Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch
By Kenneth Roth
Every government is at times tempted to violate human rights. To encourage governments to resist that temptation, the human rights movement seeks to raise the price of abuse—to shift the cost-benefit calculus behind a government’s actions.
The human rights movement’s ability to raise that price has grown substantially in recent years. Today, activists are capable of exposing abuses most anywhere in the world, shining an intense spotlight of shame on those responsible, rallying concerned governments and institutions to use their influence on behalf of victims, and in severe cases, persuading international prosecutors to bring abusers to justice. These are effective tools, and they have retained their power even as certain traditional allies wavered in their support for human rights. That effectiveness has spawned a reaction, and that reaction grew particularly intense in 2009.
Certain abusive governments, sometimes working together, sometimes pursuing parallel tracks, are engaged in an intense round of attacks on human rights defenders, organizations, and institutions. The aim is to silence the messenger, to deflect the pressure, to lessen the cost of committing human rights violations.
These attacks might be seen as an unwitting tribute to the human rights movement. If governments were not feeling the heat, they would not bother trying to smother the source. But the cynicism of their motives does not mitigate the danger. Under various pretexts, these governments are attacking the very foundations of the human rights movement.
The techniques vary from the subtle to the transparent, from the refined to the ruthless. In some cases, human rights activists—be they advocates, journalists, lawyers, petition-gatherers, or others who document and publicize abuses or defend victims—have been harassed, detained, and sometimes killed. Organizations have been shut down or crippled. The tools used range from the classic police raid to the more novel use of regulatory constraints.
International institutions have also been targeted. The emergence of an international system of justice—especially the International Criminal Court—has been the focus of particular venom by government leaders who fear prosecution. The aim is apparently to suppress any institution that is capable of penalizing those who violate human rights. The attacks are built on a series of arguments that have resonance but cannot ultimately be reconciled with the imperative of justice for the worst international crimes. In addition, the Human Rights Council, the United Nations’ foremost intergovernmental human rights body, has become victim of concerted efforts to undermine its potential by restricting voices that are independent of government control.
The emergence of a strong human rights movement has not, of course, meant the end of human rights abuses. Pressure sometimes works to mitigate or curb abuses, but at other times governments see such advantages to violating human rights that they are willing to brave the cost. The trend, however, is that a growing number of governments hope to have their cake and eat it too—to violate human rights without paying a price. They hope to achieve that abuser’s paradise by subverting the individuals and institutions that impose a cost for human rights abuse.
Governments, of course, have long been tempted to attack the bearer of bad news. There is a long, sordid history of human rights defenders being censored, imprisoned, “disappeared,” or killed. But now, as the human rights movement has grown more powerful and effective, the silence-the-messenger efforts of many governments have grown in subtlety and sophistication. Murders are committed deniably. Politically motivated prosecutions are disguised by common criminal charges. Censorship is accomplished through seemingly neutral regulatory regimes. Funding streams are blocked. As the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders noted in August 2009, “the ways and means applied in certain countries in order to restrict the activities of human rights organizations are now even more widely used in all regions of the world.”
The perpetrators of these attacks are not limited to classic authoritarian governments such as Cuba and China. Democracies such as Sri Lanka have increased the pressure on local and international human rights groups that documented violations, as have governments that hold elections but fall short of democratic rule, such as Russia.
These efforts have yet to succeed in diminishing pressure from the human rights movement. Most human rights defenders accept the unintentional compliment behind the attacks and redouble their efforts. But the campaign to undermine human rights activism is nonetheless dangerous. By highlighting it in this year’s World Report, Human Rights Watch seeks to expose and help to reverse the trend. A strong defense of human rights depends on the vitality of the human rights movement that is now under assault. We appeal to governmental supporters of human rights to help defend the defenders by identifying and countering these reactionary efforts.
Governments have long used murder to silence human rights criticism. But instead of acting openly, abusers today tend to hide behind the work of “unknown assailants” whose killing is then conveniently ignored by national justice institutions.
In 2009, Russia was at the forefront of murderous retaliation against human rights defenders. Several of the victims had in common their reporting on arbitrary detention, torture, and summary execution committed in the war-torn republic of Chechnya by forces under the de facto control of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. Russian authorities have fostered a culture of impunity for abuse that cannot but have emboldened the authors of these killings. For example:
Also in January, human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, along with a journalist who was with him, Anastasia Baburova, were killed in Moscow just after he held a press conference. Two suspects have been arrested, and one reportedly confessed to personal motives behind the shooting, allegedly linked to Markelov’s work against Russian neo-fascists. At this writing it is unclear whether that was indeed the motive for the murder. Markelov was also representing the family of a young Chechen woman who had been killed by a Russian colonel. He had previously represented Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who specialized in reporting on abuses under Kadyrov. She was killed in Moscow in 2006, and her murder has never been solved.
Some Russian human rights defenders have faced violence because of their work outside the context of Chechnya.
Russia was not alone in violently attacking human rights defenders. Other countries where rights activists were murdered, “disappeared,” or seriously assaulted in 2009 include:
Some governments are so oppressive that no domestic human rights movement can exist openly. No one dares. These governments typically also preclude visits by international human rights monitors. Noteworthy in this regard are Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan. Burma and Iran have small, embattled human rights movements but bar international groups from entering. Saudi Arabia does not acknowledge nongovernmental human rights promotion, sometimes ignoring solitary activists, but more often immediately clamping down when those brave individuals find broader resonance, especially in the Western media. Somalia is so dangerous that open human rights monitoring is virtually impossible: the past three years of brutal conflict have seen civil society decimated, with many activists killed or fleeing the country.
Libya has allowed international visits but effectively bars independent domestic monitoring because the concept of an independent civil society contradicts Libyan leader Mu`ammar al-Gaddafi’s theory of government by the masses without intermediary. In Syria, all human rights groups remain unlicensed, as officials consistently deny their requests for registration. The National Organization for Human Rights has challenged before an administrative court the decision of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor to deny its registration request. The ministry responded by calling for the organization’s members to be prosecuted.
Some generally open societies bar international human rights groups from visiting the sites of certain serious abuses. Indonesia has prohibited the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as well as international human rights groups from visiting Papua. Israel prevented Israeli and international human rights defenders as well as journalists from entering Gaza during the December 2008-January 2009 conflict, and has kept human rights activists out ever since (although it has been possible to gain access via Egypt since the conflict, and Gaza-based defenders have been able to work throughout the period). Sri Lanka blocked local and international human rights groups and independent journalists from most of the region in which the armed conflict that climaxed in 2009 was taking place, as well as access to internally displaced persons held in camps.
A number of governments block access to independent experts and rapporteurs from the UN human rights machinery. The governments of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam each continue to refuse access to more than a half-dozen UN special procedures, including on torture and human rights defenders, despite longstanding and repeated requests for invitations to visit the countries. Other similarly offending governments include Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. At the end of October 2009, Zimbabwe prevented the special rapporteur on torture from entering the country, despite having invited him and agreed to the dates of the visit, while Russia has steadfastly refused to guarantee the conditions required for him to conduct a mission.
Certain governments seem to have no qualms about simply shutting down human rights organizations:
Other governments openly harass or detain human rights defenders:
Some governments use threats of violence, whether explicit or coded, to deter or punish human rights defenders. For example:
Despite broad recognition of reproductive rights and sexual rights under international law, these rights remain socially and politically under attack in many parts of the world. Discrimination and extreme violence sometimes rising to the level of murder persist against those asserting claims to these rights. Advocates working to combat HIV/AIDS, those who promote women’s access to safe and legal abortion, or NGOs that promote lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights are frequently attacked because of the social and political controversy surrounding these issues. For example, Uganda’s proposed “Anti-homosexuality Law” would make it a crime to “promote” homosexuality, on pain of criminal prosecution and dissolution of the offending NGO.
The above methods for trying to silence the human rights movement are hardly subtle. But because of their transparency they also carry a more direct price in terms of damage to the abusive government’s reputation and international relations. As a result, abusive governments often resort to less obvious techniques. One method seemingly in the ascendancy is the adoption of intrusive laws and regulations—designed not to provide a framework to facilitate the creation and operation of NGOs, but to control and muffle them. In 2006, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders noted that “while a few States have adopted national laws reflecting the international obligations contained in the Declaration [on Human Rights Defenders], the overall trend has been for States to adopt new laws restricting the space for human rights activities.” Governments that adopt this approach try to pretend that it is no more than ordinary oversight of an important sector, but the intent and effect are to prevent these groups from holding governments accountable to international human rights standards.
Russia reinvigorated this regulatory approach when it adopted a controversial law governing NGOs in 2006. The authorities also deploy tax, fire-safety, and software-piracy codes to the same effect. NGOs involved in noncontroversial work have felt relatively little impact, but human rights organizations and others seeking to promote government accountability have faced burdensome regulations, close oversight, selectively imposed audits and inspections, and the threat of closure for failing to comply. At best, these organizations must waste their time responding to government overseers rather than carrying out their work; according to one study, registration for NGOs had become 40 percent more expensive than for commercial enterprises. At worst, these organizations are subject to liquidation or suspension for relatively minor, technical violations or otherwise prevented from doing their core work because of the demands of inspections. In 2009, courts cited technical violations to order the liquidation of two regional offices of the For Human Rights Movement. Agora, a regional human rights association, has been prevented from doing its substantive work since July because of a series of harassing inspections.
Ethiopia’s new law on civil society organizations, adopted in January 2009, has had an even more devastating effect. It has essentially shut down most domestic human rights monitoring. The law bars “foreign organizations,” defined as any group that receives more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad, from conducting any activities related to the issues of human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, or good governance. The lack of domestic donors has meant that NGOs have had to avoid these sensitive areas. The Ethiopian government justifies the law by noting that many governments, such as the United States, prohibit foreign funding of political candidates, but political campaigns are very different from civil society organizations exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The Ethiopian government also notes that it permits foreign funding of development activities (a major source of revenue to the government), but the best way of ensuring that development efforts address the greatest public needs is to allow the kind of independent monitoring that the civil society law restricts. Its constricting effect is compounded by a new anti-terrorism law, which can be used to criminalize peaceful public protest and expression under an overbroad definition of promoting terrorism.
India’s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, while initially enacted to prohibit political parties, politicians, and electoral candidates from accepting foreign financial support in order to ensure that Indian elections were not affected by foreign interests, has been used instead to block funding of and harass organizations for criticizing government policies and practices. Proposed amendments to the law will further undermine the right of NGOs to seek and receive financial support for any activity deemed detrimental to the “national interest.”
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the power of his position rather than the law to attack the funding base of a key human rights group. In August, he publicly urged European governments to cut their funding to the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, shortly after it had issued a highly critical report on the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct in Gaza. The report included the testimonies of 26 soldiers who had participated in the Gaza military operation. A senior official in Netanyahu’s office stated publicly, “We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups to shoot at us with impunity.”
Other governments with restrictive laws on NGOs and associations include:
This regulatory approach to restricting human rights monitoring has proved so handy that a number of governments—not limited to traditionally repressive ones—have proposed similar laws. Among the countries where bills are pending are:
Because lawyers often play a prominent role in defending rights, they frequently face special attack. Both China and Iran have disbarred lawyers on political grounds to prevent them from representing victims of human rights abuses.
Many governments have used trumped-up criminal charges to silence human rights defenders. For example:
In a twist on the use of questionable charges, Evgeniy Zhovtis, founding director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law and the country’s most prominent human rights defender, was found guilty in September 2009 of manslaughter following a motor vehicle accident in which a young man was killed. The investigation and trial leading to his conviction were marred by serious procedural flaws that denied him the right to present a defense, and gave rise to concern that this human tragedy was being politically exploited.
Criminal libel laws have also become a favorite tool to silence human rights criticisms.
In a slight variation on the same theme, Sri Lanka detained four government doctors for several months for allegedly “disseminating false information,” based on their reports about indiscriminate government shelling of hospitals in areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers during the final weeks of the armed conflict with the Tigers.
* * *
Despite the variation and inventiveness of government efforts to restrict or punish human rights defenders, the motives are largely the same. In today’s world, human rights abuse does carry a price. One would hope that for most governments, that price would provide yet another reason to respect their legal obligations and uphold human rights. But some governments, as described, cannot resist trying to minimize the price by attacking or restricting the messengers. Whether that cynical approach succeeds will depend on the vigor of the response from those governments that are committed to protecting human rights. Human Rights Watch hopes that by highlighting this disturbing trend, we will mobilize a strong response.
The reaction to a strong defense of human rights has not been limited to human rights defenders. Perhaps the greatest recent victory of the human rights movement has been its contribution to erecting a new international system of justice for the worst human rights offenders, most notably with the launching in 2002 of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Before the emergence of an international system of justice, highly abusive governments could reasonably calculate that they could get away with mass murder by using violence or threats to cripple their national justice system. The ICC and its brethren institutions, such as the tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia, represent the possibility of justice, beyond the reach of tyrants and dictators to compromise it.
Those institutions are still at a rudimentary stage and they will never have the capacity to prosecute all alleged perpetrators. Moreover, with deeply rooted disparities of power often determining which abusers come under scrutiny, officials from or supported by certain states are less vulnerable to international prosecution. These shortcomings mean that many atrocities remain unaddressed. But the fact that sometimes international justice is available when national justice efforts fail is a development of major significance. Bringing perpetrators to justice pays respect to their victims. And threatening would-be perpetrators with justice offers the prospect of deterring atrocities and saving lives.
But just as those developments are welcome from the perspective of the victims and survivors of atrocities, so they are a threat from the perspective of the perpetrators. And just as abusive governments have attacked human rights defenders for exposing abuses and generating pressure for change, so they have begun to attack the international system of justice for threatening the impunity that they still enjoy.
The trigger for this new assault on international justice was the ICC prosecutor’s July 2008 request for an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes committed by Sudanese forces and allied militia against the civilian population of Darfur. In March 2009, al-Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be sought by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
One would have wanted African leaders to applaud the move. After all, the world had dithered for more than five years as the people of Darfur faced mass murder and forced displacement. Finally, someone was taking decisive action. Unfortunately, some African leaders seemed less troubled by the slaughter of ordinary African people than by the audacious prospect that a sitting African leader might actually be brought to justice for these horrendous crimes.
The nadir came during the African Union summit held in July 2009 in Sirte, Libya. Under pressure from Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi and the governments of several other North African states, the AU adopted a resolution urging African states not to cooperate with the ICC in its efforts to execute the arrest warrant for al-Bashir. Some governments, notably Botswana and South Africa, later rejected that position, but the sad spectacle remains that the AU, an institution built around principles of human rights and the rule of law, had sided with an alleged mass murderer over his victims.
The AU offered various reasons for its position, none of which bore scrutiny. One was that the UN Security Council had not formally responded to the AU’s request that the case against al-Bashir be deferred. But that request was controversial to say the least, premised as it was on the dubious proposition that a leader who had sponsored large-scale slaughter in Darfur would suddenly become a man of peace if only given a second chance. The Security Council was split on how to respond, and without the consent of the five permanent members, was incapable of responding.
That claimed procedural sleight aside, some African leaders objected that the ICC was pursuing justice selectively because all of the four situations on which the ICC had then focused were in Africa. (The ICC prosecutor has since sought authorization to open an investigation in a fifth situation, involving Kenya.) In fact, this focus should have been reason for Africans to celebrate: for the first time an international court was addressing serious crimes on the continent. And African leaders had not objected when the court indicted several warlords.
But the tone changed when the ICC issued a warrant for Sudan’s al-Bashir in 2008. The AU, led by some of the continent’s worst autocrats, began accusing the court of unfairly targeting Africans. In reality, these leaders were cynically trying to protect one of their own. They knew full well that, in three of the four situations, African governments themselves had invited the court to open investigations. The fourth—Darfur—was the product of a referral from the Security Council, after a vote supported strongly by Benin and Tanzania, the African members of the Security Council at the time. Even the AU’s own high-level panel on Darfur, established in 2009 and led by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, highlighted the need for prosecutions for crimes committed in Darfur. African civil society and progressive African states saw through these blatant attempts to perpetuate impunity on the continent and focused rightfully on the legal obligations of all governments to respect the rule of law and of ICC member states to cooperate with the court.
That is not to deny that there have been problems with the ICC’s reach. The prosecutor has conducted preliminary inquiries elsewhere—most notably in Colombia, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Gaza—but he has yet to conduct formal investigations outside of Africa. In part that appears to be because of his general reluctance to seek to open investigations on his own initiative (as opposed to on the basis of a referral, although the recent action on Kenya was on his initiative) or to pursue cases that might give rise to complex legal issues. A demonstrated willingness to go after anyone responsible for large-scale atrocities would greatly enhance the ICC’s perceived legitimacy.
Another problem is the lack of comprehensive ICC ratification. Some of the clearest cases for ICC involvement—Sri Lanka, Iraq, Gaza, Chechnya—are made difficult by the responsible government’s failure to have ratified the ICC’s treaty. Rather than attacking the ICC for this deficiency, those interested in a broader reach for the ICC would do better to promote widespread ratification.
There is also a larger problem of double standards and inconsistencies by the major Western powers. The West’s eagerness to see prosecutions for, say, atrocities in Guinea, Kenya, or Darfur contrasts pointedly with its reluctance to press Israel even to bring to justice in its own courts those who may be responsible for war crimes in Gaza. That tendency to protect abusive friends only encourages a closing of the ranks on the part of the AU.
Yet the AU must still bear primary responsibility for its solidarity with al-Bashir. That the pleas of non-African victims of international crimes have gone unanswered is no reason to ignore African victims’ quest for justice. But the West should stop facilitating the AU’s callousness toward its own people. A more principled defense of justice, even when one’s friends are implicated, is the best way to encourage emulation and justice no matter where serious crimes are committed.
The Human Rights Council is a troubled institution. While repeatedly criticizing the Israeli government for human rights violations, it has neglected or downplayed comparable and more serious situations. For example, in May 2009 a small group of traditionally pro-human rights governments succeeded in holding a special session to address the grave situation in Sri Lanka, where the government had just shelled and killed several thousand civilians who had been forcibly held by the Tamil Tigers, and had then interned nearly 300,000 civilians when the fighting ended with a government victory. Rather than press for an independent investigation into war crimes by both the government and the Tamil Tigers, the Council largely commended the government while ignoring its rights violations, and focused on abuses committed only by the Tigers.
As in the Council’s other disappointing actions, this embarrassing resolution was by no means preordained by the Council’s membership. A majority of the Council’s members are democracies that might have been expected to vote in the Council according to the same principles to which they subscribe domestically. Their repeated failure to do so reflects the ability of some of the world’s most repressive governments to convince them to vote according to a perverse sense of regional or Southern solidarity rather than the human rights principles that they endorse at home. That is, as in the case of the ICC and the AU, the repressive leaders at the Council have succeeded in convincing these democracies to value solidarity with abusive Southern leaders rather than their Southern victims.
Again, their position has been facilitated by the West’s own bloc tendencies and misplaced solidarity. When the European Union spends so much time devising a common position that it has little energy to engage with anyone else, or when the United States, reflexively protecting Israel, attacked the September 2009 report of the UN fact-finding mission on Gaza led by former South African Justice Richard Goldstone, they make it easier for repressive leaders to build a common stance behind their own favorite abusers.
But these repressive leaders have not been content to settle for a series of political victories. The Council is a body of governments, but one of its virtues is that its traditions allow many opportunities for independent voices to be heard. Independent experts and rapporteurs routinely report. NGOs add their views. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has a say. All of these are important antidotes to a system that is currently dominated by many of the very abusers who should be the subject of Council action.
The repressive leaders at the Council now seem determined to silence these voices whenever possible. They have offered a series of techniques, from “codes of conduct” to restrictive rules and oversight, to limit the ability of these voices to be heard. That would undermine some of the most important ways in which the Council continues to be useful despite the current dominance of its repressive leadership. As the Council approaches a mandated five-year review in 2011, there is a danger that this scheme will succeed unless traditional defenders of human rights can be mobilized.
Cuba provides a good illustration of the manipulative tools used by abusive governments to block independent voices from being heard. Its target was the procedure known as Universal Periodic Review—an important innovation of the Council by which the human rights record of every government, even the most powerful, is scrutinized every four years. Because those doing the reviewing are largely governments, Cuba went out of its way to ensure that many friendly governments would line up to speak during the review in support of its record, reducing the opportunity during the limited time allocated for critics to take the floor. When the time came for NGOs to speak, the Cuban government sought to dilute that independent voice by encouraging dozens of government-organized associations to make uniformly positive submissions about the Cuban government’s rights record. These efforts to stifle independent commentary facilitated the Cuban government’s ability to deny, implausibly, that it holds any political prisoners or restricts freedom of speech. In addition, there is no evidence that in preparing its submission the government consulted with any independent figures within Cuba, as it is encouraged to do.
This attack on independent NGO voices at the United Nations extends beyond the Council. To gain the right to speak before UN bodies an NGO must obtain “consultative status” from the UN’s NGO Committee, another collection of governments. As in the case of the Council, governments that tend to have restrictive policies toward NGOs seem to actively seek membership and are overrepresented. The current membership includes Angola, China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia and Sudan. Among the NGOs that the committee has rejected are a Christian group from China (for refusing to provide a list of its members in China—a revelation that would have invited retaliation against them by Beijing), the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (because the group supposedly had not complied with Ethiopia’s new, restrictive civil society law), and the US-based Democracy Coalition Project (because China, Cuba and Russia objected to its supposed discrimination against them, although this rejection was later overturned by a higher UN body). Groups defending the rights of gays and lesbians have had a particularly difficult time obtaining consultative status because committee members substitute their own moral preferences for the right of NGOs to advocate freely on behalf of the human rights of anyone.
UN institutions are not alone in facing a backlash from rights abusers. The European Court of Human Rights has been the international institution that most consistently holds the Russian government to account for its highly abusive conduct in Chechnya. The Court has issued more than 100 rulings against Russia for the abduction, torture, and execution of people in Chechnya, and for failing to properly investigate these crimes. Russia complies with orders that it pay compensation, but consistently refuses to implement the structural reforms ordered, such as the mandate to end the impunity that underlies so many of these abuses by conducting effective investigations and prosecutions. That failure is particularly glaring when the identity of the offending commander or security-force unit is known, as it sometimes is. In some 40 of the cases, the Russian government also violated its obligation to share relevant documents with the court. In addition, Russia stands alone among Council of Europe member states in blocking Protocol 14, a revision of the European Convention on Human Rights that would allow an intergovernmental ministerial committee to sue a government before the European Court for refusing to comply with the Court’s judgments.
The Russian government also continues to postpone a long-planned visit by Dick Marty, the rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the human rights situation in the North Caucasus.
The one potentially positive institutional development in 2009 turned out to merit little fanfare. In October 2009, the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) launched the Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights—an institution that had been years in the making. Judging by its debut, it was not worth the wait. It has vowed to adopt a “constructive,” “non-confrontational,” and “evolutionary” approach to human rights. Although its terms of reference include the promotion and protection of “human rights and fundamental freedoms of the peoples of ASEAN,” its reach is limited by its commitment to “non-interference in the internal affairs of ASEAN member states,” its mandate to reach decisions through “consultation and consensus,” and its admonishment to be aware of “national and regional particularities and mutual respect for different historical, cultural and religious backgrounds and taking into account the balance between rights and responsibilities.” Together, these principles give veto power to any member state, and deny member states the power to receive complaints, to monitor and investigate an alleged abusive state, to impose sanctions, or to expel a recalcitrant member.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, acting as ASEAN chairman, explained that in ASEAN’s view “the issue of human rights is not about condemnation, but about awareness,” adding that improving human rights is an “evolutionary process.” Given that ASEAN members include Burma, led by a ruthless military government that shows no sign of respecting the rights of its people, and entrenched dictatorships in Vietnam and Laos, that no-pressure form of evolution is likely to take a long time.
The new Commission was expected to engage with civil society. But at the first “interface meeting,” the Thai chair rejected five of ten planned participants—from Burma, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Singapore—leading three of the remaining five to walk out. At an earlier meeting of foreign ministers, ASEAN members had decreed that each state would choose the civil society organization it wished to be part of the interface, suggesting that independence was hardly an important criterion.
The human rights movement could do without the back-handed compliment represented by the attacks on its activists and institutions. Nice as it is to know that the targets of pressure are feeling the heat, their backlash can cause great harm to those who face it. The movement as a whole remains impressively resilient, capable of fighting back against this reactionary effort. But individual parts of the movement—particular defenders and organizations—remain vulnerable, in need of support.
It is one thing to note that many repressive governments are intent on lowering the cost of their abuse, on crippling the movement’s capacity to exact a toll for violating human rights and changing the cost-benefit calculus. It is another thing to do something about it. The success of these efforts should not depend solely on the courage of individual human rights activists. The human rights movement should also be able to benefit from the backing of its ostensible governmental supporters. The retaliatory techniques described in this introduction, while often more refined than in years past, are plain for all to see. Will the governmental supporters of human rights parry those techniques, or will they conveniently close their eyes to the thrust? The answer may well determine the success of the abusers’ reaction.
It is time for a more vigorous governmental defense of human rights activists and institutions throughout the world. That requires standing up more firmly for the people and principles under attack, even when the attacker is an ally. It also requires seeing through these acts of retaliation to recognize and condemn them for what they are. It is no ordinary abuse to kill or arbitrarily detain a human rights defender, deregister a human rights organization, or attack an international human rights institution. It is a tacit confession of still greater abuse. Governments try to silence the messenger because they do not want the message heard. The surest way to reverse that censorship is to redouble efforts to redress the very abuses that these governments are seeking to hide from scrutiny.
