JBI Human Rights

The Role of Human Rights in US Foreign Policy: Setting Examples or Exercising Leadership

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.

JBI on Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities

The Jacob Blaustein Institute’s Genocide Prevention Project is working to clarify the extent of state obligations in terms of genocide prevention. At the request of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, JBI has under taken an extensive legal review, including consultations with a team of legal specialists and human rights experts, of the many indicators of genocide in order to identify the corresponding legal norms that can be invoked to remind governments of their obligations. 

The "risk factors" consist of a compilation of human rights abuses which have been recorded in the lead up to past genocides and their corresponding legal norms. The precursors can include a history of mass atrocities in a particular country; targeted violence against members of a particular group; the state-condoned use of dehumanizing, discriminatory hate speech against members of a particular group; employment and education practices that discriminate against specific groups; denial of citizenship to members of targeted groups; among other such practices. This list is not exhaustive, and pre-genocidal situations will have significant contextual differences that will require case-by-case analysis. The international community acknowledged the importance of establishing early warning mechanisms to effectively prevent the onset of genocide, most recently in the World Summit Outcome Document of 2005. 

States must be reminded that they have obligations to prevent genocide based on internationally accepted norms with which they are expected to comply. They must be provided with the information necessary to make them aware of the precursors to genocide and of the preventive steps they must take to halt potential genocidal acts. The importance and relevance of a normative framework for the prevention of genocide will better equip the Special Advisor to respond to situations that may appear pre-genocidal.

The "risk factors" listed in the Compilation are derived from international legal norms found in the major international and regional human rights treaties and jurisprudence. The risk factors do not refer to random acts but to severe and systematic abuses of human rights. Many of the rights associated with the risk factors are non-derogable as set forth in Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Though all of the risk factors in the compilation constitute violations of human rights and humanitarian law, each one in and of itself is a “necessary but not sufficient causal factor” of genocide. However, when one and/or more risk factors appears in combination with others and in certain circumstances including deteriorating political, economic and legal conditions in a society, they may well contribute to the onset of genocide. The presence of one or more risk factors therefore does not necessarily mean that genocide will take place, but it should serve as an early warning to a state that it should take measures to mitigate the risk.

The Compilation of Norms is in its near-final stages of review. It will serve to clearly set out the legal basis for genocide prevention within already existing norms of international law, and facilitate with identifying specific situations of possible concern. 

JBI on Religious Freedom for Uighurs and in Kazakhstan

Testimony of Felice Gaer, Chair, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
Before the Subcommittee on Human Rights, International Organizations, and International Terrorism of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, June 10, 2009: The Uighurs:  A History of Persecution.

Kazakhstan:  Tougher Religion Law Under Constitutional Review.

At a meeting on religious freedom and violence at the Jacob Blaustein Institute in New York on December 8, 2009, Cole Durham, director of the Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University Law School and member of the OSCE Advisory Panel on Freedom of Religion, explained that Kazakhstan tightened its law on religion in response to two factors: an influx of various people from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan with a background in extremism and the spread of groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir seeking rule by a caliphate; and increased proselytizing of "new religions" which could be construed as "any denomination formed since [the days of Martin] Luther and [John] Calvin," Durham said.

Examination of China at UN Human Rights Council

When the UN decided to reform the Commission on Human Rights and create a new Human Rights Council, it added a requirement that every country go through a public review of its human rights record on all rights, and before a committee consisting of all members of the UN.

This so-called "Universal Periodic Review" (UPR) was seen by many UN diplomats as the procedure that would save the new Council and bring new country-specific scrutiny to every country.

As the Obama Administration was taking office in January 2009, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a roundtable briefing on the UPR and how non-governmental groups could be involved in the UPR of China.  JBI Director Felice Gaer was one of the panelists who provided testimony.

Gaer emphasized that since China had participated in the review of nearly 50 other states at that time, asking numerous questions about their compliance with human rights issues, it was appropriate that the U.S. and other states participate in a thorough review of  China. At the end of the process, countries are presented with recommendations, which they can either accept or reject.

As one prominent NGO, Human Rights in China noted, the PRC government rejected a large number of basic civil-political rights recommendations, including freedom of information, protection of lawyers and human rights defenders from attacks, freedom of religion (and movement) for Tibetans, Uihgurs, etc.