Annotation of
Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly (September, 2009).
Does Obama believes in human rights? By Bret Stephens. The Wall Street Journal. October 19, 2009.
~ The Editors
Next month will be the first anniversary of President Barack Obama in the White House. The United States President was elected largely for his promise of change. His message inspired many people around the world, who believed that Obama’s leadership would bring the kind of change that they were hoping for. There was an international expectation for a new logic of international engagement in which human rights would play an important role. In his recent acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, Norway, President Obama emphasized once again his commitment for a more humane world: “We are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.”
This Roundtable evaluates President Obama’s human rights policy and asks whether his actions in this field are moving toward the direction of justice or not. In other words, is there any change in human rights policy that “we can believe in”? This month centerpieces—Obama’s first speech at the United Nations and Bret Stephens critique on current human rights policies—serve as a general background for the panelists to initiate a discussion on the progress and challenges ahead for the Obama administration.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama underscored the necessity to start a new era of global cooperation based on a multilateral approach, respect for international law, and renewed commitment to join human rights regimes through the UN Human Rights Council. He mentioned some of the actions taken by his administration to reestablish a human rights policy. “[o]n my first day in office, I prohibited -- without exception or equivocation -- the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law. Every nation must know: America will live its values, and we will lead by example.”
Obama’s speech at the UN has moved a long way from his predecessor, George W. Bush, helping the United States to recover its legitimacy at the international level. However, as our panelists have pointed out, if the United States wants to lead by example on human rights issues, it is not enough to be better than the former president. Rather, the United States needs to build on concrete actions to effectively serve the “common interests of human beings.” However, as the recent visit of Barack Obama to China illustrates, the delicate balance between human rights interests and other foreign policy goals is not an easy task; they more often than not tend to be in conflict with each other.
How can President Obama meet human rights challenges? Our contributors provide a number of recommendations to the current American administration; we would like to highlight two:
First, credibility. A government can not promote democracy abroad if it is not respecting democracy at home. Respecting civil and political rights on counterterrorism activities is seen as a priority on this area. The United States will not be able to urge other governments to observe human rights without leading with the example.
Second, match rhetoric with reality. Claiming an international commitment to human rights without deeds undermines Obama’s leadership at the international level. “But without such action, Obama’s words will just leave us feeling empty since faith without works is dead.” Actions matters as President Obama himself acknowledge in his Nobel Prize speech.
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
December 2009: Obama’s Human Rights Policy
Annotation of
Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly (September, 2009).
Does Obama believes in human rights? By Bret Stephens. The Wall Street Journal. October 19, 2009.
~ The Editors
Hope over Experience?
by Cath Collins, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
“The option for genuine multilateralism, for leading the way in accepting the binding nature of international law and refusing to invoke the veto option whenever national interests are trimmed, is always there. But the US has consistently refused to take it. This is where Obama could make a difference(…)"
Writing about US human rights policy from the outside is always a disconcerting experience. All bets are off, and all assumptions are turned on their head. Assumptions from the South looking North are that, rhetoric aside, US interests rarely if ever feature human rights protection and promotion in first place. What’s more, they have very frequently featured the opposite: dirty tricks, torture and rendition were sadly familiar to students of Latin American history long before Guantanamo. The Clinton years went some way towards reining in the more blatant contradictions of the 1980s, but they also set in train the easy and often misused equation between US style democracy and rights that paved the way for “preventive” regime change under Bush. US invocations of freedom have always, in other words, been selective even within its shores and often seem quite irreconcilable with the reality of its actions beyond them.
Read in this key, the objections raised by Bret Stephens to Obama’s lukewarm, or selective, human rights performance in office come under the heading of non-surprises. US economic interests have taken first place? Rhetoric has not been matched by reality? It’s more difficult to govern than to make promises? None of this is unexpected, unless perhaps you were one of the many who projected onto Obama the long-postponed realization of the (North) American Dream. The illusions were not restricted to US shores: the Nobel Prize committee shared the precipitate enthusiasm.
Most of what Obama has and has not done is quite explicable if you stick to what politicians really do—and are supposed to do. As he himself points out in his speech to the UN, his job is not to save humanity from itself but to represent US interests on the world stage. So when Stephens castigates the policy of “engagement” with Burma, he may well be right to do so. But his reasoning—that the military junta will only try to turn all US overtures to their own advantage—is somewhat flawed. All states, everywhere, seek to maximize their advantage on the world stage. The job of international regimes is to tame or redefine national interest(s), showing how the sum of individual choices is not always mutual advantage.
If US aims really stretched beyond individual messianism to pursuit of the common interest—as defined by all—the US would not seek to bend others to its ever-changing will. The option for genuine multilateralism, for leading the way in accepting the binding nature of international law and refusing to invoke the veto option whenever national interests are trimmed, is always there. But the US has consistently refused to take it. This is where Obama could make a difference, but it’s unlikely that even Democrats, let alone Republicans, will let him. The US wants, first and foremost, to keep control and be seen to be keeping control. The “Free Tibet” and “Save Darfur” bumper stickers in one sense only perpetuate the myth that Tibet is ours to free, Darfur ours to save.
The Chinese know better: they will sit out US self-belief in the solid conviction that the next century is theirs. Roosevelt’s post-war conclusion that the US had learned to be “citizens of the world” seems precipitate when viewed from here. Few if any in the US would agree that China should call the shots on the world stage. But what is so different? The US has done so for as long as it was able. The “winner takes all” logic that served the US so well when it was winning will work to its disadvantage once in decline. If the strongest, wealthiest, most vigorous state is free to shape the world in its own image, moral content is irrelevant. If no state is free to do that, then we need to see the emerging outlines of the common moral framework, and a demonstration from the current “front runners” that they really believe it is for all.
Cath Collins has been associate lecturer in politics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), before which she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has lived and worked as a youth and community organizer in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and the UK.
Change We Can Believe In?
by Katherine Hite, Vassar College
"But it’s very hard not to be dismayed by some of the continuities from the Bush to the Obama administration (…). When it comes to US-Latin America relations, such decisions include: professing support for progressive immigration reform while expanding regressive anti-immigration measures; claiming a commitment to human rights and democratic engagement while facilitating increased military control over domestic affairs in the region; and voicing a desire for a multilateral approach to Latin American affairs while patently undermining such an approach."
We were warned to temper our high hopes for a bold new Obama era of human rights. After all, President Obama would have “a lot on his plate”: a serious economic crisis, high unemployment, over forty million people without health insurance, “two wars,” global volatility. But it’s very hard not to be dismayed by some of the continuities from the Bush to the Obama administration, as well as by some Janus-faced policy decisions with damning human rights implications. When it comes to US-Latin America relations, such decisions include: professing support for progressive immigration reform while expanding regressive anti-immigration measures; claiming a commitment to human rights and democratic engagement while facilitating increased military control over domestic affairs in the region; and voicing a desire for a multilateral approach to Latin American affairs while patently undermining such an approach.
So many of us were euphoric about Obama’s victory. After several years of a presidency that not only broke international human rights law but seemed proud to do so, it certainly felt like we had nowhere to go but up. And indeed, within his first days in office, Obama announced the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention center within a year; he ordered the CIA to close secret long-term detention facilities; and he re-criminalized the CIA’s use of extreme torture techniques. As Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly reflects, the President’s discourse emphasizes global commonality, a new and respectful engagement, and both tacit and explicit recognition of US complicity with conflict and violence. In his speech, Obama announced that the US has joined the Human Rights Council. The fact that the US was not on the Council until now speaks volumes to the pathetic lows the US had reached.
Echoing this spirit of taking responsibility for the violence, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and President Obama himself all recognized during their visits to Mexico several months ago that US-originated gun-running, coupled with the ongoing high US demand for drugs, bring deadly consequences for Mexico. Yet the administration has continued the Bush administration approach of concentrating on drug supply and dedicating the vast majority of US-Mexico aid to the Mexican military, while a very small percentage targets judicial aid and other civilian protections efforts. The Merida Initiative to Combat Illicit Narcotics and Reduce Organized Crime exemplifies this approach. While the US congress threatened to withhold allocating a percentage of the Merida funding due to human rights concerns regarding the Mexican military, the Obama administration successfully allayed such concerns, claiming sufficient human rights progress was being made. This is in spite of the fact that while at least two thousand complaints of human rights violations have been brought against the military in the past three years, only one Mexican soldier has been convicted of human rights violations.
On the immigration and US-Mexico border front, there is similar cause for concern. As someone who is clearly quite familiar with racial profiling, Obama was expected to eliminate the controversial 287(g) program, which has allowed local law enforcement agencies the power to act as federal immigration agents. The most notorious abuser of this authority is Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has targeted hundreds of Latinos and immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. The subject of several ACLU lawsuits representing victims of racial profiling, Arpaio is now being investigated by the Justice Department and has theoretically been reigned in.
But Arpaio has become a right-wing populist folk hero and a leading GOP contender in the Arizona governor’s race. Obama administration officials, particularly former Arizona governor-turned-Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, have both expanded local police powers connected to profiling and publically refused to denounce Arpaio. This belies a claimed commitment to humane immigration reform. Such spin and double talk have made Obama all the more vulnerable to extreme anti-immigration leaders like Arpaio.
The Administration’s stated commitment to human rights and a new multilateralism were severely undermined by the October 2009 military base agreement between the US and Colombia. This ten-year agreement allows increased access by the US military to seven of Colombia’s military bases. The Obama administration chose to privilege a policy toward Colombia that emphasizes military aid and mercenary action over human rights and civilian governance. A commitment to a human rights agenda would have included protections for human rights defenders, judges, grassroots indigenous, Afro-Colombian rights movements, and others. Colombia faces a human rights crisis in which the country is second only to Sudan in terms of the numbers of internally displaced persons, and the situation for the rural poor is grave.
The US-Colombia base agreement angered much of the region, which took Obama at his word regarding favoring regional over bilateral security agreements. It has also signaled a carry-over from the Bush administration to cede greater foreign policy decision-making to the Defense Department at the expense of the State Department.
We can only hope that with the very recent appointment of Arturo Valenzuela as Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, this balance of power within the US executive will begin to shift. Yet in his first visible role regarding the region, Valenzuela has defended an Obama administration position that recognizes the outcome of the November 30th elections in Honduras. This essentially legitimizes the military coup d’etat of June 28th that unseated democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. What began as a US response condemning the coup and advocating a multi-lateral approach to resolving the situation became a lukewarm acceptance of the de facto regime, a position that has disappointed the vast majority of our allies in the region. In a country where historically the US has been the major power broker, it is virtually impossible to read the current US position toward Honduras as anything other than a sacrifice of democratic principles and the country’s poor majority to favor the Honduran ruling class and their US political and corporate allies. Unfortunately, this resonates with collective memories of US-Latin America relations that are all too long and deep.
Katherine Hite is a professor of political science and director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She is the author of When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000), co-editor (with Paola Cesarini) of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), and most recently has authored several articles on the politics of memory, commemoration, and human rights in Latin America and Spain.
Webpage: http://politicalscience.vassar.edu/bio_hite.html
From Inspiring Hope to Taking Action: Obama and Human Rights
by Stephen James, La Trobe University
"While President George H. Bush spoke of a new world order, and his ‘misunderestimated’ son mangled the English language at countless press conferences, with Barack Obama the USA now has a talented orator as a president. There is a new word order. But does the new and skilful rhetoric match the reality when it comes to human rights?"
While President George H. Bush spoke of a new world order, and his “misunderestimated” son mangled the English language at countless press conferences, with Barack Obama the USA now has a talented orator as a president. There is a new word order. But does the new and skilful rhetoric match the reality when it comes to human rights?
The human rights record of the Bush administration has rightly been described by Human Rights Watch (Kenneth Roth, “Taking Back the Initiative from the Human Rights Spoilers” in Human Rights Watch World Report 2009) as “disastrous.” In contrast, Obama’s inaugural speech to the UN General Assembly contained some encouraging signs for human rights and human security: the acceptance of interdependence and multilateralism (at least for some matters); the emphasis on health, food and water security; and the attention to the rights of women and children. It is a refreshing change from the Republican obsession with freedom of speech, democratization and religious freedoms in China (important though these are). But there were some blind spots as well. To say that divisions between North and South “make no sense in an interconnected world” gives scant comfort to the billions suffering extreme deprivation. Moreover, “balanced and sustained” economic growth does not ensure equitable growth, distribution and human development, as evidenced by a number of UNDP reports and the work of Caroline Thomas. While the efforts to combat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and polio are crucial, many people die from readily preventable diarrheal conditions. Likewise, regarding food security, how do we explain that there is an abundance of food in the world but people starve because they cannot afford access to it? If the USA and other developed nations were to open their markets to products from the South, and to reduce subsidies, this would at least make the “free” trade system a little fairer, but it would not deal with the significant ways that international financial institutions and neo-liberalism can retard the wheels of progress concerning human dignity and security.
As Roth (above) has noted, if the USA wants to lead on human rights it can best do so by example. The better it behaves at home and abroad, the more vigorous and less shamefaced it can be in criticizing the human rights records of other nation-states and in building constructive coalitions in favor of the people harmed by violations. Here is how, according to Human Rights Watch, the USA can improve its human rights record:
sign and ratify relevant treaties, such as those on economic and social rights, landmines, cluster bombs, women, children and the International Criminal Court;
hold human rights violators accountable;
avoid complicity with, or indifference to, the human rights violations of other countries, even strategic allies (including Pakistan, Ethiopia, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and China);
observe the rule of law, constitutionalism and civil and political rights in its
counterterrorism activities;
improve social and economic rights and reduce racial inequalities at home; and
avoid double standards and exceptionalism with regard to human rights
Were the USA to embark on this course, it might confidently join with others “to serve the common interests of human beings.” But without such action, Obama’s words will just leave us feeling empty since faith without works is dead.
Dr. Stephen James is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University where he edits the international journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge). He holds Arts and Law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins andDevelopment (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007) and has taught law, politics, history and philosophy at various universities in Australia. He is presently working on a book exploring aspects of the right to an adequate standard of living. Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/dialogue/staff.html
The Statesman’s Dilemma: Peace or Justice? Or Neither?
by Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut
"What advice then to give President Obama regarding this difficult balance? I would suggest three modest steps: first, do what you can where you can and disregard universal consistency; second, link your criticism of human rights violations with the traditions and efforts of the people in a given country who are themselves fighting for change; finally, to the greatest extent possible, link our relations with this country with progress on human rights."
Just as I sat down to comment on President Obama and human rights, I glanced today’s (November 19, 2009) The New York Times and found several opinion essays—careful in fact, thoughtful in tone, reasonable in argument—critical of Obama’s approach during his recent visit to China toward Chinese human rights violations (mainly concerning Tibet but including also imprisoned lawyers, internet censorship, and persecution of Falun Gong.) The essayists considered various tactics for exerting American pressure on China regarding human rights. Common to all of them was a tone of rueful admiration for the political and diplomatic skill with which China fended off human rights criticism; indeed, such measures have been more or less successfully applied to a range of countries. For one example, this year Chinese pressure had some success regarding the composition of the program (which had China as its focus) of Germany’s annual Frankfurt Book Fair.
Seen from this perspective, the President’s tactics in China were foreshadowed by his speech at the United Nations. Human rights were clearly not at the center of Obama’s agenda there, although perhaps the UN General Assembly is not the best place to enunciate such concerns. He did point to early actions by his administration, such as the ban on torture and the pledged early closing of the prison at Guantanamo, and generally stood up for human rights principles. But strikingly, his major reference to actions promoting human rights instrumentalized them as needed for achieving the four main goals he had set forth earlier in the speech. He listed four main tasks confronting the world community: reduce then ban nuclear weapons; general peacekeeping, including the fight against al-Qaeda; the challenge of climate change; economic problems. Clearly, this is not a president for whom human rights advocacy is a very high priority. Why is this so? You will not find a meaningful answer to this question in the sneering and superficial attack by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. After listing what he sees as cowardly responses to human rights violations in China, Iran, Sudan, and Burma (Myanmar), he declares, “It…takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that ‘interferes’ with America’s purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them.”
Well, yes, these are unpopular regimes. Our government has denounced them and in some cases called them names for many years, but with what result? In President George W. Bush’s first term, his then-Secretary of State, Colin Powell, branded Sudanese actions in Darfur as genocide. A decade later, has the genocide stopped? If Stephens is calling for more symbolic acts, then he might tell us why he expects them to be more successful now than in the past. If not, what actions does he (and do other, less hostile critics) propose? Who will call for American or NATO armed intervention in the countries listed above?
The central issue here is the one that underlies so many policy conundrums when it comes to implementing human rights in a complicated world of many interests, competing needs, and limitations of power: the choice between what may be called peace or justice. By “peace” I refer to restoring regimes of law after oppressive rule, abating both domestic, social, and ethnic, as well as international conflict, and enlisting a wide range of communities in such matters as dealing with global warming. By “justice” I mean calling violators of human rights to account, setting a standard to which states (and non-state actors) should adhere, realizing social, economic and political rights through concerted action, by outside powers where the local population is powerless. Consider again the four priorities Obama listed at the UN. Which of them is unimportant? In which cases can we make progress without the cooperation of regimes that are human rights violators? How difficult it can be to translate the balance between these goals into specific actions was demonstrated in summer 2009 by the inconclusive UN debate regarding the “responsibility to protect.” Who shall decide where and when protection is needed? Who shall provide the power to make protection real? Who will bear the cost in lives and goods to enforce protection in the face of resistance? What advice then to give President Obama regarding this difficult balance? I would suggest three modest steps: First, do what you can where you can and disregard universal consistency; second, link your criticism of human rights violations with the traditions and efforts of the people in a given country who are themselves fighting for change; finally, to the greatest extent possible, link our relations with this country with progress on human rights.
Professor Henry Krisch (Political Science emeritus, University of Connecticut) taught political science at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University for almost forty years. He has specialized in Soviet and German, especially East German, politics, and more recently in international human rights issues. At the University of Connecticut, Krisch was Director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, co-chaired the academic program committee for the Dodd Year (1995-96) on "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Since 1999, he has been a member of the Gladstein Human Rights Committee. His publications include German Politics under Soviet Occupation (1974), The German Democratic Republic: Search for Identity (1985), Politics and Culture in the GDR (1989), Politics in Germany [co-authored] (2009), and “George Soros,” in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (2009).
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