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The explosion of open-source information through social media and other channels has revolutionized the investigation of human rights abuses around the world.
But this information doesn’t necessarily feed into foreign policy making.
Not only do government officials simply not have the time to review the vast quantities of information available, they also don’t necessarily know which external sources they can trust. As a result, policymakers tend to rely heavily on classified materials from the country’s intelligence analysts.
The problem is, intelligence agencies don’t often specifically look at human rights abuses in the countries they’re analyzing, so policymakers are working with a distorted picture of the world – and the policies they make often reflect this institutionalized ignorance.
If the point of overseas intelligence services is to help their bosses back home understand threats and opportunities in foreign policy, then human rights abuses should definitely be in the mix. The rights violations a foreign government is committing can tell you a lot about how they see the world and how they are likely to behave.
As a simple example, just think about policymakers working on a trade deal with a particular country. Wouldn’t they find it useful to know its government is planning a new labor law that violates international human rights standards?
More broadly, systematic human rights abuses can act like canaries in a coal mine, warning of bigger crises that might be avoided with the right policy approach or that will need to be dealt with further down the road.
The signs of increasing authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia and its imperialist potential were evident at an early stage, for example, but governments generally did not factor this into their policymaking.
Writing in Foreign Affairs about the US case in particular, Sarah Yager, my colleague and HRW’s Washington Director, argues that this institutionalized ignorance should change.
“Collecting and analyzing information on human rights violations should be an essential part of any intelligence officer’s job.”
Of course, we all realize that having the intelligence community gather information on human rights abuses won’t by itself create the political will needed to make human rights a bigger policy priority. But at least it would give policymakers a clearer picture of other countries, their governments, and how to engage with them.
And isn’t that the purpose of foreign intelligence gathering?