Ana Lankes and Christopher Sabatini
In June 1993, 171 states and representatives from eight hundred nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) met in Vienna at the second United Nations (UN)-hosted World Conference on Human Rights to take stock of the condition of the international human rights system and seek ways to strengthen it.[1] After nearly two weeks of discussions, governments agreed to a common declaration and plan of action that, among other things, created new instruments, such as the high commissioner for human rights and mechanisms to bolster the UN’s capacity to monitor children’s, women’s, and Indigenous rights. The discussions leading up to the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action were heated. Disagreements raged over whether human rights should be considered universal or culturally relative, whether economic, social, and cultural rights should be given precedence over civil and political ones, whether development should be considered a right, and whether or not to call out states with particularly egregious records of rights violations, such as Cuba, China, Syria, and Iran.[2] In the end, the declaration affirmed the universality of human rights and stressed that democracy, development, and respect for rights are mutually reinforcing.
Three decades on, these discussions are still being had, but new currents are challenging even those delicate rhetorical pledges. The normative and institutional infrastructure that gave birth to the modern human rights system became central to the global order that emerged after World War II and spawned popular expectations of states and the international system. The foundation of human rights norms and commitments emerged alongside and was part of the broader momentum toward freer, integrated commerce and investment, multilateralism to reduce conflict and promote peace, and the processes of decolonization and racial integration in the United States. While parallel systems of trade and cooperation formed during the ideological confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union, broader notions of universal rights and multilateral systems to promote peace and human dignity and the protection of universal rights remained global, despite being politicized and instrumentalized at times. However, the division between political and civil rights and economic and social rights became a central point of challenge between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies.
After the collapse of communism, and the unravelling of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, the Western liberal infrastructure stood triumphant. As such, it became—temporarily, at least—the sole means to integrate former Eastern-bloc countries and much of the Global South into world trade, international financial institutions such as the Bretton Woods system and private finance, and the international and regional norms set up to promote and defend human rights. Since their creation, those systems had consolidated primarily around the Western, liberal core of political and civil rights. This was a reflection of the predominant powers that had driven their development, the specific challenges of decolonization or dictatorship, and the relative ease of litigating and enforcing those rights relative to more complex social and economic rights (as I described in chapter 1). But this felicitous world convergence around the Western liberal order was not to last.
The world is now more plural. The liberal ideals that briefly reigned supreme at the end of the Cold War no longer have the same collective pull on popular aspirations, global discourse, states’ foreign and domestic policies, or state alliances. The difficult discussions during the Vienna Summit hinted at divisions that would only grow and fundamentally shape a new global human rights landscape. The rise of China and the reassertion of Russian activism and power against the West are recasting the international balance of power. Parallel to this, the growing economic power of countries within the Global South—comprising states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—combined with the declining influence of Western powers relative to China have given greater voice to long-standing demands of the global poor. In human rights terms this has meant greater emphasis on economic and social rights. This is not limited to individual, domestic demands on governments; there are also more calls to rebalance global discussions about rights and the obligations of international organizations in favor of those rights.
China’s success in reducing poverty has amplified its global soft power as a model of economic and political development, while it has also used its bilateral assistance and investment as an alternative to more traditional development assistance and multilateral financial institutions. As Rosemary Foot detailed, Beijing has explicitly sought economic and political alliances with states that shared its rejection of liberal democratic norms or those that just needed economic investment to boost their development aspirations but indicated some ideological and diplomatic affinity and support. For those in the Global South that liked to believe they could be on the cusp of breaking out of the periphery, it was an understandably attractive offer, promising economic assistance—not always delivered—with implicit diplomatic solidarity. While the hard policy implications are yet to be evaluated, the long-term implications of these financial, diplomatic alliances hang over the current global liberal order as China seeks increasingly to assert its geopolitical ambitions over Hong Kong and Taiwan, and over states that challenge its domestic human rights policies.
At the same time, economic globalization and automation have undermined worker security, while the fragmentation of party systems has created a fertile field for political movements tapping into and directing fear and discontent toward the perceived fallout of globalization. The resulting anger has erupted in the rise of nationalist movements, and in some cases public rejection of international norms and rules to defend human dignity and human rights domestically and internationally. In France, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom, such nationalist movements rail not just against a perceived economic and cultural threat to native workers, but also against alleged broader threats to local laws from international legal regimes. These sentiments have influenced public debates and fueled the election of nationalist, populist governments in Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and, at least until 2020, the United States. Whether or not these individual leaders or movements will remain a political force, at least for the medium term they will retain their capacity to affect national politics in their ethnic chauvinism and promotion of popular rejection of perceived intrusions on national sovereignty.
As the balance of international, economic, and domestic political power has changed since the 1990s in ways that shape the future of human rights protections, so too has technology. While often overlooked among the broader challenges—Russia, China, populism, and the odd alliances that have been formed among them—technology is now an unexpected threat to the human rights order, sometimes in conjunction with the malign actors mentioned above, but often too, employed by autocracies and democracies alike. The capacity of the international human rights system to respond requires an upgrade not just of the international institutions to monitor and evaluate these threats, but also of human rights groups and their capacity to understand, track, and report their implications to international bodies and to the broader public.
The changes outlined above in the spheres of geopolitics, domestic politics, and technology are a challenge not only to international human rights norms and institutions but also to the broader post–World War II liberal order of free trade, financial integration, and a broader commercial and financial rules-based system. An often unremarked keystone of that broader order has been human rights. This book has attempted to understand developing trends both as they affect human rights and as part of a broader momentum in global politics.
In attempting to pick apart, understand, and address the novel pressures of geopolitics and technology on human rights and the international human rights regime, we focused in the last section of the book on the regional impact of these pressures. In some regions there have been greater advances in human rights defense and jurisprudence than have been achieved by global bodies. But our authors demonstrate that in all the regions we considered—with or without vigorous human rights norms and bodies—the protection and defense of political, civil, economic, and social rights have also become caught up in the global crosswinds of nationalism, national sovereignty, and great-power politics that threaten not only the immediate protection of individual rights but broader regional systems of rights as well.
In Part I, Rosemary Foot and Alexander Cooley show how China and Russia are actively reshaping global human rights institutions and norms. Both actors have used their vetoes in the UN Security Council to block international action against human rights abuses and put pressure on the UN Human Rights Council to reduce attention to country-specific resolutions. They have also set up regional counterordering initiatives that shore up authoritarian regimes, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Commonwealth of Independent States. These actions are reshaping normative agendas by elevating the doctrine of sovereign equality over that of popular sovereignty and state responsibilities to protect human dignity. China, in particular, has used its economic clout to advance an alternative vision to liberal democracy, arguing that development is a foundational right from which other human rights flow, thus subordinating civil and political rights. Nandini Ramanujam and Vishakha Wijenayake look at Russia’s historical role in pushing for socioeconomic rights and state sovereignty, and argue that while there remain challenges in Russia’s domestic and international human rights agenda, socioeconomic rights may provide an avenue for meaningful engagement with Moscow and with it broader reform of the human rights debate. All three chapters argue that ideological confrontations with either of these states are unhelpful. Instead, existing human rights bodies should do more to focus on development, the absence of which has led many countries in the Global South to support China’s approach. But governments and multilateral bodies should not do that to the exclusion of or even by minimizing civil and political rights. In the final chapter of Part I, Rana Moustafa argues that multilateral bodies must do more to protect human rights amid international crises like COVID-19. As she details, the pandemic gave greater scope and license for autocrats to consolidate power while much of the world was distracted by domestic concerns and political polarization over how to deal with its effects, and her conclusion is that the response of the existing multilateral organizations proved inadequate.
Part II focuses on how changes in domestic politics and the organizational capacity of new constituencies are a threat not only to human rights domestically but also to the international human rights framework and geopolitics more broadly. Gerald Neuman argues that the rise of exclusionary populism across the globe is threatening the operation and integrity of international human rights norms and bodies. Exclusionary populism denies the legitimacy of any opposition and undermines institutional checks and balances. This has led several populist regimes to withdraw from international human rights bodies or cut funding for them, and in some cases they vote together with autocratic governments on issues of sovereignty and accountability, while challenging the capacity of liberal democracies—often cast as elitist and distant from the interests of the people—to enforce human rights norms and standards. Some populist regimes have been helped by domestic religious groups who seek to protect “the rights of the family” and have at times been given undue influence in shaping foreign human rights policies, as Melani McAlister outlines. Both authors argue for efforts to bridge divides among nationalist populists and diverse religious groups. For example, policymakers should learn from some populist critiques, cultivate the support of moderate religious actors, and selectively deploy local values frames to reduce the fear of rapid cultural change. Above all, they must address the root causes of populism, such as economic insecurity. At the same time, the funding and independence of international monitoring bodies must be bolstered to protect against populist and autocratic efforts to undermine them, while religious groups—or any single domestic constituency—must not be allowed to hold undue influence over human rights policy.
Part III analyzes the role of emerging technologies in undermining human rights. Emily Taylor, Kate Jones, and Carolina Caeiro look at how geopolitical competition has carried over to the internet, where China is seeking to reshape technical standards to permit increased surveillance. Thompson Chengeta considers the racial implications of developing autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and law-enforcement and surveillance technologies using artificial intelligence. He argues that these instruments disproportionately threaten the rights of people of color, but more broadly that they undermine the right to justice because they make it difficult to ascribe accountability in the event of their unlawful use (whether this is intentional or not). Both chapters call for human rights considerations to be taken into account throughout the process of developing new internet protocols or AWS, or drafting technical standards. This could be done by including more NGOs and civil society organizations in the bodies that determine internet protocols, and by granting human rights bodies greater access in the drafting of regulations and participation in monitoring human rights protections with regard to the application of AWS and the impact of regulations affecting the use of technology on human rights.
These challenges have been felt and have torn at one of the most notable successes of the past seventy-five years, regional human rights systems. The last four chapters, in Part IV, are dedicated to those often-overlooked systems and the effects of changing geopolitics on their operation and authority. Solomon Dersso shows how increasing great-power competition in Africa permits authoritarian governments such as Eritrea’s, which receive military support from foreign patrons, to act with impunity. The complex machinations of Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Turkey in central, eastern, and northern Africa can contribute to greater instability, as in Libya, making it nearly impossible to guarantee human rights. Urfan Khaliq and Santiago Canton and Angelita Baeyens explain how rising illiberal populism and states’ reassertion of sovereignty have seriously challenged regional human rights systems in Europe and Latin America, respectively, by reducing their funding and eroding cooperation. Aslı Ü. Bâli demonstrates how great-power politics have corrupted human rights in the Middle East and North Africa, whether through intervention or through neglect (most recently in the case of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan). Those policies have not only affected individual rights in countries such as Egypt or Afghanistan but also undermined the political, economic, and social promise of the Arab Spring.
Taken together, the trends and factors analyzed in all four sections of the book are eroding the basic foundation of human rights. Our aim is to kickstart a wide-ranging dialogue among scholars, policymakers, and activists on how to confront these challenges and strengthen the fraying consensus. In some cases, responding will involve work within countries to address the economic insecurity and social and political illiberalism that have eroded human rights protections. In others, countering elected autocrats will require international leadership to identify, establish, and monitor effective mechanisms to react to violations. International norms and multilateral institutions need to be updated to focus on these emerging threats, find ways to generate sustainable funding, and elevate the discussion around economic and social rights amid rising global inequalities. This is not an exhaustive list of issues. Climate change and the rights of migrants and refugees are certainly others, as we discussed in the Introduction. But even successful integration and strengthening of these rights will depend on domestic political constituencies and effective international norms and bureaucracies to deal with them. The protection of human rights, more than ever, has become a domestic political messaging problem as well as an international challenge.
International Norms, Popular Discontent, and Populists
The main challenge to today’s human rights systems comes not from the decay of the systems themselves, but from the rising global power of China, Russia, and a group of like-minded countries that have formed a cynical common cause against them domestically and internationally. As several chapters in this book demonstrated, regional and international human rights systems have come under increasing attack in the past twenty years from member states reasserting their sovereign prerogatives. The fundamental consensus around human rights and democracy based on imperfect international cooperation in the post–Cold War era is evaporating. This change has gone hand in hand with growing authoritarianism, often by democratically elected leaders with a varying popular mandate, who have become a new breed of human rights abusers. These regimes are not the medal-festooned juntas of military officers or outright dictators of the past, but elected governments that gradually undermine checks and balances and the rule of law to clamp down on critical voices. This has complicated a human rights system that until recently had focused largely on coups, dictatorships, and egregious cases of human rights through death squads, gulags, and censorship, rather than the subtle erosion of checks and balances on power—often with popular acquiescence, if not support—that has tended to precede those abuses.
These elected authoritarians pose new and specific challenges to human rights. Their geographic and ideological range is broad, and include presidents Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, as well as prime ministers Narendra Modi in India and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and former president Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. But they all share an affinity with the accumulation of personal power behind the façade of elections and the trappings of democracy.
How should the international community and local civil society groups respond when voters themselves back antidemocratic and rights-abusing leaders? One starting point is to recognize the red flags that signal an elected government’s potential slide into authoritarianism. Over the last two decades, easily identifiable patterns of institutional manipulation and democratic backsliding have become apparent. Governments across the world have engaged in what Lucan Way and Steven Levitksy call “competitive authoritarian” tactics,[3] which include using state resources to promote the reelection of incumbents, redirecting public funds to uncritical media outlets and getting allies to buy opposition channels, introducing reforms that reduce the independence of electoral commissions, and weakening or abolishing term limits, while maintaining the veneer of electoral democracy. These steps generally do not elicit immediate international outcry. But by the time more obviously autocratic measures are taken, such as gaming electoral systems to perpetuate their retention of power and politicizing the armed forces, it is usually too late to respond effectively.
These tactics must be recognized and challenged to discourage would-be authoritarian governments from emulating one another. Autocratic demonstration effects have already led to cross-border learning that has eroded democratic institutions and standards, domestically and internationally.[4] For example, in 2020, Nicaragua’s dictators (President Daniel Ortega and his wife and president Rosario Murillo) almost directly copied a “foreign agents law” and a cybersecurity law passed in Russia in 2012 that curbed free speech and severely constrained the rights of civil society organizations to operate.[5] Poland followed Hungary’s lead in undermining judicial independence by lowering the retirement age for judges in its constitutional court in order to get rid of critical voices.[6] In Bolivia, actors affiliated with the ruling party brought independent media outlets to heel and removed critical content, imitating tactics previously honed in Venezuela.
Individual cases of autocrats repressing their own populations and learning from one another to do so are, of course, nothing new.[7] The difference today is that many have at least a fig leaf of elected democratic legitimacy.
In the light of these challenges and the analyses in the preceding chapters, we present several ideas and suggestions that heads of state, multilateral institutions, and activists should pursue.
- Update and expand international institutions to identify and react to modern threats to human rights stemming from elected autocrats. Rights-respecting governments, including non-Western ones, should collaborate to create a platform that can define the early warning signs of rights violations and spell out clearly when and how they would react collectively. Ideally, this should be based within the UN framework and be as inclusive as possible in order not to be seen as a Western-led politicized project. This platform could be tasked with creating a checklist of red flags, such as skewing the electoral playing field, harassing the media, politicizing the judiciary, and throwing up obstacles to the independent operation of civil society organizations. It could also outline the types of voluntary bilateral and multilateral tools it stands ready to deploy. These could include diplomatic isolation, targeted Magnitsky-style sanctions,[8] enhanced monitoring by international and other UN bodies, and greater support for civil society groups to address democratic deficits. Such a platform could create the framework for a cogent, defensive, and proactive strategy against nascent authoritarianism. But a note of caution is necessary. U.S. and European Union (EU) sanctions and their threat have proven increasingly less effective in deterring antidemocratic acts and autocrats in, for example, Hong Kong, Nicaragua, and Russia—a further sign of the diminished power of Western governments to impose their will in the current global environment. In these cases greater efforts at coordinating sanctions policy and ensuring its effectiveness should be key.
- Focus on renewing countries’ democratic social fabric and popular understanding of human rights. On a domestic level, dealing with populist or authoritarian elements will prove difficult. Ideally, respect for human rights and democracy should be instilled as early as possible. NGOs, multilateral organizations, community leaders, and national governments need to work to educate and connect their citizens to the world of human rights, to prevent the rise of parties hostile to minorities and democratic principles. Efforts to engage citizens politically and to educate populations in human rights can raise awareness about the work of local, regional, and international human rights mechanisms, and can shore up public support for them. As mentioned both by Santiago Canton and Angelita Baeyens with respect to the Inter-American System of Human Rights, and Solomon Dersso in regard to the African System of Human Rights, lack of public awareness about human rights courts leads to low public engagement with such bodies and a dwindling number of direct petitions from citizens. Expanding the budgets of these organizations will permit them to have a greater presence on the ground in ways that, as Canton and Baeyens detailed, will make human rights more personally relevant to the millions of citizens for whom regional and international systems have remained distant. As Alexander Cooley noted in his chapter, “viewing international policy or global governance as a separate sphere, detached from domestic politics, is no longer viable.” This also applies to the next recommendation.
- Understand and respond to economic insecurity stemming from globalization, the changing nature of work, and imperfect social safety nets. In all countries, the threat of exclusionary populism must also be combated by addressing its root causes: economic insecurity and anxiety over cultural change. As Gerald Neuman made clear, populism, defined most simply as a strategy that dichotomizes politics as a struggle between “the people” and a perceived corrupt “elite,” undermines democracy and human rights by narrowing the definition of what constitutes “the people,” leading to a rejection of pluralism and checks on and dissent from what leaders define as the “popular will.” Both right-wing and left-wing populism thrive in contexts of high economic insecurity and deep social cleavages. Yet liberal democratic leaders have sometimes focused on civil and political rights and ignored social and economic ones. As several chapters in this volume have noted, that has hurt the appeal of human rights discourse in parts of the Global South, where calls for social and economic rights can have greater resonance. It has also contributed to the rise of exclusionary populists in the West. One suggestion that emerged from the preceding chapters and the multiple workshops held in developing this book is that human rights groups should make greater efforts to collaborate with development economists to shape policies sensitive to such disruptions. The United States could also signal a new commitment to economic inclusion by ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
- Engage a broad segment of civil society, including a diversity of religious groups, in foreign policy and human rights policy. The undue influence in politics of powerful religious groups that seek to undermine or split the human rights agenda needs to be countered. As Melani McAlister shows, the U.S. evangelical and conservative Catholic lobbies have significantly shaped the country’s health and human rights policy abroad in ways that distance it from allies and the modern human rights agenda. The human rights community and human rights–supporting governments need to recognize the danger posed by the disproportionate and sectarian influence of religious fundamentalist groups and should create independent monitoring mechanisms to ensure that a plurality of religious views is included. As McAlister highlighted, evangelicals in the Trump administration convened a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to offer an alternative to the modern, progressive consensus in international human rights law, and disseminated its report, translated into several languages, allowing other illiberal regimes to pursue self-serving reinterpretations of their human rights obligations. Today, the U.S. State Department will need to demonstrate its more inclusive view of human rights to counteract that widely disseminated report; and it should either resign from, disband, or reform the International Religious Freedom of Belief Alliance founded by the Trump administration to bring together right-wing populist governments claiming to defend Christianity against other religions and the influence of sexual minorities. Neither the commission nor the alliance should have been enabled to gain such weight or such broad dissemination of their publications. To prevent any single group, whether religious, business, or other, from gaining an overwhelming, narrow influence on U.S. human rights–related foreign policy, Congress and/or the State Department could consider the creation of an independent, diverse commission comprising legal experts and civil society participants to ensure that such policy reflects a consistent, nonpartisan approach.
In a similar vein, Western democracies should do more to engage and support civil society in individual countries. This includes a specific focus on groups in closed or closing societies such as Cuba, China, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Such groups have come under mounting formal and informal pressure but remain key voices advocating for human rights and the universal vernacular of human rights internationally. As Nandini Ramanujam and Vishakha Wijenayake argue, this should involve legal assistance to those groups as they push back against state efforts to deny their legal and political space.
- Recommit to a broad human rights agenda among liberal democracies, including in non-Western countries. The most important way to strengthen respect for international human rights is for rights-respecting countries to speak out consistently against authoritarian backsliding and put their own houses in order. Calls to respect the universality of human rights will not be taken seriously if countries that purport to uphold such rights apply them only selectively. Public efforts by the United States and other countries to downplay systematic human rights violations in Israel, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, among others, cheapen the values and commitments of human rights supposedly embodied in the international system. At the same time, dehumanizing rhetoric and policies toward migrants in the United States; the United Kingdom; and in other countries in Europe, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, have eroded, in ways that are difficult to measure but powerful, the delicate respect for human dignity and the importance of laws and policies to protect it, nationally and internationally. Renewing, restoring, and sustaining the international human rights order requires the founders and one-time supporters of that order to show greater commitment to the objective discussion of the rights and dignity of human beings; and ultimately all governments, including those that once claimed to be champions of these rights, must pledge to safeguard them.
- Improve the capacity to monitor and punish states and businesses promoting or selling technology that violates human rights conventions and practices. The use of automated weapon systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and surveillance technology, and attempts to reform internet protocols—as detailed both by Thompson Chengeta and by Emily Taylor, Kate Jones, and Carolina Caeiro—demands greater scrutiny by multilateral organizations, democratic governments, and human rights NGOs. Such actions should also involve greater inspection of and restrictions on the role of certain nonstate actors, such as arms manufacturers and tech companies, that enable rights violations. For example, under international guidelines, defense contractors are obliged to respect international humanitarian law.[9] But this has not always been the case. The international community needs to be more vigilant and assertive in demanding accountability. The United States and United Kingdom manufactured weapons sold to Saudi Arabia that were responsible for the tragic killing of civilians—including children—in Yemen.[10] The sale of surveillance technology from Israel has also been abused by governments to covertly track journalists and civil society.[11]
- Ensure greater technology awareness among human rights bodies, norms, and activists. Privacy concerns and surveillance will become increasingly pressing problems in the field of human rights, as shown by Taylor, Jones, and Caeiro. Better global standards, which include human rights considerations, would protect privacy online and discourage governments from providing licenses to apps and software that could be used for unlawful surveillance. Creating better technology standards and global regulations on the development and deployment of online and digital surveillance and tracking technology may prevent governments from licensing their use, but it is only a first step. All standards development organizations, such as the International Telecommunications Union and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), must ensure they lower the entry barriers for civil society and human rights organizations to participate as members. Where such groups already have a voice, as in the IETF’s Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group, they should have a greater say on the development of controversial technologies. Finally, a UN body could be created and tasked with producing human rights guidelines for technology standards organizations as well as alerting the international human rights community to rights-threatening technological developments, including spyware, AWS, or AI. The UN Human Rights Council should commission standards on the state collation of data and surveillance, to identify technology and its use that are not compatible with international human rights law.
- Ensure that international bodies, including multilateral organizations and human rights groups, reflect global diversity. One of the easiest and most important ways in which human rights institutions can gain greater legitimacy internationally and in local settings is by becoming more diverse. The accusation that “human rights are a Western imposition,” weaponized frequently by actors who have an interest in diluting or ignoring such rights, would have far less purchase if these bodies were not overwhelmingly staffed by people from Western countries. They could become more diverse, first by instituting stronger affirmative action policies; second, by making greater efforts to look for local actors in recruitment drives; and, third, by consulting more actively and in greater depth with local communities, such that every policy has the input of the people it will affect. This also applies to the recommendation to increase the budgets of international and regional human rights bodies to enable greater on-the-ground presence, which will ensure inclusion and diversity.
- Explore existing and potentially new platforms to more effectively challenge and mobilize action on severe human rights abusers. What can be done in the hardest cases, when states continue to violate human rights despite diplomatic and economic pressure? One response is to repurpose existing frameworks to tackle governments and elected leaders that have blocked traditional human rights channels and mechanisms. For example, a resolution presented by Liechtenstein at the UN General Assembly—rather than the Security Council, where it would have been blocked—created the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), a body that has collected evidence of human rights violations in Syria since the start of the civil war. The Gambia spearheaded a resolution to create a similar mechanism for Myanmar through the General Assembly, and also got the backing of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to take Myanmar to the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) to face charges of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people. These platforms engage countries that otherwise do not participate actively in human rights forums. Another such framework is the UN’s Universal Periodic Review, which examines the human rights record of member states every five years. The point is that activists can use existing tools in innovative ways to tackle the most recalcitrant regimes. Along these lines, there has also been a growing movement to use individual country courts to prosecute cases of crimes against humanity and genocide. Since World War II, fifteen countries have used the concept of universal jurisdiction to pursue such cases in country courts. This was done, for example, in Spain for the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998, and most recently in the 2019 case filed by the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) in Argentina’s federal courts for crimes committed by the government of Myanmar against Rohingya populations.[12] Regardless of the merits of those cases and their outcome, country judicial systems offer another platform for raising demands for justice over egregious human rights abuses and increasing popular awareness of these cases.
- Upgrade, reform, and protect international and regional human rights bodies. Some existing mechanisms require serious reform to become more effective. International monitoring bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) have at times been captured by authoritarian states, which then act as a bloc, distorting and emasculating the body and its processes, as detailed by Rosemary Foot. The UNHRC needs to be reformed to impose stricter membership criteria and create a more competitive, transparent electoral process as well as subject members to routine inquiries about human rights practices. In the case of the worst offenders, the threshold for suspending members should be lowered; at a minimum, acceptance of UNHRC monitoring mechanisms should be a requirement for membership of the body prescribing them. Furthermore, budgets for international human rights–monitoring bodies should be protected or increased; anti–human rights regimes have consistently sought to reduce the impact of such bodies by cutting their funding and limiting their independence. The chairpersons of the ten UN Treaty bodies warned in 2020 that underfunding was putting their work at risk. Almost all chapters in this book mention underfunding for human rights bodies as a serious impediment to their operation: for example, the Inter-American System of Human Rights receives only 19 percent of the overall budget of the Organization of American States (OAS); this means that it has few full-time staff and no subregional offices. Similar dynamics affect the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The capacity of these important bodies to realize human rights in their regions hinges on more effective funding and the associated on-the-ground presence.
- Strengthen international solidarity in defense of human rights. The political, economic/financial, and legal costs of violating human rights must be increased. States are increasingly disregarding civil and political rights because the costs of doing so are low. Part of this stems from a declining attention and commitment to human rights. But in part it is also because Russia and China brazenly support rogue regimes, both economically and diplomatically, for their own ideological and diplomatic ends. This calculus must be changed. Strengthening sanctions regimes would be a start. Recent threats and implementation of sanctions regimes over human rights have had little effect. The reason is that they are too easy to bypass, and their implementation can be patchy. Greater efforts need to be made to coordinate sanctions multilaterally and ensure that the private sector is on board. Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the United States has piled up sanctions on individuals, regimes, and organizations, at times with little regard for their effectiveness in meeting intended goals or for their costs.[13] In the case of the EU sanctions imposed against Russia after the latter’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 (and before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2021), the German government’s refusal to halt the building of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and the fact that German businesses increased their investments in the country since 2014, diluted the original sanctions and later those in 2021. A global Magnitsky-style compact may help ensure greater international compliance and create clear criteria for imposing sanctions, which should also always be targeted to avoid or minimize the cost to civilian populations. Such a compact could also create a monitoring mechanism to minimize breaches and ensure private sector support, and to evaluate their efficacy objectively.
If a global compact on sanctions seems far off, then individual states can do more to enhance the symbolic weight of sanctions. As one example, the United States has sanctioned the architect behind the Uyghur genocide, Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary for Xinjiang and a member of the Nineteenth Politburo. As the previous secretary for Tibet, he was also behind the massive repression, Sinicization, and increased surveillance of that region. Other states should join in those sanctions. Bodies that have strong sanctioning tools, such as the EU, should also not be afraid to use them against members when (as, for instance, in the case of Hungary and Poland) they defy its core values, even if the primary outcome is simply to send a strong signal to other members.
Refocusing and potentially ramping up the international sanctions regime today requires examination of three factors. The first is history and the conditions that affect successful sanctions policies. Many sanctions today have failed, including broad multilateral efforts. Part of that failure is that they are often too ambitious and lack clear goals and policy to leverage sanctions. A second consideration is that while the West applies sanctions frequently, today many other countries are willing to help repressive rights-violating regimes evade them. Some, such as China, have a large economic market and resources that can be used to assist such regimes; others—such as Russia and Iran—provide diplomatic or intelligence support because of their own sanctions. In these cases, sanctions-backing governments must figure out how to coordinate to close off these routes more effectively.[14] Third, governments that use sanctions against rights violators must publicly recognize that for the first time in recent history, a new, powerful geopolitical actor, China, is not only less vulnerable to sanctions but also willing to impose them itself on governments, and even on private institutions and individuals. The effect is not only to diminish the moral authority of sanctions but also to threaten governments and national businesses, making it potentially difficult in the future to invoke them.
- Be honest about the challenges today and the need for an upgrade. One of the central recommendations of this book is the need to be introspective. Human rights groups need to evaluate what has worked, where, and why. There needs to be a greater understanding about differentiating between human rights strategies in closed societies such as China’s, or in failed states such as Somalia, as opposed to those in democracies such as Denmark or the United States. Trying to understand why the “golden era” of human rights, from the 1970s until the early 2000s, has ended is important to prepare for the future. The dynamics and reasons behind the withering of the basic consensus around human rights in the past two decades, alongside a reversal in the third wave of democratization, need to be understood. And that understanding should be built into any effort by the one-time defenders of the liberal international order to engage with and reform the global human rights regime.
- Consider whether it is time for a new Vienna Convention on Human Rights. Calling such a global discussion would not be without risk. There are too many states today that would seek to undermine consensus and dilute rather than uphold human rights. Before such a forum is called, there will need to be questions about whether to convene it only among a coalition of the willing, or to make it broad-based, and how to ensure that nonstate actors, particularly NGOs and civil society groups, have their voices heard. Private sector stakeholders, particularly in technology, and experts in economics, development, technology, and sanctions should also be included, alongside representatives from moderate religious groups. The challengers to the current human rights regimes are already building their own alternative human rights movement: China has created a South-South Forum on Human Rights, which has met twice, with an agenda of promoting development as a right over traditional political and civil rights. Western liberal governments need to step up to do the same. Unfortunately, U.S. president Joe Biden’s December 2021 virtual Democracy Summit was too perfunctory and too focused on international challenges, and at the same time not sufficiently focused on the specific shortcomings and threats to international human rights, or on collective responses.
A global, broad-based forum led by liberal democracies could, if done correctly, be an important step in evaluating and restoring the international human rights regime in a complex and contentious world. It would open up a global discussion on the successes of the grand human rights experiment started seventy-five years ago and on ways to help it evolve and thrive in the future. Within that discussion, the principles of human rights and their universality should remain central. But that is not to say that the norms and institutions and even goals that sought to embody and advance these principles cannot be updated. Indeed, as this book has argued, they must be—as must our domestic discussion and commitment to human rights within our borders.
Note: To help sharpen the recommendations of the authors and editors of this book, in May 2021 Chatham House convened a meeting of human rights activists from around the world. Participants included activists in general human rights organizations as well as those representing the rights of migrants, women, ethnic minorities, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex (LGBTI) communities. The meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule. As noted in the Introduction, this concluding chapter contains many of the ideas and recommendations discussed during that exchange.
Notes
1. Kevin Boyle, “Stock Taking on Human Rights: The World Conference, Vienna, 1993,” Political Studies 43 (1995), pp. 79–95, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1995.tb01737.x.
2. “A Rights Meeting, but Don’t Mention the Wronged,” New York Times, June 14, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/14/world/a-rights-meeting-but-don-t-mention-the-wronged.html.
3. Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky, “Elections without Democracy: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, 2 (April 2002).
4. Christopher Sabatini and Ryan Berg, “Autocrats Have a Playbook, Now Democrats Need One Too,” Foreign Policy, February 10, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/10/autocrats-have-a-playbook-now-democrats-need-one-too/.
5. “Nicaragua: Law Threatens Free, Fair Elections,” Human Rights Watch, December 12, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/22/nicaragua-law-threatens-free-fair-elections.
6. “EU Court Rules Poland’s Lowering of Judges’ Retirement Age Is Unlawful,” The Guardian, June 24, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/24/eu-court-rules-polands-lowering-of-judges-retirement-age-unlawful.
7. As detailed in John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: The New Press, 2005).
8. Magnitsky sanctions refer to U.S. and other countries’ legal authority to target individuals’ bank accounts and visas for crimes of corruption and human rights abuses. For more information, see https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/sanctions-programs-and-country-information/global-magnitsky-sanctions.
9. For defense contractors obligations to respect international humanitarian law, see https://www.ohchr.org/documents/publications/GuidingprinciplesBusinesshr_eN.pdf.
10. Bruce Riedel, “It’s Time to Stop US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia,” Brookings, February 4, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/02/04/its-time-to-stop-us-arms-sales-to-saudi-arabia/.
11. Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Paul Lewis, David Pegg, Sam Cutler, Nina Lakhani, and Michael Safi, “Revealed: Leak Uncovers Global Abuse of Cyber-Surveillance Weapon,” The Guardian, July 18, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus.
12. Tun Khin, “Universal Jurisdiction, the International Criminal Court, and the Rohingya Genocide,” in OpinioJuris, October 23, 2020, http://opiniojuris.org/2020/10/23/universal-jurisdiction-the-international-criminal-court-and-the-rohingya-genocide/.
13. Christopher Sabatini, “America’s List of ‘Undemocratic and Corrupt Actors’ Just Keeps Growing,” New York Times, October 5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/us-sanctions-venezuela.html.
14. Daniel Drezner, “The United States of Sanctions,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/united-states-sanctions.
