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There are dozens of bad arguments governments give for not tackling human rights abuses as they should – and as they are often legally obliged to.
You’ll sometimes hear their leaders simply issue denials of the evidence: “it never happened,” or “it wasn’t us.” Sure. And all the videos, satellite images, and eye-witness testimonies?
Or sometimes they’ll attack the messenger: “you and your organization are imperialist dogs,” or “you’re paid agents of our enemies.” A classic.
Another bad excuse abusive governments occasionally give for their appalling record on human rights is along the lines of: “give us more time.”
The argument goes more or less like this: we’re a new government, or we’re a new country, or we have a new political system. We’re young, and still learning how to do things. We just emerged from a terrible dictatorship, and you can’t expect us to be a fully-fledged democracy that always respects human rights like in western Europe right away.
This is an argument I heard fairly often from government officials and government supporters in eastern Europe and central Asia 25-30 years ago. The idea was the countries were new, they had just gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they were slowly “in transition” to western-European-style democracy.
The argument is flawed in so many ways.
First, it’s founded on a false idea that there are somehow established “stages of development” governments go through like a player in the video game Civilization. Supposedly, democracy and respect for human rights are the inevitable end point, but a country has to go through other stages – like autocracy – first.
That’s a pretty dubious notion on its own, but the idea that western-European democracies were the model and the end point make it even more problematic.
The reference to western Europe – which is the comparison I heard most often in the 1990s – came with the implication western European countries didn’t have human rights problems of their own. They did then, and, as any reader of this newsletter knows, they still do.
Finally, the suggestion that democracies never backslide is ludicrous. You merely have to look around today at the human rights horrors in some countries that used to pride themselves on being “democracies.” The backsliding on fundamental rights is all too depressingly obvious.
The “give us more time” argument just falls apart on every level.
Here’s the reality: Countries whose governments signed international agreements to protect universal human rights – universal, not western European – have committed themselves to uphold those rights.
New country, old country, transitioning country, whatever. Stop making excuses, and instead, work on fulfilling your promises.
