Freedom from Fear Speech
Bruno Stagno-Ugarte, Deputy Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
21 April 2016, The Hague Peace Palace, The Netherlands
Your Royal Highness,
Esteemed Laureates,
Members of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and Roosevelt Foundation,
Distinguished guests,
“My mother was filled with such fear that she bore twins, me and together with me fear.” This is how Thomas Hobbes recounted his birth on the eve of the invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Fear that is man-made, designed to be terrifying, crippling or extinguishing of others with the purpose of gaining or retaining power, both predates Hobbes and unfortunately continues to this day. Whether it be the fear of being killed, maimed, tortured, raped, imprisoned, displaced, harassed, the list goes on and on, as fear can be made to take many shapes and guises. From the politics of fear, where it is used as a political tool to corrode norms of tolerance within a society, to the use of fear as a continuation of politics by other means to attain far more ghastly aims.
Fear stands behind many of the human rights developments of our time. The fear of being killed or maimed in Syria or Somalia, Afghanistan or South Sudan, or of being imprisoned or tortured in Eritrea or Libya, has driven millions from their homes. The fear of what an influx of asylum seekers could mean for their societies has led many governments in Europe and elsewhere to close the gates and pursue beggar-thy-neighbor policies that are the negation of shared solidarity and responsibility. The fear of more terrorist attacks has moved many governments around the world to follow the excesses of the post-9-11 response by the United States and many politicians to scapegoat Muslims or refugees. The fear of being held to account has led many autocrats to crackdown on society to smother political dissent and social protest of government repression or corruption.
These trends threatened fundamental freedoms in two ways, the twin threats of our time. The first, the high-profile threat of a rollback of rights and freedoms by many governments in the face of the refugee crisis and the parallel decision by the self-declared Islamic State to spread its terror beyond the Middle East and Africa. The second, the less visible threat of an unprecedented global crackdown on civil society to prevent people from banding together and claiming and enjoying fundamental freedoms.
Let me start by addressing the first threat.
The estimated one million asylum seekers who have fled to Europe by sea in the past year are among the more than 60 million people now displaced by military conflict or tyranny—the highest figure since World War II. The biggest driving force recently has been the brutal conflict in Syria, due in part to atrocities committed by ISIS and other armed groups but foremost to the Bashar al-Assad government indiscriminately attacking civilians in opposition-held areas. Some 4 million Syrian refugees initially fled to neighboring countries, including more than 2 million to Turkey and another million to Lebanon where they now comprise nearly a quarter of the population.
The million reaching Europe in the past year are just a fraction of the populations of the European countries where they are heading— 0.20 percent of the total EU population, if resettlement sharing actually occurs. We are therefore facing a crisis of politics more than numbers.
Instead of putting fact and human rights aside to ride populist or nationalist sentiment and become pawns to political brinkmanship, EU politicians need to put reason and rights center-stage to inform the debate, not inflame it. To a large extent, the fixation in Europe with the new refugees as a possible terrorist threat is a dangerous distraction from its own home-grown violent extremism, given that the Paris and Brussels attackers were predominantly EU citizens. Instead, public discourse has been filled with voices of hatred and fear of Muslims, for whom the refugees are surrogates. These messages need to be countered foremost because they are wrong.
And EU politicians also need to remember their own history.
Those raised on the grimmer side of the Iron Curtain – in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981 or all of Eastern Europe in 1989, or under the dictatorships of Greece, Portugal, or Spain in the 1960s and 70s – should remember that they were greeted with open arms in time of need, not with fences and closures. They were embraced as victims claiming long lost freedoms, not rejected on the fear that they were Communist or Fascist agents, agitators, or infiltrators.
Those raised on the brighter side of the Iron Curtain should remember that the EU is a project of peace and tolerance that arose from the horrors and lessons of two traumatic wars and intolerant ideologies. It is unconscionable that a project of the scope and size of the EU cannot fathom how to rationally and securely resettle refugees currently encamped in Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey otherwise than in succumbing to fear and betraying its core values.
The recent EU-Turkey deal is a case in point.
The Greek islands facing Turkey began operating as reception and registration centers for the hundreds of thousands of people who had reached the islands since early 2015. When the EU-Turkey deal came into effect on 20 March, they became detention camps. The moral and legal standing of the EU has taken a serious and ignominious hit for this deeply flawed deal premised on dehumanizing one-for-one refugee swaps with Turkey. In brazen violation of EU and international law, the EU has instituted swift deportation of asylum seekers and refugees to Turkey, feigning that it is a safe country when it does not grant effective protection to non-Europeans, has repeatedly pushed back refugees into conflict zones and closed borders to others trying to flee.
And let us not even think of what will become of what remains of the moral and legal stature of the EU if it signs a similar deal with Libya. Despite such an outcome being a complete travesty of legality and reality, it seems to be in works nonetheless.
While the West worries about the nexus of refugees and terrorism, political and economic pressures have led authoritarian governments to fret about the combination of civil society and social media. Which brings me to the second threat.
When leaders are primarily interested in advancing themselves, their families, or their cronies, the last thing they want is an empowered society, able to link together and combine resources to investigate, publicize and mobilize against government corruption or repression. By closing the political and social space in which civil society operates, autocrats are trying to suck the oxygen from organized efforts to challenge or even criticize their self-serving reign. As repressive governments learn from each other, refine their techniques, and pass on lessons learned, they have launched the broadest backlash against civil society in a generation, from Hungary to Turkey, Russia to Kenya, and beyond. Through overt or covert oppression, legal regulation, or financial constriction, they are keen to spell the demise of civil society and return society to its most atomized and subdued forms.
It is far from clear who will prevail in this duel between the unfettered and uncontested rule by autocrats and societal demands for accountable government. If, however, the many governments that pride themselves for upholding human rights do not seriously recommit to the inalienability and universality of fundamental freedoms, the autocrats may very well retain the upper-hand.
Unfortunately, too many governments in the West and beyond have subordinated or all but erased human rights from their foreign policies, concluding modern-day Faustian bargains for the sake of stability and security with the very same autocrats that are shuttering civil society. In doing so, they are forgetting that human rights violations played a key role in spawning and aggravating most of the crises that haunt the international community today, including the refugee crisis. They are also forgetting that rebuilding the moral fabric that underpins social and political order requires that human rights be an essential compass for political action.
Given the tumult in the world today, addressing these twin threats is hardly easy. But surrendering the fight against fear or the wisdom enshrined in international human rights law is definitely, definitely, not an option. As the global community becomes more interconnected, threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights rarely present themselves in the isolation of a single country. The likelihood of people seeking safety and security elsewhere, however near or far, is now not only possible, it is probable. In order to avoid larger fallout, it is necessary to contain and restrain violations to fundamental freedoms as soon as the first warning signs appear.
It is high time to recommit to international human rights law and to give new life to the one fear that we should not take exception to: the fear of accountability. For the best response to addressing the root causes behind the twin threats I have been talking about is seriously committing to accountability and the two twins it can father: deterrence and justice.
Yet international support for that effort has been uneven and selective. By reducing the certainty of justice being done, inconsistency undermines its deterrent value.
There is no better place to speak of accountability than here, in The Hague. As the seat of the International Court of Justice, the ad hoc international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, it is the spirit of The Hague that must reach both near and far, leaving no corner of the world untouched. It is the commitment to accountability that needs to be strengthened, so that the long arm of justice can claim its rightful place and role as a source of deterrence and justice whenever and wherever governments are unwilling or unable to redress threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights.
Many wrongs proceed from fear. Let us not be led astray by fear. Let us not give impunity any quarter. We abandon The Hague spirit and accountability at our peril.
Thank you.
