The Secretary-General's Lecture Series: 'who is afraid of human rights?'.

On 26 May 2004, Secretary-General Kofi Annan invited delegates, UN staff and members of civil society affiliated with the United Nations to a lecture entitled "Who Is Afraid of Human Rights?", part of the Secretary-General's Lecture Series. It included brief presentations by three guest speakers: Ali Mazrui, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York in Binghamton; Najat Al-Hajjaji, Permanent Representative of the Mission of the Libyan Arab Jamahariya to the United Nations and Chairperson of the 59th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights; and William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. A question-and-answer session followed.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In his opening comments, Mr. Annan addressed the continuing violations of human rights: "More than half a century after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is very easy to feel disillusioned, and for millions around the world to wonder if the Declaration's words will ever be more than just that: words on a page." Drawing attention to two recent instances of grievous abuse of Iraqi prisoners and the attack on civilians in Sudan's Darfur region (see page 70), he reminded the audience of the innumerable human rights violations occurring every day in the world which often go unreported.

In his presentation, Mr. Mazrui looked at the cultural dimension of human rights. He said that there was a universal ethical code slowly revealing itself, which would gradually be identified as human rights through "the old utilitarian principle of minimization of pain and maximization of happiness in human experience". He suggested two factors needed to be taken into consideration when discussing culture: historical relativism, which is the change of moral standards across generations; and cultural relativism, which is the variation of moral judgements across different societies and cultures around the world. These factors have affected leadership and ethics in different places and time periods.

Mr. Mazrui also addressed what he said was several major ideological changes concerning universal human rights. These range from homosexuality, the death penalty and interracial marriages to women's rights and political corruption. As evidence of historical relativism, he pointed out that homosexuality has been legalized in most Western countries since the second half of the twentieth century, while only five decades earlier it had been regarded as a crime almost everywhere in the world. Similarly, he said, cultural relativism manifested itself in the fact that while at least thirty countries have abolished the death penalty since they agreed that it is a human rights violation, the United States still has not come to terms with that agreement.

While he saw hopeful signs in the field of human rights, Mr. Mazrui said that some universal standards are still to be accepted and fully acknowledged. The torturing and killing of innocent children might already be universally regarded as a violation of human rights, but innocent prisoners in various countries are still being tortured. He emphasized the distinction between human rights and civil liberties, in that while every person is entitled to human rights, civil liberties are subject to the regulations in specific countries and regions. For instance, interracial marriage is now considered an aspect of universal human rights, yet the right to conduct same-sex marriages is not yet acknowledged worldwide and unlikely to be incorporated into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mr. Mazrui did suggest, however, that same-sex marriages might one day be universally recognized.

The subject of Ambassador Al-Hajjaji's presentation was the politics of human rights, which she stressed was an extremely sensitive and complex issue. The first Arab-Muslim and African woman to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights, she faced a very challenging task on her nomination in 2003, when human rights situations had sharply deteriorated and given the terrorist operations and attacks in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. As Commission Chairperson, the Ambassador recounted how she had to fulfil her duty with "prudence, patience, objectivity and genuine neutrality". She also recalled the items on the Commission's agenda, ranging from civil and political rights to economic, social and cultural rights, and in particular the rights of children and women, minorities, the indigenous and internally displaced peoples. The Commission also focused on racism, promoting development and sovereignty, and the human rights situation in specific countries.

The Libyan Ambassador also said that human rights issues were perhaps most vulnerable to "double standards, double norms and arbitrary attitudes" around the world, and expressed her personal view that the Commission has gradually transformed itself into a political body, and therefore human rights issues have come to be regarded as political matters, governed and dominated by "power politics and self-interest". As the notion of human rights changes according to time and place, she said, the Commission on Human Rights-the main international body responsible for uniting States under one common agreement on human rights--has instead become a plat-form for "exchanging accusations" and "exacting revenge" among Member States.

There have been instances where States were pressured by more powerful nations and, consequently, the Commission on Human Rights has also witnessed harsh and even violent confrontation among its delegations. Ambassador Al-Hajjaji concluded her presentation by acknowledging that the main losers in all human rights violations have always been the victims who looked to the Commission as their champion. The Commission would need to transform and improve itself so that the commitment to promote human rights was, she said, no longer distorted by political tyrannies or human rights "hypocrises".

At the beginning of his presentation, Mr. Schulz remarked that the lecture's topic, "Who is afraid of human rights?", was a provocative question. He proposed two possible answers: "No one" or "Everyone". He believed that since human rights remained more a dream than a reality for much of the world, it was understandable to conclude that "no one" was afraid of human rights. Not only have some Governments suppressed human rights, non-state actors were also responsible for some of the worst violations and were often less likely to abide by humanitarian law than were many Governments. Mr. Schulz said that the international community was still struggling to establish a global treaty against "terrorism" and had not yet been able to agree on a common definition of the term. Thus, an answer to "Who is afraid of human rights?" may well be "no one".

Nevertheless, history has witnessed a long list of those who did fear human rights. As Mr. Schulz stated, some small countries were afraid because it was conceivable to them that foreign powers would compromise their sovereignty in the good name of protecting human rights. As safeguarding these rights had become a good way to gain respectability in the international community, any Government that appeared to be blatantly violating those rights would risk being regarded as a "rogue" State and, therefore, lose its credibility and chances to obtain aid from other countries.

Large countries were also afraid of human rights because they limited their autonomy. Mr. Schulz commented that "human rights and humanitarian law define the boundaries beyond which those who pride themselves on civilized behaviour may not go". Recalling the meeting that he and his colleagues in the civil rights movement had more than a year ago with top United States officials at the Pentagon and the National Security Council concerning the mistreatment of prisoners in United States custody, Mr. Schulz said: "It now appears that our pleas were ignored, not because those officials took [that mistreatment] so casually but because they took them all too seriously, and they believed that the mistreatments were justified in a world in which after 9/11 all the rules were repeatedly set to have changed."

Mr. Schulz said he believed the reason why the United States was apprehensive of some human rights instruments was because adherence to the international structure was "enormously inconvenient" and required foremost the recognition of the concept of an international community. As evidence for the failure to fulfil that requirement, Mr. Schulz cited National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's comment in Foreign Affairs magazine during the presidential campaign in 2000: "Foreign policy in a Republican Administration will proceed from the firm ground of the national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community."

It was not just small and large Governments that do not hesitate to violate human rights to defend their own interests, he said. Military officials were also afraid of human rights because such rights affirmed that "all blood flows red". While spending so much time on training designed to induce soldiers to kill their "enemy", the military tends to ignore the fact that the adversaries are humans, too. Mr. Schulz said that although human rights advocates were by no means all pacifists, they did insist that no one sacrifice fundamental humanness by taking up arms. He further said that international corporations were among those that were most fearful, if not derisive, of human rights, because of the pragmatic apprehension that human rights could cost them money. If companies had human rights problems, they might stand to lose their reputation, their customers and their revenues; and if these firms did observe human rights, they would no longer need to confront accusations by rights advocates.

The United Nations was another institution that, on occasion, might be afraid of human rights because, according to Mr. Schultz, human rights standards were able to magnify the failures; international crises at times required that a choice be made between peace and justice, and there had been instances when the United Nations had to prioritize the pursuit of justice over the maintenance of peace and the protection of human rights, despite its faith in the co-existence of these values in the long run.

Mr. Schulz also believed that the human rights community itself was afraid of human rights. He recalled that Western advocates had been challenged to expand their understanding of these rights to include social and economic rights. For example, to be a true protector of human rights was to denounce both the Cuban imprisonment of political dissidents and the United States' embargo of Cuba, as well as to condemn Palestinian suicide bombers while at the same time criticizing the human rights violations of the Israeli defence forces. In the process, rights advocates could not ignore the possibility of becoming isolated.

While concluding that perhaps everybody was in some way "afraid" of human rights, Mr. Schulz also emphasized the importance of an engaged international civil society in the creation and maintenance of an international human rights regime. It was due to the fact that all the institutions he had cited in his talk, including non-governmental organizations, had their own narrow interests, and only a truly global civil society could effectively promote human rights on a worldwide scale.

Another reason why global civil society was so crucial to this endeavour was because it embodied the human capacity for moral imagination, without which humanity would undoubtedly decay. Many who had violated human rights committed those crimes because of a lack of moral imagination. Mr. Schulz noted, adding that those who had never faced pain were not able to imagine what it was to suffer, and the strong could not imagine what it was to be weak. And such moral imagination, he said, was exactly what the world today desperately needed. "Only until we are aware of the unfortunate fate of our peers can the world no longer be afraid of human rights", he said.

By Nguyen Tang Le Huy Quoc-Benjamin, for the Chronicle