Silver Lining: The Year 2013 in Human Rights

The UN Human Rights Council begins to live up to its promise. The council was established in 2006 to replace the UN Human Rights Commission, which had lost credibility as repressive governments flocked to it in an effort to use their votes to avoid censure. The council had tighter membership standards, but for its first few years was little better than its predecessor. In recent years, however, the council has come into its own. A key factor has been the Obama administration's decision to join it after the Bush administration shunned it. Other governments have also played an important role, including Mexico, Switzerland, Chile, Botswana, Brazil, Argentina, Mauritius, Benin, Maldives, Costa Rica, and a number of European Union states. Together they made a successful effort to bridge the political divides and overcome the apathy that often stood in the way of effective action. Even traditionally more reluctant countries, such as Nigeria and Thailand, were persuaded to play productive roles.

The positive results are most visible in the case of Sri Lanka. In 2009, when some 40,000 civilians were killed in the waning months of the conflict with the Tamil Tigers, the council's initial reaction was to congratulate the government on its victory. But for the past two years, the council has pressured Sri Lanka to honor its pledge to investigate war crimes by both sides and bring those responsible to account. Similarly, in March 2013, among other useful steps, the council established a commission of inquiry to collect evidence of North Korea's crimes against humanity -- the first step toward possible prosecution.

Two former African leaders face prosecution. During his reign as president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, Hissène Habré is alleged to have committed systematic torture and thousands of political executions. Deposed, he fled to Senegal, where he lived in comfortable exile as the country's former president, Abdoulaye Wade, obstructed repeated efforts to prosecute him -- in Senegal, in Belgium, and via mandate of the African Union.

Yet Habré's victims, and activists working with them, persevered. Their fortunes began to change when Macky Sall assumed Senegal's presidency in 2012 and the International Court of Justice ordered Senegal to prosecute Habré "without further delay." In June 2013, Senegal arrested Habré, and he remains in custody for a trial anticipated in late 2014 or early 2015. Habre's trial would mark the first time in modern history that the courts of one country tried the leader of another for alleged grave crimes under international law.

Similarly, an internationally established tribunal in September 2013 affirmed the conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, for planning and aiding and abetting atrocities by rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone, including by trading his arms for their diamonds. This sets a precedent that may come to haunt other leaders who assist atrocities in other countries by providing military support to abusive forces.

Exposing the National Security Agency's mass surveillance to public scrutiny. President Barack Obama is still trying to prosecute Edward Snowden, but he deserves a hero's welcome from everyone else for the tremendous service he did by exposing the NSA's massive surveillance of electronic communications and activities. If not for Snowden, we wouldn't know the extraordinary breadth of the NSA's data collection practices -- such as the fact that the agency collects metadata about potentially all phone calls in the United States because, under woefully outdated rules, none of us has any legitimate expectation of privacy about this information on the grounds that we shared it with the phone company.

Snowden also helped to highlight the NSA policy that foreigners outside the United States don't even have a recognized right to the privacy of the contents of their communications. He revealed that the NSA doesn't believe it affects our privacy when it collects our communications, only when it examines them. That amounts to saying it would be okay for the government to collect a video stream from your bedroom and store it on a government computer so long as it wasn't watched until the government came up with some reason to do so.

And without Snowden we wouldn't realize how weak the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been in reviewing all of these transgressions -- though we shouldn't have been surprised given that its judges, all hand-picked by the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, hear only from the government and lack technical expertise. None of this has been fixed, although recommendations from a reform panel that Obama established address some of the issues. But after Snowden's disclosures, it is hard to imagine the world simply moving on as if nothing has happened.

A treaty to protect domestic workers takes effect. The world's most vulnerable workers are probably the millions who labor in people's homes, most of them women and girls. Working in isolation, often far from their own countries, they are ripe for economic exploitation, physical and sexual abuse, and trafficking. Yet they historically have been excluded from the rights afforded most other workers under national labor laws, due to a reluctance to legislate working conditions in the home, often coupled with the myth that these workers are treated like members of the family.

That should begin to change with the new Domestic Workers Convention, which took effect in September. It entitles domestic workers to most of the same rights that laborers outside the home have long enjoyed, including such basics as a weekly day off, limits on hours of work, and a minimum wage. In the two years since the convention was adopted, dozens of countries have strengthened labor-rights protection for domestic workers including comprehensive reforms in the Philippines and Argentina and new protections in Brazil's constitution.

There is still a long way to go, but increasingly domestic workers' second-tier status under national labor laws is coming to an end.

Burma releases most of its political prisoners. The reformist government of Burma's President Thein Sein is at best a work in progress. The military still dominates the government and shows no willingness to change the constitution to, for example, permit Aung San Suu Kyi to run for president. War crimes committed in the ethnic conflicts in Burma's border regions remain unprosecuted. New violence has erupted against Muslims, particularly the Rohingya minority, led by Buddhist extremists and often tolerated by the security forces, with muted criticism from key national figures such as Aung San Suu Kyi.

But there is important good news. Independent organizations, while still subject to constraints, are flourishing more than at any time in the past 25 years. The media, while still embattled, are more outspoken. And hundreds of political prisoners -- the vast majority -- have been released. Some new people have been charged on political grounds -- a trend that needs to be stopped -- but there is no question that political detention has decreased dramatically in the last year.

Marriage equality is on a roll. It has been legalized in not only 18 U.S. states (and the District of Columbia), which the U.S. government must now recognize, but also in 16 countries, plus parts of Mexico. Governments joining the trend in 2013 were Brazil, France, Uruguay, New Zealand, and Britain (though it has yet to take effect in the latter).

A step forward for the right to health. Because of the narrow focus of the U.S. Constitution, most Americans do not realize that international human rights law includes not only civil and political rights but also economic, social, and cultural rights. An example is the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Obamacare might have been much less controversial if more Americans treated access to medical care as a basic human right. But one area where progress was made globally on the right to health involved the danger of mercury poisoning. Much of the world's artisanal gold mining uses mercury to separate gold from ore. Mercury is toxic, and particularly harmful to children. Exposure can cause life-long physical and mental disability. A treaty adopted in October requires governments to eliminate the most dangerous uses of mercury in mining and promote alternative forms of gold processing that do not require mercury.

An official assessment of Bush's torture policies seems nearer. On his second day in office, Obama pledged to end the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- the U.S. government's preferred euphemism for torture. But shamefully, Obama has refused to prosecute those who planned and ordered the torture, encouraging future presidents to treat it as a policy option rather than the crime that it is. What's more, Obama has even fought efforts to investigate the torture, and cited the need to preserve state secrets to block victims' civil lawsuits.

That has not stopped the Senate Intelligence Committee from conducting an extensive investigation and producing a 6,000-page report. While still classified, it reportedly rejects the CIA's claim that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" yielded key information for the capture of Osama bin Laden or any other information of value, and finds that the CIA lied to Congress, the White House, and the Justice Department about the effectiveness of the program. The CIA (meaning the Obama administration) has been fighting tooth and nail to block publication, even as its own unpublished internal report is said to have reached similar conclusions. But as the year came to a close, this obstructionism seems increasingly to be failing.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the committee, has said she intends to seek declassification of a 300-page executive summary -- the only accounting for Bush-era torture that we're likely to see anytime soon.