance with Westphalian pretensions of unconditional sovereignty (Booth 1995; also Falk 2002a). It was in this contested and ill-defined space between piety and interventionism that international human rights was formally launched as a doctrinal reality through the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN General Assembly. This document encapsulated the prevailing moral wisdom of the 1940s about the humane treatment of individuals, especially with respect to state/society relations. The UDHR combines a series of minimal specific standards of respect for human dignity with rather grand aspirations for a world order that is dedicated to meeting the material needs of every person on the planet (see especially Articles 25 and 28 of the UDHR). But the idea of compliance, and enforcement, are nowhere to be found in the document.

And what was to be found in the world was not reassuring about the prospects for voluntary compliance and self-enforcement. Many of the states that joined in support of the Declaration were organized on bases that flagrantly contradicted the fundamental premises of rights for individual citizens. The liberal democracies of the West that were more or less in compliance were themselves not ready to waive their sovereign rights, and winked at the hypocrisy of including the Soviet bloc states and the various authoritarian states scattered around the non-Western world in 1948. Intriguingly, the UDHR would never have been accepted even as “a declaration” if it has pretended to be a framework of enforceable rights. What made it politically acceptable was precisely its unenforceability, which was consistent with the Westphalian ideology of world order.

It is against this background that civil society emerged, some of its most energetic representatives taking seriously the obligation of governments to uphold the standards embedded in the UDHR, and to give those standards greater specificity, political support and a higher status as legal claims. What followed is the now familiar proliferation of human rights instruments addressing in greater detail certain issue areas that were treated vaguely in the declaration, such as racial discrimination, the rights of women and children, and the treatment of refugees (Weston et al. 1997: 368–670). At the same time, the framework of the UDHR was split into the two covenants, acknowledging a difference between “civil and political rights” and “economic, social and cultural rights.” Both covenants were concluded in 1966, and have now been widely ratified by states throughout the world. The influence of civil society actors in this process is difficult to assess with precision, but the pressure for elaboration and implementation was mounted by important transnational human rights organizations, often focusing on a single issue of wrongdoing. For many years, Amnesty International concentrated almost all of its energies on seeking the release from confinement of “prisoners of conscience” and on inducing governments to end their reliance on torture. Without this pressure emanating from civil society, it is quite likely that human rights would have never overcome their marginality, being largely dismissed as either a display of moral sentimentality or the output of opposed Cold War propaganda machines.⁵

This dynamic of strengthening the global regime of human rights reached its climax at the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights and Development held in Vienna, and also the related conferences on population and women in 1994 and 1995, as well as the Social Summit held in Copenhagen in 1995. On each occasion there were several elements present: a high-profile civil society presence capable of gaining media attention and of providing information and guidance to weaker and poorer governmental participants; an atmosphere where the relevance of human rights was taken for granted as part of the inter-governmental undertaking; and a tension and interaction between the formal governmental proceedings and the civil society policy agenda. These UN conferences became vibrant occasions for the practice of an incipient global democracy during the 1990s, and were accordingly terminated by leading states threatened both by the subversion of Westphalian authority structures and the corresponding emergence of global civil society.⁶

The enhanced stature of international human rights contributed to two historically significant moves that seemed to cast aside Westphalian deference to the authority of oppressive states. The first of these was a kind of Faustian Bargain struck with the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, the Helsinki Accords, which exchanged the stabilization of the borders of East Europe, a high priority for Moscow, for a commitment to monitor through annual hearings and reports adherence to ...