Thanks to Kay Reibold of the Montagnard Human Rights Organization for forwarding on to me Joshua Kurlantzick’s piece, The Downfall of Human Rights.
As I commented on the Newsweek site, I value the analysis, since it’s important to evaluate how — or whether — human rights as an approach to alleviating some human suffering is working. We can’t just assume that because “human rights” feels good, it is effective. When we experience dramatic failures, like the eight years under President George W. Bush, we need to acknowledge them and find better ways to defend human rights (even though it may mean fighting battles we thought we won, like over torture).
What Kurlantzick does is take on the young administration of President Barack Obama at an exceptionally difficult moment, and draw dramatic, over broad and dire conclusions about the role human rights plays in diplomacy and human events around the world. Obama is “waffling”… caving to China… engaging with a “brutal Burmese junta” .. and the rest of the world is following suit.
But what of the president’s courageous and clear rejection of torture? Or the Department of Justice’s recent report on the “torture lawyers,” Jay Bybee and John Yo? While the report fell short of saying that they were guilty of misconduct, it did conclude that Yoo “knowingly failed to provide a thorough, objective and candid interpretation of the law” and that Bybee, now a federal judge, “acted in reckless disregard of his professional obligations.”
Sure, I wish we could throw them, and many others, in jail. Yet this is not nothing, and is but one example of how things are not only materially different than during the Bush Administration, but also from previous dark periods in American history.
The downfall of human rights since… when? If we restrict ourselves only to the twentieth century, we can find any number of examples of how “human rights” failed to stop the worst of the worst. Yet are we as bad off today as we were in 1944, 1978, 1994, the worst of Darfur, the height of the Bush embrace of rendition and torture?
I would counter that human rights is far more embedded in international relations than it was 5 years ago (without a doubt) and that’s not just referring to the “Dark Side” of torture promoters like Dick Cheney. Mike Posner, a dedicated activist, is at State, we have convictions at international tribinals, truth commissions even in the US. While human rights won’t cure baldness or stop Kim Jong Il, I don’t think that’s necessarily a condemnation. Sure, people are rightly worried now about the economy and global warming, etc — and in 1945, when the UDHR was signed, we had equally pressing and scary worries.
Don’t overestimate the power of the idea — or underestimate how much it has gained in a relatively short time.