On June 14, the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) held a public panel discussion titled, “The Role of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Setting Examples or Exercising Leadership?” E. Robert Goodkind, Chair of JBI’s Administrative Council, moderated the program which featured the following panelists:
George Packer, writer for The New Yorker magazine; Suzanne Nossel , U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations; Sharon Hom, Executive Director, Human Rights in China, and Andrew Apostolou, Senior Program Manager, Freedom House. A summary is presented below.
George Packer: Rights and Wrongs
George Packer’s essay titled "Right and Wrongs," published in The New Yorker on May 17, 2010 critiqued President Barack Obama's human rights policy. Beginning from the premise that following the Bush administration there was “a need to cleanse the air,” Obama’s speeches did not moralize about good and evil, nor did he emphasize freedom. Rather than prodding other countries to focus on human rights or democracy, however, Obama embarked on a policy that featured other issues: renewing American partnerships with countries like Russia, rebuilding multilateral institutions on issues like nuclear non-proliferation, and trying to engage with hostile regimes like Iran.
In China, early in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly assured her hosts that human rights would not interfere with improved relations. General Scott Gration, the President's Special Envoy to Sudan, suggested that the U.S. would deal with President Omar al-Bashir who was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). These developments were met with dismay by human rights activists, according to Packer. In time, the administration found "a better balance between engagement and criticism" but it continues to face serious questions and is "coming up against the limitations of engagement."
Packer talked with experts close to the Administration and found that while some of Obama's speeches, such as the speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, were quite weighty and even stirring on rights issues, there was a widely recognized gap between the policy stated in the speech and any action thereafter. It is not just the disjunction between words and action, it is actually worse than that. The pattern has been to “say one thing and then imagine that saying it has created a policy and that that policy is going to be implemented.” Packer emphasized that “Implementation is 90% of the battle, and it's taken a long time for implementation to begin to catch up with the speeches." Complicating things further, according to Packer, this is the “most White-House-centric foreign policy since [Richard] Nixon.” The State Department is cut out of foreign policy-making issues, or left to wait for various policy matters to be resolved elsewhere before they can take action -- such as with Afghanistan. While Secretary Clinton has become "more of a dominant force," there is still a lot of frustration in the State Department about White House control.
The critique of Obama from his supporters is a kind of "lover's complaint." They harbor an expectation that Obama, in trying to restore or repair relations with Russia, Iran, China or Burma, and in making an outreach to the Islamic world, will still find a way to raise human rights. To be sure, after the failed policies of the Bush administration, Obama had to "disinfect the room" and make sure the U.S. would "speak with credibility and authority” on rights issues. And yet Obama did not use the terms "human rights" or “democracy” in his Cairo speech until paragraph 44 –“pretty far down” as any journalist could see. When non-violent Iranian demonstrators were demanding their human rights and being shot or hauled off to jail, the Obama Administration’s initial response was “pathetically muted.”
"I don’t think it’s because they didn’t care. I think it’s because they didn’t know how to jump from engagement to criticism," remarked Packer, and they hadn't yet figured out how to "engage and, at the same time, use public as well as private channels to criticize human rights violators and violations". As a result, there has been a lot of disappointment. A key problem with the engagement strategy, he stated, has been too much engagement with governments and too little with the publics, whether in Iran, Burma or elsewhere. “Why is it that over and over we are hearing from Egyptian democracy and civil society activists that they feel they’ve been abandoned?” There is real opportunity there now.
Suzanne Nossel, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, has been responsible for the U.S. re-engagement with the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Nossel deals with the multilateral institutions and also collaborates with the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor headed by Assistant Secretary Mike Posner. Nossel is the author of the 2003 article Smart Power, which launched the concept that Secretary Clinton has now very much emphasized as key to America’s approach to the world. “Smart power” calls for using the power of American ideals, diplomacy, culture, etc. in a more sophisticated way to advance U.S. interests and values globally. Nossel outlined four ways that “smart power” informs the U.S. approach to human rights globally.
The first way is “drawing strength and credibility from the foundation of human rights in the U.S.” As applied to human rights in foreign policy, this means "only by getting our own house in order and by being seen to live by the values that we profess can we be a credible force for human rights globally," explained Nossel. Here, Nossel cites a "dramatic change in the administration," with President Obama's executive order on his second day in office declaring an end to torture, his commitment to closing Guantanamo and holding the U.S. accountable to international standards. To illustrate the latter, Nossel pointed to the substantial U.S. preparations for the Universal Periodic Review process before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. As part of the preparation for this review, the U.S. sent officials around the country talking to Arabic Americans in Dearborn, Michigan; Hispanic Americans in Phoenix, Native Americans in Indian country in Montana, and victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to "make this a very rich and engaging dialogue on our human rights." The problems in the U.S. will not be solved overnight, but the interagency team was able to get significant feedback on its dimensions and ways forward. She also stated that Secretary Clinton has committed herself very strongly to trying to get the Administration to ratify the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), “but right now the votes aren’t there.”
Second, the U.S. must integrate human rights into U.S. bilateral diplomacy. To be effective, human rights must be "part and parcel to our diplomacy with the countries whose practices we’re trying to change" as well as with other relevant and influential countries, Nossel explained. An example was the way the U.S. mobilized, together with Europeans and others, to prevent Iran's election to the UN Human Rights Council. As a result, despite “very aggressive lobbying” by Iran initially, Teheran ultimately withdrew from the race when it realized it would be defeated.
To be "more credible and effective," the U.S. should "begin with dialogue and a conversation," according to Nossel. When she and her colleagues have discussions with Beijing and Moscow, they "try to be forthright when it comes to serious issues that need to be raised and serious human rights concerns and abuses that have to be called to account." Yet at the same time, human rights are "not the only dimension" to the bilateral relations. There are many other officials in the system; those whose job is to raise human rights must coordinate with others and try to fit in the issues when dealing with other countries; these dialogues are "constructive" but as Nossel concedes, "they don’t necessary yield results as quickly as some might like, and perhaps as we all might like." In cases when engagement does not succeed, the U.S. may seek to “create a foundation for more forceful action” perhaps at the multilateral level. But precisely in such cases, “our efforts are more credible and effective if they begin with a dialogue,” according to Nossel.
Third, the U.S. must develop stronger multilateral tools for the promotion of human rights. For example, on Iran, the task is to broaden the range of voices that are speaking out, so that advancing rights is not only a U.S. agenda item. That also means working within the UN system because it has a unique credibility and a statement can be heard a different way in Tehran when it comes from the UN rather than from the U.S. It can often be more effective. As an example, Nossel pointed to a “cross-regional” statement critical of Iran to be delivered the following day in Geneva, signed by more than 50 countries. Of course, the limitations of the multilateral system of human rights are well known, especially to the Jacob Blaustein Institute. For example, the U.S. was deeply concerned over the UN's approach to the Goldstone report, and with the flotilla to Gaza. Ultimately the UN Security Council adopted a more measured approach that the U.S. could support, but in Geneva, the Human Rights Council "reverted to form" and the resolution was one-sided.
"We look at every single session of the Human Rights Council as an important opportunity to try to move the ball forward and the Council to take on more issues in a serious way," says Nossel. The U.S. also faces new challenges with new groupings such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference now playing a much bigger role than they did previously. The U.S. continues to fight the effort to impose a norm of "defamation of religion" which would in fact ban speech that is critical of religion.
Fourth, there is the power of norms, and the U.S. is working on new norms, but also on countering “aggressive norms.” Secretary Clinton has also worked to champion Internet freedom, standing up for bloggers and content providers on the Internet despite unhappiness from China and others. The U.S. is very careful about what it supports, unlike many other countries that join resolutions casually. The U.S. will not sign on to anything without a thorough review, to ensure that we can adhere to the agreement fully.
An example of a success of this administration's approach at the UN is the joint resolution with Egypt at the Human Rights Council on freedom of expression, which grew out of the Cairo speech. Of course, the practices of Egypt regarding journalists and bloggers is nowhere near the language affirmed in the resolution
Nossel emphasized that a key reason for the U.S. being present and engaged in the multilateral human rights bodies is “to counter aggressive norms” and that this was demonstrated clearly in the fight over the “defamation of religions” – which the U.S. actively opposed. “It’s still a work in progress but it’s very important that we are there to … counter what is an aggressive initiative,” she stated.
Sharon Hom: China
Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, stated that a number of new developments in China create enormous obstacles for any Administration and constitute great challenges. The U.S. should recognize, however, that China, in fact, exercises "smart power." Long before Nossel's article, China understood how to use bilateral and multilateral soft power to its advantages. China has become very sophisticated about calibrating its messages for different audiences. While it can put us into despair to see how manipulative they are, it's also a sign of hope that the Chinese regime is listening, and sometimes changing their message to what they think the international community wants.
Social protest is growing, particularly among workers and that is a threat to the legitimacy of the Party and its actual power, says Hom. That has in turn engendered crackdowns, detentions and convictions for "subversion". With international media and foreign diplomats in attendance, on Christmas Day, the Chinese courts sentence Liu Xiaobo to eleven years in prison for six essays which were published on websites inaccessible from inside China. The websites, with hits from 50 to several thousands, revealed how critical they were not only of the Chinese government, but of the Chinese people.
However, the Chinese government has also moved to tighten the regulatory climate regarding flow of information and of funding support for civil society groups in China. It has moved to restrict financial support from abroad by instituting new guidelines for any foreign donations from individuals or institutions. The government has increasingly tightened information and monitored the Internet even as it welcomes the Internet as an effective tool in the spread of its own propaganda. Under the revised State Secrets Law that goes into effect on October 1, 2010, Internet Service Providers and telecommunications companies now have an obligation to cooperate with the authorities and the police to monitor and remove content deemed to be state secrets (including retroactively), or face criminal and administrative penalties. The law has also been amended on protection of state secrets in state-owned enterprises, so if you are doing any business with state-owned enterprises you have to be very careful what constitutes commercial secrets and what constitutes state secrets.
In addition, the Chinese government has expanded its soft power, and launched 44 news and commercial websites in foreign languages to increase its impact on foreign audiences and counter Western media “propaganda.” A key ideological message or trend has been to promote a reassertion of cultural relativism, as a banner for claiming that China’s sovereignty, including “Internet sovereignty,” cultural norms and laws must be respected in the face of scrutiny of its implementation of its universal human rights obligations. We are hearing versions of this argument at the UN, in bilateral discussions, and in the media—and it’s being echoed by foreign governments and media.
In addressing these trends, there are “strategic traps” that must be avoided by the U.S. and others in their China human rights policy and actions. One trap is the fear that if you publicly criticize China, it will resist and ignore recommendations for constructively addressing these human rights issues. This is related to the mistake of conflating public outraged responses by the Chinese government to any criticism, and its real responses on the ground. Hom cited two recent examples suggesting that China pays attention to multilateral recommendations and engagement. First, when China was reviewed by the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT), where Felice Gaer served as the rapporteur, two CAT concluding recommendations were that that legislation on torture be revised specifically and that a right to compensation be established. The Chinese government protested bitterly the UN process and said the CAT was biased and reliant on “so-called NGOs.” Yet two years later, the State Compensation Law has been revised and will go into effect this year. It will include mistreatment in detention centers, and compensation for psychological harm – important developments for formal Chinese law.
A second example is to be found in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. China rejected key recommendations of the UPR such as ensuring the independence of the judiciary or the right of the lawyer to defend his/her client without harassment. And yet later, China has begun to make some reforms in these areas. So these processes do have some impact. It’s important to keep a longer timeline and more comprehensive frame in mind in developing strategic approaches and in assessing and recognizing impact. There are wide and growing internal pressures on the Chinese leadership for reforms raised by scholars, rights defenders, lawyers, workers, petitioners, and many other groups. The key role for the international community is to exert external pressure and attention to support these voices and trends.
Andrew Apostolou: Iran
Andrew Apostolou is Senior Program Manager for Freedom House which conducts programs on Iran, among them one funded by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the U.S. State Department, and another by Near East Affairs. Freedom House aims to help Iranians conduct peaceful civic protests; it advocates for Iranian prisoners and activists in danger, and works against censorship.
It can be said that U.S. policy with regard to Iran has failed badly over the last 20 years, according to Apostolou. The U.S. has failed to stop Iran from exporting terrorism or interfering with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and supplying weapons that have killed American, British and Iraqi soldiers. The U.S. has also conspicuously failed to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran simply does not pay attention to U.S. policy in these areas.
The one area where we actually got Iran's attention was in democracy promotion, remarked Apostolou. Iran has protested volubly and come up with conspiracy theories such as "George Bush is in league with George Soros to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran" -- which would be news to both of them, of course. It is to the credit of U.S. funded programs that we have helped Iranians keep their human rights monitoring and reporting going, as well as the debate on democracy and human rights –particularly after the regime closed many media outlets and jailed protesters. We have helped Iranian protesters, and all of this is to our credit.
The U.S. began revising Iranian policy in November 2008. And now the policy stresses helping people to use technology to get around censorship on the Internet, as the regime blocks thousands of web sites. The U.S. coordinates closely with the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and as Ms. Nossel noted, they were able to quietly defeat Iran's candidacy to the UN Human Rights Council, and that was a big defeat for Iran. Fortuitously, Iran was reviewed by the Human Rights Council in the Universal Periodic Review procedure in 2010, and Assistant Secretary Michael Posner was dispatched to Geneva to be the very first speaker critical of human rights in Iran. The U.S. has been cautious on its human rights rhetoric, by contrast with its statements on nuclear issues. Although Iranian activists originally felt that such caution was justified, they have become steadily more critical and are disappointed that the rhetoric is not hardening.
Unlike China, with Iran we are not dealing with a regime that cares about respectability, and therefore the standard recipes may not work. The regime thrives on confrontation, and that means that the grand public statements the U.S. makes on nuclear issues are exactly what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants. When the U.S. engages in rhetorical confrontation, U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf run for cover, and the Iranian opposition gets into a defensive posture and begins trying to prove its nationalist credentials, which is how the regime would like the conversation to be.
It does not help when the U.S. becomes apologetic, such as for the 1953 coup. It's important to remind the Iranian regime of the U.S. assistance in 1946, when the U.S. opposed Stalin's attempt to dismember Iran by creating an independent republic.
Apostolou noted that the initial approach was very cautious but now has changed. He recommended that the U.S. keep asking questions about what has happened to jailed activists and those who have disappeared or have been found dead, or who are facing the death penalty. The U.S. can ask why Shiva Nazar Ahari, a human rights activist who was first arrested after September 11, 2001, for attending a candle-light vigil for the American victims, is on trial for connections to terrorism, when actually all she has done is human rights work.
There are limits to our multilateral work, as now the coalition government in the UK will be less strong on human rights commitments, according to Apostolou. France has recently done a prisoner exchange with Iran, and that lessens its ability to apply human rights pressure. The German approach on human rights has been wanting for some years. And while it's good to promote technology against censorship, the real problem is how to maintain security and integrity in any communications, whether via telephone or Internet. Nokia Siemens has sold the technology to the Iranian regime that it uses to monitor people. So we need to remember that while technology is useful, it is never a substitute for organization. It’s never a substitute for teaching people the basic techniques of politics. Even in the recent UK election, what mattered were leaflets, not Facebook.
Without fanfare, we can help Iranians with campaigns about protection of prisoners, the methods that worked in movements from the 1960s-1980s, like the successful Soviet Jewry movement. Campaigning for prisoners helps lift their spirits, as it did for Natan Sharansky in his day, and it means the guards will treat them better. It's elemental solidarity. We do not need to make the Iranian struggle an instrument of our policy; we can respect it is a parallel struggle to our own, to help Iran become a country at peace with itself and its neighbors.
Discussion
Mr. Goodkind moderated a lively question and answer session that raised a variety of issues for further clarification, including future priorities, how to interact more with human rights defenders, how to measure the results of bilateral dialogues and engagement, the relative strategic importance of human rights and democracy building, how to assess cultural relativism arguments about rights, including the gender and sexuality agenda, and whether the U.S. is likely to ratify more human rights treaties.
First, panelists were pressed to go beyond an assessment of past Obama administration policy, and to offer policy advice for what else should be done by the U.S. Suzanne Nossel, citing the examples Sharon Hom presented, said it is very important to take these international human rights forums and procedures seriously. Despite the Chinese effort to convey that it is futile to raise human rights issues with them, it clearly does make a difference to devote energy to the human rights reports, recommendations, and follow up inside the U.N., and it is useful to take a longer term view of these processes. As for Iran, it is important to speak out and that is being done.
George Packer emphasized the need to be more imaginative in having U.S. leaders connect with people inside the country and specifically questioned why top administration officials have failed to meet with human rights dissidents and defenders in public. Nossel, pointing to the White House summit of human rights leaders held in March and to Secretary Clinton’s regular meetings with civil society groups wherever she travels, argued that whatever improvements could be suggested, “the commitment is there.” She also pointed to the sizable number of senior administration officials with strong human rights credentials.
A questioner asked about actual results from the bilateral dialogues, other than perhaps establishing U.S. credibility on human rights practices here. In exchange for American candor about our rights problems, we “don’t get the same candor back,” the audience member stated, and the U.S. projects a moral equivalency. The topics discussed have been relatively “soft” ones. At what point is the US going to talk about the real human rights problems in such meetings, and defend the NGOs and human rights activists who have not already been coopted into the dialogue programs?
Sharon Hom called for re-thinking and critically examining the impact of US policy in some areas:
1) academic and cultural exchanges – she pointed out the judge that sentenced the blind lawyer, Chen Guancheng, had been a visiting scholar in the US on one of the exchanges, and asked what is the content of their visits and whether they are exposed to human rights experts and rights organizations when in the U.S.?
2) capacity-building and rule-of-law programs—what are these benchmarks and when so much technical assistance is provided, what is the content and are rights-friendly values conveyed?
3) what high end technologies are being sold and what human rights accountability is there?
Suzanne Nossel affirmed that focusing on civil society is indeed a key goal of US human rights policy, and that “we are looking very hard at how we do it, what we can build on, and what’s being done to strengthen civil society and instill solidarity with it.”
Further, she emphasized the importance of public statements made at the UN, in which a lot of country situations are addressed, and the need to figure out how to build coalitions so that these messages are heard and reiterated in other ways, from other countries and institutions, and may become more effective. In short, there is an emphasis on finding out how to put mechanisms in place that will make a difference.
In response to Sharon Hom, Nossel also pointed out that while it’s not so simple to do, programs are indeed being evaluated and that the exchanges need to be looked at in the long term, as well.
A participant inquired about whether “democratic accountability” is not an issue that is seen as a strategic advantage that should be prioritized in U.S. policy, including in any “engagement” policy, whatever its scope. Stating that this is “at the very forefront of thinking within the administration,” Nossel emphasized the “importance of articulating the imperative of promoting and defending human rights and advancing democracy as strategic goals” and noting that officials are “making those arguments in dialogue with our counterparts in regional bureaus.”
George Packer returned to the need to focus on friendly countries like Egypt, and asked why USAID funds will no longer go to civil society activists who haven’t registered with the Egyptian government? Because the Egyptian government wants it that way? “On the Middle East, the U.S. is more hesitant than anywhere else in the world…” Another questioner asked, more pointedly, “How much is U.S. foreign policy governed by the desire to keep certain heads of state where they are and not be overthrown by freedom?” Nossel remarked that human rights is “always in competition with other elements” and it is never the sole dimension of U.S. policy.
Following up on the cultural relativism question, another person asked Suzanne Nossel how much the human rights agenda is simply a Western agenda? And whether gender and sexuality issues are important when the U.S. does its internal reviews and its advocacy abroad. Nossel rejected the idea that rights are merely Western, and as to gender and sexuality, she pointed to Secretary Clinton as one of the most articulate advocates of these matters. “She coined the phrase women’s rights are human rights” at the Beijing conference on women 15 years ago and talks about this wherever she goes. It’s similar on LGBT rights issues, she remarked.
A final question was whether the U.S. was considering ratifying the Convention on Economic and Social Rights and the Rome Statute, as a key part of establishing its own credibility, especially with countries of the South, including South Africa. Nossel responded that she had recently travelled to South Africa for a bilateral dialogue on their vision of possible human rights collaboration. Building common ground won’t be easy as some see “calling out human rights abusers …[as part of a] neo-colonial …agenda.” She also pointed out that the U.S. had just participated anew in the Rome Statute states’ parties meeting (the International Criminal Court). U.S. policy on ratifying human rights treaties won’t change overnight—only 10 per cent of the members of Congress were in office the last time the U.S. ratified a treaty.
Nossel concluded by thanking JBI for doing “amazing work” on human rights and lamenting the fact that there isn’t more time to step back , analyze, reflect and form arguments to be more persuasive in advancing policy on all these matters. Goodkind thanked all the participants and offered to continue to meet together to work through the issues in the future.
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