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Global Human Rights Leadership: Who Will Fill the Void Left by the United States?
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March 7, 2007
IntroductionJOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers,
Director of Public Affairs Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd
like to thank you for joining us.
We are delighted to welcome back Ken
Roth to our breakfast today. If you take a moment to read his c.v., it will
immediately become apparent that, as the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, he has probably done more to
bring human rights abuses to our attention than any other individual or
group.
This morning the subject of his discussion is "Global Human Rights
Leadership: Who Will Fill the Void Left by the United States?"
The
introduction to the 2007 Human
Rights Watch Report begins with a question that asks: What government is
today's champion of human rights? This year there is increased disillusionment
within Human Rights Watch, and for millions of people around the globe, as they
realize that Washington's longstanding powerful voice on behalf of victims of
human rights abuses has been diminished. Many in the global community wonder if
the country that once stood as a staunch defender of human rights has now lost
its moral compass, and they wonder, if America's credibility is on the wane,
whether declarations such as the September 2005 UN Doctrine, which embraced the responsibility
to protect people facing mass atrocities, will be more than just words on a
page, without any discernible action.
Today it so often appears that
human rights issues are vulnerable to double standards, double norms, and
arbitrary attitudes around the world. More often than not, they are regarded as
political matters, governed and dominated by power politics and self-interest.
And in the end, the main losers are not the governments, but the individual
victims of mistreatment and abuse. In the past, these individuals could look to
the United States as their champion, but with the U.S. government's use of
detention without trial and reports of interrogation and torture, this no longer
rings true. Accordingly, we might ask: Who will take the lead in this battle to
promote and protect human rights?
So often, in so many poignant ways, our
guest has been the one to bring the human rights agenda to our attention. As an
advocate for a strong public morality, he speaks about the inherent dignity of
mankind and the abuses suffered at the hands of tyrants. Believing that the
world can be a better place if you fight for what you believe in, Ken has been
steadfast in bringing to the world's attention the perils faced by political
activists, independent journalists, and ordinary citizens around the
world.
Inasmuch as human rights are daily being put to the test, in my
opinion there is no one better qualified to discuss the gap in leadership that
is apparent today. For the Carnegie Council and our guest, it has always been a
very thought-provoking morning when Ken is our speaker. I am confident that
today will be no exception.
Please join me in giving a very warm welcome
to a very unflappable and passionate voice for human rights, Ken Roth. Thank you
for coming.
RemarksKENNETH ROTH: Thank you, Joanne, for that very generous
introduction, and thank you all for braving the cold and the snow and the winds
to make it here. I guess it shows that either you are very loyal to the Council
or you are as worried as I am about the state of who is going to promote human
rights around the world.
The topic this morning is not pleasant for me.
The human rights movement is very dependent on allied governments to get things
done. Obviously, much of what we do is to investigate human rights conditions
around the world, to publicize abuses, and to shine a spotlight of shame on
governments for their human rights violations.
But we also recognize that
we need that activity supplemented by friendly and influential governments.
Traditionally, there was no one more important in that process than the U.S.
government. Now, I say that fully aware of all the warts and imperfections of
the U.S. government's own record both domestically and in its foreign policy.
And I am also aware of—and, indeed, I have probably spoken here several times
about—the double standards that Joanne mentions, about the selectivity. But that
said, the United States is, of course, the most powerful government, but also I
think it is safe to say it has paid more attention to promoting human rights
than anyone else around. So I am not happy to report the reality that I think is
also apparent to most of us, and that is that the United States has severely
damaged its credibility when it comes to promoting human rights.
Now, not
on everything. You know, we should put a caveat there first. The United States
doesn't engage in genocide, it's not running around killing massive numbers of
people; so it can protest, say, in Darfur with credibility. The United States is
not shutting down civil society, censoring newspapers, closing political
parties; so it can advocate for the protection of those freedoms and
institutions around the world.
But the United States is using torture and
inhumane treatment. It has—and, frankly, continues to—forcibly disappeared
people into secret detention facilities. It is locking people up without trial
for long periods in places like Guantánamo or in Iraq or at Bagram Air Base in
Afghanistan. And these are not small matters, I don't need to remind you. These
involve some of the most fundamental rights around.
And so it has become
effectively unthinkable for the United States to go to a government and protest
its torture or to protest its locking up of the latest dissidents without trial.
I remember meeting recently with the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and asking
him, "Do you complain about Egypt's use of torture?" He, sort of sheepishly, had
to admit, "No, I can't really." And I saw why, because I then went to meet with
the Egyptian Prime Minister and mentioned the torture problem. He kind of looked
at me and said, "Well, what do you want? That's what Bush
does." Now, we all know that that's a cheap excuse, it doesn't excuse anything
in reality, but it is a line that helps to deflect the pressure, and it makes
pressure from the United States much less real, much less forceful.
This
has left, in my view, a tremendous void on the leadership front when it comes to
enforcing human rights. It is not a void that I think is necessarily there
forever. I don't believe that America's reputation is irredeemable. But it is a
void that will be there certainly for the next two years, because it is almost
impossible for me to imagine the Bush Administration taking the steps that would
be required to begin to change America's reputation around the world. What will
be required is not only an end to the practices—stopping the torture, stopping
the detention without trial—but a real repudiation of those practices, and
ideally some form of accountability—prosecution for the worst offenses, other
forms of censure, or the like—to make clear that this is not what America stands
for. That is not going to happen under the Bush Administration.
So, at
least for the next couple of years, and possibly for longer, we are going to
face the problem of traditionally the world's foremost human rights governmental
advocate effectively not being there for many of our most serious
problems.
So what do we do? Look around the world and see who else might
lead. There are a couple of eager candidates out there. China and Russia, they
are eager to lead, but in the wrong direction.
China, which is notorious
for its "no strings attached" loans and foreign assistance, has been using its
new economic wealth to actively undermine Western pressure for, say,
transparency in Angola's finances, or for an end to the utterly self-destructive
ruling of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or, I guess in most acute form, in
Darfur, where President Hu Jintao recently visited, and while mentioning
Darfur, and encouraging perhaps that Bashir
might consider letting in the UN peacekeepers, at the same time vowed to build a
presidential palace—and, of course, the oil money continues to flow, which is
the money being used to buy the arms to kill the people in Darfur.
So
China, for reasons of economic interest, for reasons of long-term ideology—it
really does feel that these are all sovereign matters that are not the business
of the international community, in part because of a fairly narrow conception of
human rights, that focused on development but not other things, and because it
doesn't seem to see the connection between a lack of respect for civil and
political rights and the economic devastation in a place like Sudan or Zimbabwe.
Also in part, because China I think resents not having been around when many of
these treaties were adopted—of course, they were adopted when Taiwan was
considered China. So for these various reasons, there is no real eagerness to
lead in the direction we would want when it comes to China.
Similarly
Russia. I don't need to dwell on Russia. I think we are all aware that Putin is
eager to in some sense rebuild the influence that Moscow enjoyed at a time when
the Soviet Union still existed. And so he is particularly embracing, say, the
dictatorships of Central Asia. When President
Karimov of Uzbekistan slaughtered hundreds of people in Andijan, Putin was
one of the first people to embrace him, even as Europe and the United States
were backing away.
I don't have to go on here, but it is clear that there
are some powerful actors who are eager to start leading but who are not going to
be leading in the way that we would want.
Now, looking more seriously at
who might fill this leadership void, there are a number of democracies outside
of the European Union that traditionally have played important roles. I think
here about Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein in
certain cases. But the difficulty we've had is that a number of these countries
are actually fairly ambivalent these days about taking strong stands on human
rights because they fear that it will harm their relations with the Bush
Administration.
So just to give one example, about ten years ago, Canada
and Norway led the effort to create a treaty to outlaw anti-personnel landmines.
This time around, when we are beginning a very similar process to adopt a treaty
to outlaw cluster munitions, Norway has taken the lead and Canada didn't,
because Prime
Minister Harper is worried that this is something that Bush doesn't want to
happen. You find similar calculations taking place in Australia.
And so,
while we do look to a number of these governments as allies, some of their most
significant members are ambivalent about talking about the exact issues, the
exact rights abuses, where we are most in need, the ones where the Bush
Administration is most at fault. So I don't see the non-EU democracies in the
West, or the northern democracies, being sufficient.
There are in the
global south some democracies that have played a useful role. I think in
particular, say, in Latin America Mexico, Argentina, and Chile have become quite
reliable supporters of human rights, and in situations like the Human Rights
Council in Geneva are playing for the most part useful roles.
But
there is another whole group of democracies in the global south—governments like
India, South Africa, even Brazil—which have been at best inconsistent supporters
of human rights, and at worst outright opponents of human rights enforcement. So
you have the spectacle, for example, recently of South Africa voting against the
Security Council resolution on Burma, an utterly superfluous vote because Russia
and China had already vetoed it; a vote that should have been surprising
because, after all, who was a greater beneficiary of international solidarity on
human rights issues than South Africa at the time of apartheid? But memories
seem to be short, and so when another nation needs international assistance for
its severe human rights abuses, South Africa voted with the abusers.
We
are running into problems like this over and over, for various reasons. Part of
it has to do with the difficulty of African solidarity. The African bloc in UN
matters tends to vote together and tends to be led by a number of its most
abusive members, with particularly the northern African countries—Egypt,
Algeria—playing a very hostile role on human rights issues and often leading the
rest of Africa along with it.
So having done this brief tour de
raison, I'd like to come to the focus of my talk, which is the European
Union, because the truth is if you say, "Okay, the United States has effectively
disappeared for human rights enforcement purposes, who is going to take its
place?" the logical answer is the European Union. I mean, here you have 27
governments, an economy roughly the same size as the United States, similar
population, a long tradition of respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Indeed, the European Union is built around this; it has been highly successful
at bringing up the human rights standards of its newer members. This is the
logical set of nations to step forward. They have the clout. They have the
commitment in principle.
But unfortunately, as I'll outline, they don't
have the performance, because as you look at the European Union, what you see is
a government that is punching well below its weight when it comes to human
rights issues. And again, I should put a caveat on this, because the European
Union has been very good on human rights issues in the accession process,
because its odd consensus approach—meaning that anybody can veto—actually has
the effect of raising the bar on accession. You don't get in unless you get
everybody's consent. And so it has been very helpful for Romania and Bulgaria
most recently or, going back, for Poland, the Czech Republic, et
cetera.
But that same dynamic—this quest for consensus, meaning
unanimity—has the opposite effect when it comes to the projection of EU
influence outside of the immediate would-be accession countries. It is this
grappling with how do you set foreign policy with 27 independent members that is
really at the heart of the European Union's failure so far to assume the
leadership mantle on human rights. Let me, if I could, run though in a little
bit more detail why I say that and then I'll open it up for
questions.
First, as I mentioned, because the EU
Constitution failed, on foreign policy issues unanimity is still required in
order for a common position to be determined—on anything, but on foreign policy
as well. And so the effect of this is that the European Union is leading by its
most reluctant member. The government that is most reluctant to exert pressure
for human rights is the government that sets EU policy. That sounds crazy, but
that is the way it works.
Just to give one example, on Uzbekistan, the
case I just mentioned, the European Union did impose sanctions just after the
Andijan massacre, a few months afterwards. Today the government that is most
eager to end those sanctions is Germany. Now, if you just took a vote, you
would, I think, find overwhelming support for continuing the sanctions because
there has been no international investigation, there has been no accountability.
In fact, there has just been a crackdown—witnesses were arrested, human rights
groups are being shut down, most of the international groups are being kicked
out—so things are going backwards quickly. Hardly a moment in which you would
send the signal of approval by lifting sanctions.
But Germany, with its
US-Politik theory of engaging and all this, wants to settle for a dialogue,
conversation, as sufficient progress, and is pushing to lift sanctions. There is
a real risk that this will happen because of the lowest-common-denominator
approach of the European Union decision making.
The obvious key to this
would be to adopt some kind of supermajority decision rule, as the constitution
prescribed. I am not here advocating adoption of the constitution en masse—that
is going to be difficult—but there are elements of the constitution that I think
are absolutely essential if the European Union is to effectively project its
potential influence.
Now, to make matters worse, this consensus approach
tends to play out in ways that are even worse than it has to be. Let me here
cite the UN Human Rights Council—and it's not just the Council; it's going back
to the time of the Commission as well. Theoretically, you could say, "Okay, our
common position at the European Union is going to be that we want a resolution
on Darfur. So, the half-dozen members of the European Union who are at the
Council, we direct you to get a resolution on Darfur. Do what it takes." You
know, that would be a common position, and it would be one taken at the
strategic level, which would make some sense.
But instead, the European
Union adopts a common position at the micro level, the micro tactical level. So
they literally sit there and edit resolutions together. They don't agree on a
common position until they have all signed off on the text, commas and all.
Many of you are familiar with UN negotiations and know that there is a
give and take that is required; there is a rapid back and forth; you've got to
make split-second decisions. Often, to cut the deal that is needed to get the
resolution, you've got to be able to move fast and flexibly.
Needless to
say, when for every word change you've got to go back and get 27 governments to
sign off on it, that doesn't exactly make you a terribly relevant player in the
negotiations leading to a would-be resolution. That is the position that the
European Union has put itself in—not by virtue of any constitutional
requirement, but rather by virtue of how they have interpreted the consensus
requirement to require this micro tactical management.
Another problem
with the European Union is its rotating leadership. I think you are all familiar
with the fact that every six months you have a new presidency. Now, there is
nothing wrong with that in principle because, after all, everybody wants to lead
and they're all equal. Again, I am not going to take issue with the idea of
having a rotating presidency.
But I will take issue with the practice of
always speaking through the presidency and having the presidency be the sole
government to deal with the various issues that come up in the course of their
six months. This is the opposite of what is required for effective human rights
work, because one thing you learn in the human rights business is that if you
don't stick with an issue, if you don't understand the nuances and the
complexities, you don't get anything done. Abusive governments need to know that
you are going to be there month after month, year after year, and you are going
to finally wear them down, and that's when they begin to change.
But with
the European Union you've got a new presidency coming in every six months.
They've got to figure out where is Uzbekistan. They've got to remember what was
the Andijan massacre. You know, there is a whole educational process that is the
antithesis, frankly, of what is needed to operate effectively.
There is
another way to do this. They could continue rotating the presidency, but they
could decide that for important issues they will assign someone permanently to
the problem. This is done already in the case of Iran, and more recently
Somalia, where there are permanent troikas. A troika is actually the structure
they put around the presidency, so it is the current presidency, the next
presidency, and then kind of a Commission staffer stuck on as well.
But,
rather than having this rotating troika of the recently arrived, you could
actually develop permanent troikas of the most influential or the most
knowledgeable or the most committed and deploy them on an ongoing basis. So you
could have a permanent troika on Darfur, a permanent troika on China. The
presidency you could still rotate, but these people would be there as the EU
representatives for the long term. That would develop the expertise and the
stickiness that is required to get things done. But it's not the way the
European Union is choosing to operate at the moment.
To make matters
worse—you know, I've described the tendency of the common position to be the
lowest common denominator—when you go to individual governments and say, "Well,
okay, the European Union as a whole, their common position may be to do hardly
anything, but why don't you go a little bit more yourself? Why does that common
position have to be the maximum position?"
But there is a tendency on the
part of EU members—and this is, frankly, a tendency of convenience—to treat the
common position as a ceiling rather than as a floor, as the most that will be
done rather than as the least that will be done. So this, again, accentuates the
weakness of the EU foreign policy process.
Then finally, to top it all
off, much of what I describe here takes place in back rooms in Brussels. Human
rights issues are inherently difficult for governments because they bump up
against other issues—commercial interests or diplomatic interests or what have
you—and there is a natural tendency of governments to want to subordinate human
rights concerns for other interests that they see as more important.
One
antidote to that is to open up the process, because what I have seen over and
over is that governments tend to behave better on human rights when they are
being scrutinized by their public. But because so much of this is done behind
closed doors, because there is so little tradition of transparency in the
European Union, this weak approach to human rights tends to be
perpetuated.
Now, to give you just a few examples of how this plays
out—and then I'll welcome your questions—let me just quickly run through four of
I think the most pressing human rights problems facing the European Union today:
Darfur, China, Russia, and the United States.
Darfur: The European Union
has still not agreed to targeted sanctions against any leaders other than the
four who have been agreed upon by the Security Council. The four here are, shall
we say, pretty low-level people, and only two of them are even on the
governmental side. So the basic step of imposing travel restrictions, or seizing
assets, the most obvious things you do, the least controversial form of
sanctions, the European Union has not taken with respect to Darfur. It is
missing an obvious way to put pressure on the Sudanese government to allow the
UN peacekeepers into Darfur, which in my view is the most important step that
could be taken right now to stop the killing.
The Treasury Department in
the United States is currently toying with the idea of imposing banking
sanctions with respect to Sudan, similar to what was done in North Korea. That
is to say it would block any oil payments to Sudan that go directly to the
government and would insist that they go to an escrow account, where essentially
they would be spent on humanitarian purposes for the Sudanese but not on
military hardware. This, if it were ever adopted, would be extremely effective
in putting pressure in Khartoum. But the Treasury Department is reluctant
because there is the euro escape hatch, which requires the European Union to
cooperate with us, and so far it hasn't. Indeed, the European Union hasn't even
been putting pressure on China to put pressure on Khartoum, which is again an
obvious route to getting things done.
With respect to Russia, I talked
briefly about German US-Politik, which is as dominant with respect to Russia as
it is with respect to Uzbekistan. This is despite the fact that Putin has done
everything he could to show that an unaccountable government is a bad business
partner, that a government that is not subject to the rule of law and to the
ordinary constraints of democratic institutions is a government that will, when
convenient, shut off oil or gas to Belarus or Ukraine or Georgia or whomever.
That is not the kind of energy security that you want in the long term. But,
rather than recognize that energy security would actually be promoted by efforts
to promote democratic accountability in Russia, there is the sense that those
two are somehow antithetical and you can't push too hard on democracy or you
might sacrifice your energy.
That view, the false view, is the one that
is dominant in European capitals today. It doesn't even matter, frankly, that it
is dominant in all capitals. It is dominant in Berlin. Because of the
lowest-common-denominator approach, that is blocking a tougher EU
position.
With respect to China, this is a good illustration of the
problem of having these rotating troikas, because the European Union has a
periodic human rights dialogue with China, and China has figured out that you
should put the same people there every time, that if they remember what happened
at the last dialogue, they are much better at deflecting criticism than if they
have never been into a dialogue and they are showing up for the first time, or
maybe the second time. So while the European Union sends this rotating set of
interlocutors to these dialogues, the Chinese have the same guys there every
time. And guess who does the better in these conversations?
And then,
with respect to the United States, finally the European Union is speaking out
about, say, the need to close Guantánamo. They are talking about torture. But
there has been a real reluctance to take some of the steps that would, I think,
really help to put an end to these practices.
With respect to Guantánamo,
we have been pushing Europe to offer a deal to the United States. The United
States is very concerned about at this point fifty people who it wants to
release but doesn't have anyplace to send them, either because they are Yemeni
and the Yemenis have disowned them, or because they come from a country that
practices torture and it would be inappropriate send them back. The United
States wants help in resettling these people.
So in our view, if Europe
is serious about shutting Guantánamo, it should offer to help resettle these
people in return for a commitment from the United States to shut the facility, a
quid pro quo. And shutting the facility means basically prosecute with a fair
trial, not the substandard military commissions, anybody who really committed a
crime and release everybody else. But that would require a certain sacrifice on
Europe's part, and so it has been reluctant to take this
stand.
Similarly, on the question of torture and rendition, there have
been a few studies and the like. At the national level, there have been these
prosecutions now in Italy; there are efforts in Spain. But for the most part
Europe has been sort of passively investigating these things. The Council of Europe, obviously a
separate institution, appointed the Swiss lawyer Dick Marty, who
never had subpoena powers, who never had any prospect of getting to the bottom
of the rendition question.
The European Union, which does have the
capacity to put real pressure on its members, has never pushed hard to get past
the blanket Polish denials that Poland ever had a secret detention facility on
its soil. It has just sort of accepted the summary "No" and willingly moved
on.
Indeed, in the case of Britain, Britain is even pushing for these
so-called memoranda of understanding, which would be a piece of paper that would
justify sending people back to a country that tortures, even though the
monitoring regime that Britain is proposing is an utter joke, because you can't
really walk up to a prisoner who just emerged from the torture chamber and say,
"How did they treat you?" No one answers those questions honestly.
So
there is just a series of problems in the way that Europe is going about this.
Some of this has to do with just national self-interest, but some of it has to
do with a real lack of leadership within Europe itself, particularly on these
tough questions when national interests are at stake, and it's very difficult to
overcome a Poland or a Germany or a United Kingdom which is setting too low a
standard for the European Union.
Let me sum up just by saying there is an
enormous gap right now on the human rights front. I wish I could be more
optimistic about Europe stepping into the void, but Europe has got a lot of work
to do to get its act together. I don't know which is going to happen more
quickly, Europe succeeding in developing an effective foreign policy mechanism
or the United States recognizing what an utter disaster the Bush
Administration's approach has been to fighting terrorism and changing course. I
would like to see both happen—both are absolutely essential—but currently
neither is happening very quickly.
So on that somewhat pessimistic note,
let me stop and welcome your questions.
Questions and AnswersQUESTION: Just a couple of comments. The
way you talk about leadership, you talk, of course, about leadership on public
censorship really. You are talking about publicly criticizing states, in
particular. I think the United States has played a big role on that in the past.
It is certainly much more difficult for it to do it now.
But it is also
important to have leadership on issues, like on counter-terrorism, on impunity,
on issues that you have mentioned—disappearances, torture, and so on. The United
States has never played a leading role on those in the past. They have certainly
subscribed to the standards, but the United States has not ratified many of the
treaties, for example. So that is not leadership that we have lost.
I
don't want to talk much about the European Union because I am not a member. I
certainly am familiar with what they do and their difficulties. But I think
there is one very important element missing in what you have said, namely that
the fact that the United States currently has the human rights record that it
does have also makes it more difficult for allies of the United States to take a
credible stance on human rights, because if you come out now and you present a
resolution, for example—it doesn't matter, on any given country—then you are
very likely to be criticized for double standards and for saying, "Well, where
is your position on Guantánamo? Why do you not present a resolution on
Guantánamo?" This is not something the European Union can do. And far from that,
they cannot even collectively support that. So the European Union and other
allies have a problem, sort of a proxy problem, through the United
States.
And also, on an issue, for example, like Darfur, I just believe
we need different sorts of alliances. It is not the best thing if the United
States leads on Darfur or if Canada leads on Darfur or whoever it is. What we
need is at least a strong commitment from a country like Nigeria or Ghana or
whoever it is, a country in the region, that says, "What is going on in Darfur
is not acceptable to us."
It doesn't make much sense to have a human
rights mission sent to Darfur that is headed by Jody Williams, quite frankly. I just think that is
perception-wise wrong. I mean I don't have anything against Jody Williams. I
think she is a great activist. But it would be better to have that mission led
by someone from the region. And you do need support from those that are more
directly affected than we are. It is very important to have a more collective
leadership that is not an exclusively Western leadership in the
future.
KENNETH ROTH: You mentioned a number of points. Let me
quickly respond.
First, with respect to Europe's historic role on
treaties, Europe has been much more supportive in the treaty process—and not
only treaties setting standards, but also enforcement-type treaties, like the International
Criminal Court Treaty.
I think, though, despite the traditional U.S.
reluctance to ratify anything, where the United States has nonetheless played a
more important role is in enforcing those treaties. Indeed, even on the question
of impunity, it seems to have gotten over its allergy against the International
Criminal Court, and has been playing a constructive role in northern Uganda, in
Darfur, and eastern Congo. More broadly, if you say, "How did Charles
Taylor get surrendered?" it was really U.S. pressure in the end that was
key.
When it comes to that enforcement question, I have always seen the
United States as being more important than Europe. I would like Europe to play
more of a role in enforcement, but it hasn't been that effective so
far.
I completely agree that U.S. misconduct weakens any enforcement
effort, because there is always this cheap excuse, "Well, the United States is
doing it," and even the double standard excuse.
My answer to this was
have a resolution on Guantánamo. I realize this is somehow sacrilege, that the
idea of Europe criticizing the United States formally like that is difficult.
But it is precisely what is needed, and it would go a long way toward helping
generate the pressure to shut Guantánamo. Europe is at this point saying this.
Why not translate it into a resolution? It would help overcome some of those
questions.
On Darfur, yes, we obviously do need African leadership.
Indeed, there has been quite a bit of African leadership, in that at least the
African Union is there. But I don't think the answer is then just to wait for
the African leaders to emerge. I think that Europe has a key role to play in
finding those leaders and bolstering them to break from the common African
position, because we are all aware that this African bloc has been stifling a
number of African governments that have actually much more pro human rights
policies than their bloc voting would indicate.
I think where Europe
could play a real role would be in liberating those countries from the bloc. I
can think of probably nothing more important than that in terms of making it
possible for the Human Rights Council to succeed.
QUESTION: I'm
going to try to defend the United States. I understand that the role of an NGO
is to criticize government and to motivate communities, and it is a very
important role. I also think it is a good thing that a U.S. human rights NGO
criticizes its own government before it criticizes others. However, I do think
you understate the role that the United States is currently playing. You
mentioned Burma, for example. The United States led on Burma.
In
relation to Darfur, the United States is leading in Darfur. No one is going to
send troops into Darfur without the agreement of the Bashir government, and that
is just the current reality. So the issue is: How can you put sufficient
pressure on Bashir without undermining the humanitarian efforts that are taking
place in Darfur? That is a complicated issue, but it is the United States that
is actually leading on the issue.
In relation to the gross human rights
abuses that are occurring in Afghanistan, who has responded foremost against
those abuses? It has been the United States. And so I could go on.
In
relation to Guantánamo Bay, in some ways the United States in my view has been a
victim of circumstances there. My only objection to Guantánamo is that what was
found was there was an inadequate set of laws and mechanisms for trying those
who were in Guantánamo Bay. That inadequacy is one that has obviously existed
for a long time, because this is the first incidence in recent times when the
adequacy of those laws was put to the test.
We have one Australian, for
example, who is still in Guantánamo Bay, been there now for four or five years.
He actually comes from my hometown. My only complaint about him is that he has
been there for four or five years and he hasn't been brought to trial. But he
hasn't been brought to trial because when it came to the crunch, as you did
indicate, the tribunals didn't stand the test of law, and there is still debate
about whether the new laws that have been put in place will be adequate in
themselves.
The fellow who is there actually wants to go to trial.
Australia wants him to go to trial, wants the matter to be resolved. The United
States would like to see the matter resolved as well. But because of what is in
fact a structural failure, it hasn't occurred. Therefore, I say it is being a
victim of circumstances.
I could go on around the world. So criticizing
your own government is a good thing, because standards must improve, and even I
would have trouble in trying to defend the rendition processes. It will be an
interesting exercise for scholars in the future to look back and see how that
occurred, what sort of failure within administrative structures allowed that
mechanism to be put in place and implemented. I think there is a real story in
that for the future.
I do criticize when criticism really is due, but I
think we should also keep things in perspective.
KENNETH ROTH:
When I opened, I tried to clarify that I am not saying that the United States
never can credibly promote human rights. When the human right involved is
something that the United States doesn't violate, the United States can credibly
pursue the matter. So of course it can deal with Darfur because the United
States is not running around slaughtering people on ethnic grounds. Of course it
can deal with the traditional pariah states of North Korea or Burma because
these are questions of a complete lack of democracy, and nobody is going to
challenge whether the United States is a democracy. So there areas where the
United States can continue to deal with human rights issues.
But it
cannot address torture or arbitrary detention or disappearances. And indeed, if
you look at the rhetoric of the United States, it is very rare that they even
talk in terms of human rights. They talk in terms of democracy, which is
something they are not going to be called hypocritical about. It also has the
advantage of being sort of a fuzzier word and is not as subject to charges of
"how can you talk about that when you're violating this or that provision?"
which would come up when you talk in terms of human rights.
On
Guantánamo, I have to correct you there a little bit. This is not a question of
circumstance. If the United States wanted to try David Hicks or
any of the other 400 people in Guantánamo, there is a perfectly acceptable
structure that has been in place this entire time. It's called a court martial,
under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It has been widely accepted,
approved by the Supreme Court many, many times. Human rights groups are
completely satisfied with it. It is there. The United States chooses not to use
it.
Instead it has put forward these substandard military commissions,
mainly because it wants to cover up its torture. The entire purpose of the
military commissions is to make it possible to introduce evidence that was
coerced from a suspect and to prevent questions about the interrogation
technique by calling it classified. That's what this whole dispute is
about.
The only difference of substance between the military commissions
and courts martial are the provisions that will allow the United States to get
away with introducing coerced testimony. This is something that no one should
stand up for.
It ultimately is going to fail, because either they are
going to not introduce the testimony because they are so afraid to; or if they
do, it is going to get challenged in the courts and the United States is going
to lose. So it will prolong things further.
But this is not a matter of
circumstance. This is a matter of cover up.
QUESTION: I have two
questions. How important is the threat of force by a friendly government for
organizations like you when fighting for human rights? Because the United States
has shown a great willingness to intervene while the European Union is more
reluctant, does this play a role when the European Union is supposed to take the
lead?
And do you see this debate actually taking place in the European
Union? Is the European Union actually aware of the fact that they are supposed
to lead now in human rights matters?
KENNETH ROTH: Taking your
second question first, I think that there is a broad awareness in Europe that
the European Union is punching below its weight, that it is not exerting the
influence that it should have on human rights or a number of other issues that
require projecting that influence beyond the territory of the European Union. So
yes, indeed, part of the impetus for the new constitution was to overcome some
of those shortcomings. The constitution failed, and now I think there is a
grappling with how do you move forward incrementally to address some of these
problems.
In terms of force, let me divide your question into two parts,
if I could. There is consensual force, force that is welcomed by the government
in question, of the peacekeeping variety; and then there is
invasion.
When it comes to consensual force, the European Union has
traditionally been a major proponent of classic peacekeeping, the blue helmet
Chapter 6 version. We get less and less of that these days. And increasingly,
even UN-authorized operations are fighting operations—not fighting against the
central government, but fighting against some kind of forces, Afghanistan being
the perfect example of that.
There is, I think, broad recognition that
the European Union has not invested in the lift capacity, basically the
development of troops, sufficient to carry out those tasks. You know, France and
the United Kingdom do have troops of that sort, and then you get small elements
elsewhere. I think there is recognition that this is a shortcoming. I know this
is something that Washington is pushing all the time.
I'm not seeing a
lot of change in reality. You know, Germany is evolving, is more willing to play
this role, but even in Afghanistan it is staying safely in the north and is
avoiding the real combat in the south. So there is that kind of operation with
the central government's authority or consent.
As for invasion, I don't
see the European Union willing to invade or threaten to invade at all at this
stage. Human Rights Watch is maybe unusual among human rights groups in that we
do at times advocate humanitarian intervention—that is, nonconsensual invasion
for human rights purposes. We have done it in the case of Bosnia; we did it in
Rwanda. But it is a concept that has been misused.
Iraq, which belatedly
the Bush Administration tried to justify as a humanitarian intervention, I don't
think can be justified. That is a longer story. I'd be happy to get into that
privately. But there I see no real willingness by Europe to do this. I think the
whole Iraq debacle has made everybody even less willing to do it.
So you
have the emergence of this responsibility to protect concept, but real
reluctance to use it in anything other than the consensual Security
Council-authorized way.
QUESTION: Just one quick point on Darfur
and then two short questions.
First of all, those of you who heard Jan
Eliasson on PBS last night or at the Security Council are aware that he and
Salim
Salim are really working very hard not only to get the deployment of the
troops which you mentioned, but, even more importantly, to get the peace process
going again in Abuja. So I think a lot more is going on than perhaps in your
remarks you referred to. I wondered if you would elaborate a little more on
whether you think those are useful initiatives.
This morning's New
York Times reports in the middle of the front section on the annual State
Department Report to the Congress on Human Rights, with a remark by the
Assistant Secretary of State—something I mentioned to you before we
started—along the lines of recognizing the United States itself is being
criticized for human rights violations by other countries. I wonder whether you
think this report has any value or credibility at all; and, if so, what that
value is.
My other question is about the role of the U.S. Senate, and as
a matter of fact the opposition, the Democratic Party, all these people who are
out on the stumps these days—Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, John Edwards, and so on and so forth. I haven't heard a word
from any of them about human rights, or Guantánamo, or rendition, that you
mentioned. Did you feel that the Senate has also failed on human rights issues
by acquiescing in these commissions?
KENNETH ROTH: There's a lot
there.
On Darfur, obviously there is a value to the Abuja peace process.
Of course, if you could stop the fighting that would help enormously. Pending
that, the real issue is: What will it take to coerce consent out of Khartoum? As
was said, nobody is going to invade Darfur; that's not on the agenda. So the
question is: How do you force Khartoum to consent?
The key to this, I
think, is above all China. China is blocking Security Council pressure. China is
the major source of revenue. I do feel we need to pay more attention to China's
foreign policy. I don't think it's a lost cause. China is quite attentive to its
international reputation. I don't think it wants to be seen as the supporter of
thugs and murderers around the world.
At Human Rights Watch, we have
assigned somebody now and we are beginning to treat China the way we would treat
the European Union or Berlin or Paris or London, as a foreign policy
interlocutor as well as a source of domestic concern. This is a long-term
project, but one that I don't think is hopeless, because I think China is trying
to find some accommodation between its sort of instinctive reluctance to enforce
human rights standards and its desire to be a responsible global citizen. We are
trying to move it more in the responsible direction.
With respect to the
State Department report, I do think it is an important report. If you go back to
its early days under Carter and Reagan, it was a highly politicized document. It then went
through many years in which it was quite objective, and today still for the most
part is objective. There were a few things yesterday—I haven't read the whole
thing; it's obviously thousands of pages—but there were a few disturbing
variations from this history of objectivity.
First of all, you won't find
anything in there about the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, other than a cursory reference to
cluster bombs. But the fact that Israel was indiscriminately bombing large parts
of southern Lebanon and that the principal cause of civilian death in southern
Lebanon was not Hezbollah hiding in civilian villages but rather Israel
deciding that anybody who hadn't fled was fair game for attack was not even
mentioned in the report.
There are other places where it's almost
ludicrous reading it. The guy who was picked up in Milan, was picked up by—I
think "foreign agents" is the term they used. I mean which world are we
operating in here?
The Arar case was written in a
way that suggests that Canada just didn't understand what this case was really
about.
I saw this as actually a dangerous reversion to kind of the
Reagan-era tendency to politicize the reporting.
That said, it is useful
once a year to state what human rights practice is around the world.
Traditionally, my problem has been that this is a one-day policy and that the
other 364 days there is little inclination to do much about it, with the
exception of the obvious Burma or North Korea.
This year you've got the
added problem of credibility. And so even if you had the political will, it is
not clear that there is the capacity in light of the credibility
problems.
Finally, in terms of the Democrats, obviously the military
commissions were set up under the last Congress, when the Republicans still
controlled the Senate and the House. The new Congress is going slowly on these
issues. They have introduced some bills trying to remedy some of the worst
defects of the past, in particular on habeas corpus. I think the Democrats are
probably genuine in terms of trying to get as much as they can. The difficulty
is getting the 60 votes you need to get past a filibuster in the Senate, and
that is a very real obstacle.
So what I see is not indifference, but
rather a kind of calculation as to what can they put forward that would build a
sufficient coalition involving some Republicans that they can get this stuff
through. The concern is really less a veto, because they can always attach the
bill to some basically un-vetoable bill. The real issue is the filibuster threat
in the Senate.
QUESTIONER: Did you want to comment on the
candidates at all?
KENNETH ROTH: Of the candidates, who's talking
about this? Well, it's still very early on. I guess my concern, reflected with
my talk today, is which candidate can redeem America's reputation. If we are
imagining a future President So-and-So, who is going to have both the desire to
address these issues and the credibility to be seen as having addressed them
effectively?
I see possibilities on both sides of the aisle. We're a
nonpartisan organization, so you're not going to get me kind of endorsing people
here. I think there are possibilities on both sides. But it still is very early
and it is unclear. I think none of the candidates have really committed
themselves in this area.
QUESTION: I know how cumbersomely the
system works. We are, together with France, to blame for the rejection of the
constitutional treaty. It will take time, I agree. It is cumbersome. It will
take time to find incremental ways to improve the system. I think it will take
more time than for the United States to restore its reputation, as you said. My
guess is that after the next election here in the States that will happen,
whoever wins so to speak.
Two questions. One is: How would you define
leadership? Is it setting the good example; that is one option? The other one is
pressuring other countries. There is a big difference between the two.
My
second short question is: Probably the United States is not putting its
candidacy for the Human Rights Council again this year. Do you think that is a
good decision or a bad decision?
KENNETH ROTH: In terms of
leadership, obviously setting a good example is a critical part of that, because
you can't preach what you don't practice. That's the credibility problem of the
United States. But I wouldn't settle for just being the sterling example on the
hill who otherwise ignores the rest of the world. What is needed is pressure
effectively applied outside of one's borders.
Europe has its own internal
problems, but for the most part sets a decent example, certainly one that has
not been as tarnished as the United States in recent years. But it is not
projecting, and I look for that projection of influence in the form of
statements, of diplomatic pressure, of economic pressure, of sometimes providing
peacekeepers. There is a range of tools that Europe is not consistently
deploying.
In terms of the U.S. candidacy, I would have been happier if
the United States had run, because I think that the Human Rights Council is in
big trouble. I haven't given up on it by any means, but it needs intensive care.
I think we would have been more likely to be able to provide that intensive care
with the United States formally inside the tent rather than trying resuscitate
from outside.
For me the major problem is if you look at the Human Rights
Council, there are roughly the same number of confirmed defenders of human
rights and confirmed opponents of any human rights enforcement. There then are
eight or nine or ten swing states that can go either way. So those people who
say the Council is hopeless I think aren't counting right. If you look at the
swing states, those states could be voting with the pro-human-rights
governments. If they did, you could salvage the Council.
The problem is
that I think there has been ineffective outreach to those governments, certainly
insufficient outreach to overcome the bloc tendency, because right now the
combination of the OIC [Organization of the Islamic Conference] and the tendency of
the African governments to vote as a bloc has meant that the opponents of human
rights enforcement are winning time and time again and are quite deliberately
destroying the institution.
So I think the key is to provide enough
incentives and security for particularly some of these African states that
should be pro human rights, that certainly by their domestic behavior would
suggest that they are pro human rights, to increase their discontent with being
represented by the likes of Algeria or Egypt. I think that possibility is there,
but it is going to require intensive diplomatic action. With the United States
not formally inside the tent, that means more of the burden to do that kind of
diplomatic outreach is going to fall on Europe.
JOANNE MYERS: Ken,
I thank you very much for what I anticipated to be a wonderful morning. Thank
you.
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