The universality of human rights -- the fundamental premise that they apply to all nations without exception -- came under sustained attack in 1997.
With the economic crisis in Asia, the invocation of "Asian values" to justify repression lost much of its resonance, but the marked tendency of the major powers to ignore human rights when they proved inconvenient to economic or strategic interests posed a growing threat to universality. This failing, common to both Europe and the United States, was seen most vividly in relations with China and Central Africa. In addition, the U.S. government actively obstructed the strengthening of international human rights standards and institutions and remained unwilling to permit the application of existing international standards at home. This U.S. arrogance suggests that in Washington's view, human rights standards should be embraced only if they codify what the U.S. government already does, not what the United States ought to achieve. Fortunately, a new coalition of small and medium-sized states from the North and the South, working closely with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), has begun to fill this breech in the defense of human rights.
In the Human Rights Watch World Report 1998, released today, Human Rights Watch finds that in the past year, the U.S. government actively obstructed the emergence of human rights standards in three significant areas: landmines, child soldiers and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
While some one hundred governments prepared to sign an historic ban on anti-personnel landmines, the Clinton administration sought to weaken the ban with exceptions. The U.S. government is unwilling to join the ban because of a desire to use landmines in Korea and to exempt certain types of self-destructing "smart" mines. But scores of governments are willing to accept the military inconvenience of abandoning landmines in the interest of a strong international norm that would curtail their terrible humanitarian cost. The Pentagon's refusal to embrace the ban reflects its unwillingness to change its conduct even in light of evolving international humanitarian standards. The U.S. stands virtually alone in opposing a ban on the use of children under eighteen as soldiers. The ban would end a practice that leaves the children -- as many as 250,000 worldwide -- physically at risk, emotionally traumatized, and a danger to anyone they encounter. Only about one-half of one percent of the U.S. military is composed of recruits under the age of eighteen. The U.S. maintains its opposition even though the ban would be attached as an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty which the U.S. has not even ratified. On the International Criminal Court, the U.S. government has insisted on various restrictions that would weaken the ICC's independence and effectiveness as a deterrent to tyrants everywhere. Illustrative is a proposed requirement that the U.N. Security Council approve most prosecutions, which would allow those with veto power on the Security Council to block any inconvenient prosecution. The goal appears to be avoiding even the remotest possibility that an American might end up in the dock. But the insistence on an effective U.S. exception -- one that the other four permanent members of the Security Council were quick to demand for themselves -- undermines the universality on which any international system of justice must be built.
Human Rights Watch asserts that it is time for the international community to stop indulging this obstructionist behavior. If the U.S. government persists in its dismissive posture toward international human rights law, the international community should simply leave the United States behind. As it did in the case of landmines, the international community should, if necessary, move ahead without the U.S. to adopt a ban on child soldiers and create a strong, independent ICC.
Selective Commitment to Human Rights by the Major Powers: China was the single greatest beneficiary of this selective commitment, as the international community grappled with how to exert human rights pressure on a repressive country that is also a key trading partner. Some countries seemed more concerned with how to strike deals than how to protect human rights. Nowhere was this more evident than at the annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva:
France, Germany, Spain and Italy capitulated to China's commercial seduction by trading the usual European Union sponsorship of a U.N. resolution critical of China's human rights practices for the prospect of more Chinese purchases of their jointly produced Airbus planes. These governments did not rise to the defense of their fellow E.U. members when China retaliated, especially against Denmark and the Netherlands, for sponsoring the resolution and speaking in favor of it. Japan, Canada and Australia abandoned their traditional sponsorship of the U.N. resolution in return for a toothless bilateral human rights "dialogue." Although the U.S. did sponsor the U.N. resolution on China, it waffled so long, and lobbied its allies for support so ineffectively, that the result seemed more a cosmetic gesture than a genuine effort to censure China.
In the past, China has responded to pressure when its human rights practices were clearly linked to something of concern to Beijing. There are ample opportunities for such linkage today: China's admission to the World Trade Organization, World Bank loans, and future dates for summits with world leaders. But the U.S. government in particular has obstructed debate over appropriate linkages by speaking in terms of a false dichotomy between "isolation" and "engagement" of China and rebutting a largely fictitious demand to hold the entire relationship with China "hostage" to human rights.
Human Rights Watch calls on the international community to stop such obfuscation and link some significant aspect of relations with China to Beijing taking structural steps that will lead to substantial improvements in human rights, such as:
granting humanitarian organizations access to prisons; opening all of China and Tibet to scrutiny by independent journalists and human rights monitors; or, releasing the many nonviolent offenders among the 2,000 prisoners serving time for "counterrevolution," a crime which no longer exists.
A New Challenge to Human Rights in Central Africa: A number of African leaders challenged the universality of human rights principles under the slogan of "African solutions to African problems." They argued that deviations from human rights standards, including tight control on speech, assembly and association and democratic institutions, are temporarily necessary to rebuild nations recently liberated from highly repressive regimes. Policymakers in Europe and North America provided a disappointingly weak response to this theory.
This thin cover for repression has found favor in the new generation of leaders in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In the DRC and Rwanda, where thousands of civilians were murdered in the course of conflict in 1997, leaders did not challenge the validity of international humanitarian law prohibiting such slaughter. Instead, they tried to conceal the extent of the killings by impeding independent investigation of the crimes. At the same time, they argued that the killings were justified in the context of overthrowing a tyrant in the DRC and combating forces responsible for the genocide of 1994 and now waging war again in Rwanda. European and North American governments, while pressing for investigation of recent killings, seemed eager to build political relationships with and send economic assistance to these governments, despite their failure to hold abusive members of their security forces accountable for their crimes. U.S. officials, in particular, repeatedly downplayed the role of Rwandan troops in the slaughter.
Bosnia and Rwanda: The International Criminal Tribunals: Significant progress was made in 1997 toward securing justice before international tribunals for those behind the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But this experiment with international justice remained at risk because President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and French President Jacques Chirac refused to order their troops in SFOR to arrest the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Of the seventy-eight war crimes suspects known to have been indicted by the Yugoslavia tribunal, twenty are in custody awaiting trial, six are known or believed to be dead, and fifty-two are at large, primarily in Serbia or Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia.
In July, British troops arrested a secretly indicted Bosnian Serb suspect in Prijedor and killed another in a firefight, making it clear that NATO was fully capable of "encountering" indicted war criminals when it chose to. Despite NATO's predictions, there was no serious retaliation against NATO troops or other international workers. After July, however, various NATO governments offered one excuse after another for not pursuing further arrests. Above all, the U.S. military leadership remains determined to avoid any risk to American soldiers, regardless of the stakes involved. It is also disappointing that Britain, France, and their European allies -- which had already incurred casualties in the interest of establishing peace in Bosnia -- were so deferential to Washington's excessive fear of casualties when it came to building the justice system necessary to keep that peace.
A New Set of Actors Comes to the Fore: Fortunately, as the most powerful governments wavered in their defense of human rights, a new set of actors, both governmental and nongovernmental, came to the fore. A defiant coalition of small and medium-sized states from the North and the South overcame obstructive major powers, including the U.S., to draft a new anti-personnel landmines treaty, due for signature in Ottawa by more than one hundred governments on December 3 and 4. Campaigns to create a strong, independent ICC are gaining strength in many countries around the world, despite the active opposition of the permanent five members of the Security Council. Other NGO efforts include attempts to hold multinational corporations to human rights standards, to continue integrating women's rights into the human rights agenda, and to secure the arrest of indicted war criminals. With the model of their successful landmines campaign in mind, these new coalitions could assume important leadership roles by insisting on the principle of universality and a strong defense of human rights when the commitment of the major powers is lacking.
Human Rights and the United Nations: The election of Kofi Annan as U.N. secretary-general and his appointment of Mary Robinson as U.N. high commissioner for human rights gave a tremendous boost to those who look to the United Nations to play a leadership role on human rights issues. While Kofi Annan spoke frequently and forcefully on human rights in 1997, the one significant disappointment during his first year was his capitulation to the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in removing Roberto Garret¢n as head of the U.N.'s investigation into the massacre of tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees as they fled across northern Congo. This breeched the fundamental principle that abusive governments should not be allowed to select the investigators of their conduct -- a precedent that came back to haunt the U.N. in Iraq. The U.N. granted further concessions in the DRC on the timing of the investigations, the investigators' access to certain Congolese witnesses, and the investigators' ability to recommend prosecutions.
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights is crippled by its own indifference to the human rights record of its membership. Commission members include not only countries that routinely flout basic human rights, such as China, Belarus and Rwanda, but even countries that refuse to permit U.N. special rapporteurs to conduct on-site investigations, such as Cuba. Human Rights Watch calls for an end to the charade that permits abusive governments to join the U.N.'s highest human rights body for the principal purpose of shielding their own conduct from criticism and enfeebling the U.N.'s capacity to defend human rights.
Restrictions on Refugee Rights and Religious Persecution:Human Rights Watch also decries a growing determination among powerful governments to shed their responsibility toward refugees. Illustrative were a U.S. law authorizing the use of summary procedures to evaluate the claims of many asylum seekers and a European Union rule allowing the rejection of asylum claims if the applicant had passed through a "safe third country."
The report describes at length various forms of religion that faced persecution around the world. The persecution of Christians received heightened scrutiny in the United States in 1997. The report demonstrates that a broad array of religious minorities face persecution, and that the persecution comes in a wide variety of forms not currently addressed by legislation pending in the U.S. Congress.
Attacks on Human Rights Monitors: In apparent retaliation for their work, fifteen human rights monitors were killed, forcibly "disappeared," or died in suspicious circumstances in 1997. This was more than double the toll in 1996, with all but one of the victims in Colombia or Rwanda. Many other human rights monitors faced detention or harassment.
The Human Rights Watch World Report 1998 is our eighth annual summary and is released in anticipation of International Human Rights Day on December 10. The report is a review of human rights practices in sixty-five countries, and covers events from December 1996 through November 1997. Most chapters examine significant human rights developments in a particular country; the response of global actors, such as the United States, the European Union, Japan, the United Nations, and various regional organizations; and restrictions on human rights monitoring.
