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Part 2: Interview with the author of "The Politics of Human Rights Protection" Jan Knippers Black
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PART 2 of interview with Jan Knippers Black, author of "The Politics of Human Rights Protection - Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment."
How do those who feel vulnerable and recognize that injustice and feel that powerless get their impact assessment reports read by the proper decision makers who are going to make responsible policies?
Sometimes, it happens because they are determined enough to organize broadly enough to bring their demands into the streets, but lord knows it’s a really, really uphill game. Any group of really vulnerable has to gain allies who are not as vulnerable and build layers of coalitions around them. They also need to organize anybody they see as being in the same category of vulnerability, like indigenous people need to pull together across all the lines they can.
Amazingly enough, a lot of that is happening! There really are international organizations of indigenous peoples. You’d think that would be the last category of people who would be able to find common ground with people on the other side of the world. But there has been a lot of help from lots of international organizations and non-governmental organizations and it does make a difference, but then if the problem being addressed is one within one particular state, then you also need alliances and coalitions within that state too.
And it’s just a really, really major undertaking, because otherwise a government once in office is accessible to the powerful, to the big businesses, people with money to protect and to offer as campaign contributions and it’s very hard for other kinds of people to get access.
If Israel met Hamas on their terms, how would an impact assessment that overrides trumps (i.e. religious concerns, economic concerns, security concerns) look? For example, let’s say Hamas actually played politics as it should since being elected, rather than tactics it used prior to election.
In assessing the problem, everybody seems to forget now that what distinguishes terrorists from other kinds of contenders is that they are put off from the table. They have no way within the system to be heard. That’s not to say that there are not awful people. That’s not to say that harming innocent people is justifiable under any circumstances, but it is to say that there is an approach that should make a difference, which is to bring them to the table.
Maybe some of them you can’t deal with at all, maybe you have to lock them up for the safety of all of us, but if it is a whole movement of people it must be that they have a need that should be dealt with. And in the case of a group like Hamas, for heaven’s sakes, we said, play the game within the system, run for office, have elections the way the rest of us do. They did, they won, and we refuse to acknowledge it and pushed them out again. So we’re not playing the game. The rest of the world is not playing that game fairly with Hamas. It’s hard to see from standing where we are, anything that absolutely promises success, but it’s very clear that the way we are going about it is doomed to failure.
An episode called the peace process that really means a 50-year war is the best example I can see of accepting failure. I can see some good reasons why we wanted to call it the peace process early on as a ploy hoping that it would become one, but at least we have to notice that it didn’t and that we better do something different if we want it to become a peace process.
It seems that all sides are stuck in a big stand-off. It seems that an impact assessment like you promote would have to do away with the kind of terminology we’re talking about right now.
Actually, there have been in-depth studies, you might say impact assessment, the Goldstone Report is one, and it’s amazing how quickly people back off from something that tells an uncomfortable truth, some things that they don’t want to know. That unwillingness to understand is also part of the problem. It goes along with the fact that, as I say, there is no such thing as a system that doesn’t work, every system works for somebody, and this 50-year war is working for a lot of people, and we have to understand that and find ways to make people face that and cut across it.
How do you suggest?
The U.S. and Israel have actually persuaded even the UN Human Rights Council to avoid considering the Goldstone Report that just came out about the consequences of the invasion of Gaza a while back, and the entrapment of a million and a half people in this tiny territory where they are not able to get even the things that they need most. That’s just terrible! It would be wonderful if we could have an international movement that would have to call upon the resources of the media as well to generate an international discourse about this thing, and make people focus on it and understand it. It’s not enough that it is possible for people to understand a situation of abuse, the point is that everybody is under so much pressure in so many ways now, you have to make it impossible for them not to understand in order to get any action.
It’s an occupation that has turned at least part of the area into an open-air concentration camp. People just find it a whole lot easier not to face that.
In your book, you bring up conventions that protect human rights and the importance of their being written, but do you see them being employed in current events?
I think the thing is that those conventions are very valuable. They give us a lever, a handle to pick this up by, but unless there is a category of people, a group, a coalition, a mobilization of activists who are willing to do what it takes to focus international public attention on something, there will be no enforcement. In other words, having the conventions there is essential, but it still doesn’t do the job unless you have people who are willing and able to make it work.
You talk about collective rights in your book, can you share with me your perspective on civil rights laws and the chance they have in countries that have the worst human rights abuses?
I guess, one of the problems, is that even if we are able to get people around the world to understand that there has been a terrible wrong perpetrated against a particular category of people at a time and at a place, we don’t somehow get across to enough people what the background of all that is, how ‘cause and effect’ work to make peoples vulnerable and gives peoples impunity, so that they recognize when there’s another category of people collectivity whose rights are being abused who need to see those rights protected. Most people now understand about the Holocaust and what an awful kind of thing that was and some of the reasons for it, most people understand something about the civil rights movement and how it overcame the terrible level of discrimination and abuse against blacks in the U.S..
A lot of people in the West understand the nature of abuse of women in the Middle East. It’s easier to understand abuses and protections when it’s somebody else, when it’s in some other country. If you talked in Europe about the idea whether people live or die in this country depends on how much money they have, that they can’t get adequate healthcare unless they have adequate money, and that people accept that, they would say it’s shocking, when you think about it. Americans are immune to it, because the kind of a violation that becomes routine ceases to be seen as a violation. So you can apply this to so many kinds of things, for example, the way land has been taken from the people who tilled it, country by country all around the world.
When I first started studying Latin American affairs, it was so easy to attribute the kind of poverty and inequality to the Spanish conquerors and the great landlords of the 15th and 16th centuries, without noticing that the business of pushing people off of their land has been accelerated - it wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse. It continued to get worse all over the world. There are still pressures like that on the indigenous everywhere. I’ve been working on the case of the Mapuche in Chile and taking students down to see first-hand how that works. It’s no longer the great plantations - the old fashion kind, it’s not the sugar or cotton plantations of an earlier day - it’s plantations of pine and eucalyptus, and other commercial logging operations depriving the indigenous people of their land. So, I think that’s the kind of thing you were talking about, and how collective rights, as well individual rights, continue to be violated all over the radar, because people aren’t able to take what they understand about such violations at one time and in one place and transfer it.
So, what about writing more civil rights laws in those areas to protect their rights?
They need tighter laws, but that’s not the main problem in itself. The security trump card is available to be played all over the world, since the U.S. has introduced the war on terror and that there should be laws that are applicable in a case when terror violations have been alleged. They override other kinds of laws that might protect people. There were anti-terror laws that came in under Pinochet, but that kind of thing - the insistence that countries should have anti-terrorist laws - was pushed by the Bush administration all over the world after 9/11, so laws like that are being used to override other laws that were there to protect vulnerable people.
How do we reverse that?
I think somehow it has to start with education, but that also means organization and coalition building and popular movements. How do you get them going? They also have to be in conjunction with communication media campaigns to bring political pressures. And then whatever you can get going on the ground, you have to be able to funnel it to decision makers. To get that kind of chain going is also very difficult. There is nothing easy about this.
Rights are not bestowed, they have to be won and they have to be protected then or else they will lose them again otherwise.
What are your thoughts on Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman who wore trousers in public and therefore was convicted of indecency under Islamic law, and the trousers trial in terms of addressing human rights and Islamic law? She had a huge number of supporters.
There was an awful lot of support. I think the trick is if you can genuinely educate people, if you can get them to understand, to allow themselves to understand what is going on, then they really do support human rights. Most people believe that they support human rights, even if they don’t know anything about the particulars. But then they don’t want to know more about it, because it’s painful to know, because it puts an obligation on you to do something about it, to think about it.
Our problem is not that most people don’t care, they do care in principle, we have to get them to care enough to say something, to stand up. There was a poll, I think it was earlier this year or late last year, of 16 countries representing 2/3 of the world population that said that they thought women should have equal rights and that governments and international organizations should contribute to protecting those rights. So, it’s not that public opinion runs the other way, it’s that public opinion does not lead people to take stands that are strong enough or open enough to override the power of those who have too much to lose by acknowledging equal rights.
Individual heroism like Lubna exercised really does make a difference. It doesn’t always, but it does sometimes make a huge difference. I think the government hedged a bit after they saw that reaction and that answers the question that it does make a difference when people get out there and express themselves.
Writing on the topic of individual versus collective rights, you wrote “Perhaps a recombination of supposed first and third world positions would better serve to protect the rights of the majority worldwide.” Can you elaborate?
The discourse and the use of the idea of collective rights for the discourse has so often been dominated by the male leadership of countries where gender rights are so unequal, and then the discourse becomes cover for abusing women. They say, 'We don’t believe in individual rights, we believe in collective rights, and that includes our right to abuse women,' but what about the women’s rights. That’s a sham!
What I meant too was that the use of the idea of individual right in the West has become absurd to the point of giving priority to profit. Corporate personhood means that they can steal like swine in the name of corporations, because the corporations get away with pretending that they are individuals. In the meantime, the same country that allows that to happen does not allow individuals necessarily to speak their own languages in the workplace, or to smoke their pot at home or whatever. It is not really a priority given in the West to give individual rights; it’s a priority to the rights of the people who have the most money. They have all kinds of ways written into the law to protect that.
Can you give a current example?
We have a pharmaceutical industry that is able to pour so much money into the Congress that they were able to get a law that says that even though they can sell the drugs more cheaply to other countries, we cannot buy them back from other countries. They can make a law that makes it impossible for a government agency to make a deal with Canadian pharmaceutical importers and exporters to sell them back to us cheap. It’s absurd, the kinds of supposed rights that corporations get under that myth that we call individual rights.
In your book, you say, that “the real victor in the cold war thus was neither West over East nor North over South so much as the private sector over the public sector. That by no means ordained that the state was to fade away or that public budgets were to shrink. Rather it meant that the boundary between public and private domains was to be set by the private sector rather than the public one and that the power base of governments would shift more decisively from popular constituencies to corporate ones.” Do you think this might change given the current economic hardships that we are seeing?
Certainly, it should. You would expect so. That’s what happened when we had the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a big turn around, because we could get the kind of government that assumed responsibility for it. It isn’t happening now. It certainly has not begun to happen. In a way, ‘we the people’ are begging the supposed healthcare insurers to let in us in the gate, to give the people something to say about their healthcare system. The whole approach is as if it was theirs to give us. There is no reason to have insurance companies involved in healthcare. What do they have to do with healthcare? But they own it, and we are not seriously challenging that. You’re right it should be turning around now, but it has a long way to go. We’re still going in the wrong direction right now.
In your book, you talk about incarceration and that it should be countercyclical, in that rates of serious crime rise in periods of economic decline, but in fact it responds above all now to political climate, particularly the generation of fear. Can you be specific about this observation?
I forget the exact figures, but it seems to me that incarceration, and I’m not certain whether we’re talking about the country as a whole or just in California, but I believe it has quadrupled over the last two or three decades at a time when actual rates of violent crime were dropping. So what does that say? It’s bizarre.
It is an economy that operates on its own now. It manages to build its own demand by scaring people and then just locking up more people for reasons that in the past we wouldn’t have taken seriously as a reason for locking them up. Small amounts of consumption of some drug that happens to be illegal, or perhaps is made illegal for frivolous reasons, like marijuana.
Even economic reasons. We don’t have a debtors’ prison, but we sure drive people to doing the kinds of things that can somehow be defined as illegal and then locking them up. We’ve hugely expanded the prison industry to lock up people who may be in the country illegally, instead of just deporting them. It was bad enough the way they were deported without any of the court procedures that are supposed to be carried out, that they are entitled to, but now we are neither deporting them nor giving them their day in court, we are just holding them in prisons, then sooner or later deporting them. [They’re being thrown in] just for being in the wrong country, and for trying to get a job. The point is that we are feeding the prison industry, which is now a private industry, like the military industry complex. It’s gone the same way as the medical industry, which used to be largely public or at least non-profit, and is now private.
What countries currently have the worst human rights violations?
It depends. There are so many different kinds of violations. China’s record with respect to capital punishment is just awful. The U.S. is one of the worst - one of the top 4, I guess - in capital punishment per capita, but China is by far the worst. The U.S., on the other hand, is the worst by far in the number of people incarcerated. If you are looking at abuses in terms of categories of people, like women, well, maybe Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to say. There are a number of countries that abuse women systematically and straightforwardly as a matter of law, as in Saudi Arabia, others where that kind of abuse may not be sanctioned by law, but it happens anyway. Even in a very modern and sophisticated, and in many ways a democratic country, like Turkey, abuses occur like honor killings of young women, because they are in the company of men they are not related to. There are terrible abuses like that in so many different places.
Do you think the super global powers like China, like the U.S., and countries like Saudi Arabia could find a shared interest among all of them in improving their human rights records, or is this just an exercise in our collective ability to recognize these violations, but our hands are tied?
I don’t think an initiative to find a collective interest will ever come from governments, I think it has to come from people. We have to force our governments to see it. I think it would not be a problem of getting the people to see that they have a collective interest in having governments that respect their rights, but systems operate as they do, because they serve the interests of some people. So that’s what you have to cut across somehow. That means governments won’t act in the public interest unless ‘we the people’ force them to do so.
I liked your suggestion that in the long term, peace means many things and should include “re-visioning of what civilization can and must be about.” And that for the time being, most of all, investing in peace must mean investing in the UN, the ICC, and other multilateral organizations and institutions. The way that civilization is defined depends on what book you read, there’s the Eurocentric view of civilization, the Arab-centric view of civilization and those who want to merge those views and not promote a clash of these civilizations. Can you elaborate?
In a way, we have ceased to aspire to the kinds of things that most people were agreed upon in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of the kind of society that we want, much less we accept. We have accepted the idea that profit motives outrank human rights. How can we ever have accepted something like that?
It could be argued that civilization was built on slavery, but I would say that modernization was built on slavery. It’s not the same thing as civilization. You’re right it depends on what one means by civilization. I like what is attributed to Gandhi, the idea that he was asked about what he thinks about western civilization and he said, ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ Most of us in the so-called Western civilization assume that we have a corner on civilization, the right to define it for ourselves. I don’t think that you find a lot of clash in values among the non-hegemonic. I think that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents probably the needs and feelings of most people.
But we have to understand that the hegemonic will try to define it in ways that work particularly for them and in some areas people will claim a right to collective or cultural rights that are not recognized by the universal declaration, meaning that half the population has the right to abuse the other half of the population. Whether it’s men wanting to abuse women, or the rich wanting to abuse the poor, if you start with the assumption that human rights means all people and all rights and that everybody should have a say about what those rights are, then it’s democracy with a small ‘d’. I think there is a global view of what civilization is, but most people don’t have enough to say about the way they see it.
Speaking of civilization, you’ve probably heard about Iranian Nobel Laureate winner Shirin Ebadi who took issue with the “clash of civilization” posture that has characterized West-Middle East relations over the past 30 years. She was Iran’s first female judge, supported the Islamic Revolution in 1978, suffered and then became a human rights attorney. She has said that Middle Eastern leaders use Islam as a shield. “They use Islam to hide behind and violate human rights. Like [Samuel] Huntington, they claim Islam is not compatible with democracy. But this is their interpretation. They interpret Islam in a way that grants them power and supports their power. Any objection to them is then an objection to Islam.” Your thoughts?
I’m very sad about the appearance of that book. Whether Samuel Huntington really thought that something like that was inevitable, or whether he thought it was a timely popular topic, is an open question maybe, but I think it played into what was to come and helped a lot of people come to a conclusion that differences inevitably lead to clash and the thing to do about it is to prepare for clash, instead of prepare for mutual understanding among cultures that are different.
He basically said that Islam is not compatible with democracy. So what, we are supposed to take that at face value?
In the first place, whose democracy? Ours is not compatible with democracy. Ours is run by money. Is that what democracy is supposed to be about? It is just too helpful to too many people to have the idea that violence is inevitable so preparing for it is the way to go. If you prepare for violence of course you’ll get it. If you prepare for peace, maybe that’s what you’ll get.
When I was talking about the trump cards, I really talked about a triad of trump cards, and the other one is religion, because if you credit that kind of religious thinking, I don’t mean from just the Islamic side, but from the so-called Christian side, there is a kind of mindlessness there that is also a conversation stopper that tells people that whoever can claim to speak for God has the last word and that people with better intentions and better sense are not supposed to weigh in. It has the same effect then as the security card and the economics card that just assume a right to override everything else.
I think that she’s right that a great many readers over there use Islam as a shield just in the way that many leaders, including supposedly religious leaders in the U.S., use family values as a shield. I think that people who are serious about human rights just have to keep trying to protect even our words and our dialogue. The whole discourse gets pulled into another direction, if we are not careful.
Ebadi mocked the idea floated by the same leaders that, instead of abiding by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they would write their own “Islamic Declaration of Human Rights.” “How many declarations do we need?” said Ebadi. “If Muslims are allowed to draft their own, we will have a Christian Declaration and a Hindu Declaration… We will have as many declarations as there are faiths. It would be impossible.” How do you react to this?
That’s the problem - it’s not so universal. The pretense at least is that most of the world has had a say in these major documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if it is just a matter of one group’s dogma versus another group’s dogma, there is no end to that.
What age are we in now? Do you think that we are in a more selfish era than previously? For example, there was the age of enlightenment during the Industrial Revolution, the age of reason, the age of discovery or exploration, the great awakening…
I would say we are in the age of denial. It’s certainly not the age of reason, is it? In some ways, it’s an age of greed. I think most people go along with it, the idea that greed can override, but I don’t think most people are greedy. Most people accept empire, but I don’t think most people are hegemonic. But most people will settle for denial. Trying to survive however they can and to not notice, because they don’t feel empowered to challenge what they see.
That’s really what this book is all about, trying to get past that.
Do you think that it is a matter of time that those who implement the politics of human rights protection will not be vilified or seen as missing the importance of industry and economics, and seen as too sensitive?
I never seem to remember who said what, but I think it was Solomon who said a prophet is not without honor save in his own country. We don’t mind being reminded that somebody else way far away is being abused or abusing other people, we just don’t want to know that it is right here, because we don’t know what to do about it and we don’t want to feel responsible for it.
How do we stop the vilification?
There are ways. We need more ways of protecting and recognizing the kind of work that needs to be done when we see it. Instead of backing off and disassociating from people who have the nerve to tell the truth, we should protect them, we should do them honors. We don’t. We have laws that are supposed to protect whistle-blowers, but they don’t, because most people understand that it’s dangerous to be a whistle-blower and it can be dangerous to be associated with whistle-blowers. We just have that upside down and backwards. We bestow more honors on military leaders who bomb villages than we do the people who might have tried to point out ahead of time that if you drop that bomb you are going to destroy the village.
If you can get people to listen and think about it, maybe you can help them understand, that caring about what your country is doing is patriotic and taking responsibility is perhaps even more patriotic. We’re not led to think that way. We’re led that blindly following people right off a cliff is the way to go. The kind of twist that we need to our way of thinking is so huge.
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