Christopher Sabatini
In preparing for this book, Chatham House convened an extended, informal discussion among young scholars and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom with the aim of better understanding the views of a diverse generation of youth with regard to human rights.
Given growing concerns about economic insecurity and the divisive, hateful rhetoric of demagogues and xenophobes, I expected to hear shades of skepticism about the seemingly antiquated notions of political and civil liberties. Instead, rather than concentrating on the potential irrelevance of the international human rights system, or how human rights have failed to meet the promises of seventy-five years ago (though the discussion did touch on those too), the young participants emphasized their faith in human rights and their potential. There was some debate regarding the indivisibility of human rights and whether some should be prioritized over others, but by and large, participants not only praised the philosophical centrality of human rights today but also emphasized how they have shaped their own lives. As one woman from Africa said, they are the generation that “grew up in human rights.”
If the discussion challenged my pessimistic assumptions about the opinions of at least an internationally engaged segment of youth, it also reinforced my belief in the importance of preserving and reforming today’s international system of human rights. In January 2020, I published an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why Is the U.S. Joining Venezuela and Nicaragua in Discrediting a System to Protect Human Rights?”[1] My argument was that the administration of Donald J. Trump was undermining international bodies intended to monitor and defend the rights that the United States claimed to champion. Of course, the administration’s hypocrisy wasn’t news to those who had watched the forty-fifth president embrace politicians such as Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, President Recep Tayyip Erodoğan of Turkey, or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán. What was ironic was that in the United States’ own neighborhood, the White House was undermining independent human rights bodies in implicit alliance with two members of what the administration’s national security adviser John Bolton called the “troika of tyranny”—Venezuela and Nicaragua, along with Cuba.[2] I had moved to Britain a few months earlier, just as my adoptive country was engaging in the vitriolic and complicated process of extricating itself from the European Union. Both countries were in different ways pulling back from international commitments and restraints on their power that formed part of the broader network of the postwar liberal institutional order. But something deeper, more systemic, it seemed, was afoot. At the same time that these two countries were questioning, even challenging, elements of the post–World War II liberal international order, nondemocratic regimes in China, Russia, and Latin America were actively seeking to recast global human rights norms and multilateral bodies.
The changing and complicated positions in the United States’ foreign commitments to human rights transcend parties. Just half a year into President Joe Biden’s administration, his government followed through with a plan to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. As the Taliban quickly retook the country and the U.S.-backed elected government collapsed—leaving behind thousands of Afghans who had worked with the United States and Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to promote human rights—President Biden struck an almost Trumpian, realpolitik tone. The United States’ mission, despite promises of restoring democracy and rolling back the Taliban’s mistreatment of women, was not to defend human rights. As the Democratic president said, “We [the United States] had no vital national interest in Afghanistan other than to prevent an attack on America’s homeland and our friends.”[3] For those Afghans who had placed their faith and lives on the promise of a democratic new era in Afghanistan, and for the rest of the world, which had spent blood and treasure on the liberal promise of an Afghanistan that protected women’s rights to education and the rule of law, the rapid withdrawal and the United States’ dismissive shrug over the reversal of over twenty years of work could only seem a betrayal. But more than this abandonment of the lofty rhetoric of the values of the expanded mission, the United States’ glibness over the consequences of its actions sent a powerful signal to current and future allies in other countries that its commitment at one moment to the advancement of principles of human rights and liberalism could quickly evaporate in the face of defeat and domestic popular and political opinion.
Globally the threats to the international rights regime today are multiple and complex. The bare power calculations of states’ national security, economic, and diplomatic interests still present the primary challenge to compliance with human rights norms. But threats to the international rights framework are emerging from three new directions: increased geopolitical competition with new powers whose views of state sovereignty are at odds with human rights obligations, the rise of xenophobic and populist domestic movements, and the spread of surveillance technologies. In addition, for billions of citizens living in poverty or conflict zones, the notion of an international legal regime to which they can appeal for the protection of their rights remains a distant fiction. More than simply challenging individual norms and institutions, these factors are undermining the fragile, imperfect consensus that developed around human rights since 1945.
This book examines these emerging challenges to the international human rights regime and offers recommendations for activists, policymakers, and academics to better understand and address them. It emerged from discussions with the Ford Foundation on how scholars, youth, policymakers, and activists could weigh in on the partisan, often gloomy, global discussion around human rights. As the project unfolded over the course of two years, we held a series of virtual workshops with authors and informal meetings with human rights experts and activists to share ideas, explore and develop cross-chapter themes, and reality-check our analyses and conclusions.
To be sure, there are other threats than those described above. The impact of climate change on human rights is a major one. Another is the rapid growth of global inequality, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crises that accompanied it. Even before the pandemic, poverty, inequality, and deprivation were undermining not just the guarantees of economic and social rights described in the following chapters but also the substance and perceived legitimacy of political and civil rights protections. Arguably, as citizens feel their economic insecurity more acutely in the postpandemic recovery, autocrats and demagogues will seek to exploit economic insecurity to consolidate personal power. Partisan attempts to parlay popular fears over the economy will lead to worsening treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and the declining power of multilateral and regional organizations to enforce international commitments for their protection and humane treatment.
Of course, we could not address all these issues in a single volume. Our goal was more modest: to focus on the structural, political, and technical challenges or threats to international and regional human rights regimes. However, many of the other issues listed above are addressed indirectly. Climate change, for example, has an impact on many of the themes addressed here. Extreme weather is already a factor in increased migration and domestic and international conflict. The rise of populism and the breakdown of regional human rights bodies’ enforcement of protections for migrants and refugees have fueled the deterioration in attitudes toward them, and in their treatment. And although economic and social rights are not addressed here as a discrete topic, many of the authors in this book explain how economic, social, and political inequality have both increased the pressures for the realization of the broad guarantees of human rights and weakened the appeal of the West and indeed much of the Global North’s traditional focus on civil and political rights.
Structure of the Book
The chapters are grouped into four related clusters: the rise—or return of—global great power competition and the efforts of global autocracies and to remake the global order; the persistence of populist and transnational religious groups that are shaping international human rights policies and institutions; the emergence of new technologies, which has placed greater authority in the hands of states, corporations, and individuals; and the struggles of regional human rights systems to adapt to these challenges.
After my historical and contextual overview in chapter 1, the first section explores the effect of geopolitical competition on human rights. Chapter 2, by Rosemary Foot, examines the dynamics and implications of rising U.S.–China antagonism, both within China and globally. In chapter 3 Nandini Ramanujam and Vishakha Wijenayake look at Russia’s role in shaping the international rights system and how the international failure to address economic and social rights has aided President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to undermine political and civil rights domestically and abroad. Alexander Cooley discusses in chapter 4 how China and Russia have sought to create new institutions of global governance that promote their self-interested views of illiberalism and national sovereignty at the expense of human rights in an attempt to remake the global order to their own advantage. When we initially sketched out the outlines of this book project, the term COVID-19 did not exist, but in chapter 5 Rana Moustafa explains how rising geopolitical competition weakened the global response to the pandemic and how multilateral institutions have failed in guaranteeing human rights protections during domestic responses.
The second thematic section deals with the impact of domestic politics on international human rights policies. The influence of domestic politics on the foreign policies of states is, of course, nothing new.[4] But the sorts of national populist movements described by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, often stoked by economic insecurity, are targeting commitments and policies to defend human rights, not just domestically but internationally.[5] In chapter 6, Gerald Neuman builds on his previous work on this topic[6] to examine these pressures and explore how the reassertion of national sovereign claims might be balanced against international norms. Within and outside those populist movements, evangelical churches and leaders in Brazil, the Philippines, Uganda, the United States, and elsewhere are asserting themselves in foreign policy and human rights matters. Chapter 7, by Melani McAlister, examines the tension between the narrower interpretation of rights advanced by evangelical movements and the progressive rights agenda of many human rights NGOs and multilateral organizations.
Section III examines the threats of new technologies to human rights, and the gaps and weaknesses in responses by existing institutions. Emily Taylor, Kate Jones, and Carolina Caeiro consider in chapter 8 how attempts by the Chinese government to alter internet protocols will likely impinge on rights to privacy; freedom of expression and opinion; freedom of thought, religion, and belief; and due process. In chapter 9, Thompson Chengeta highlights the racially discriminatory effects of autonomous weapons systems and artificial intelligence and the lack of accountability regarding their use.
The last thematic grouping, section IV, focuses on regional human rights systems in Europe; Latin America; and Africa; and political upheaval, geopolitics, and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. In chapter 10, Urfan Khaliq analyzes the European system of human rights, which was once considered an exemplary model (wrongly, he believes), and how domestic and intraregional tensions have weakened its effectiveness. Chapter 11, by Santiago Canton and Angelita Baeyens, argues that unless governments in the Americas dramatically reform the inter-American system of human rights, sometimes described as the “crown jewel” of the Western hemisphere’s multilateral system, the Organization of American States, will become obsolete. In the case of the African human rights system, Solomon Dersso argues in chapter 12 that the continent is not immune to contemporary pressures facing the global human rights regime, including populism, nationalism, bigotry, the assertion of national sovereignty, and intensifying rivalry among global actors. In each of these cases, reimagining the function and duties of these systems and their bureaucracies will be essential if they are to remain relevant to the mission of defending human rights and lives. While the Middle East and North Africa do not have a regional human rights system similar to those in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, there too citizens and governments have become caught up in the rising demands for accountable government, geopolitics, and decreasing U.S. commitment to advancing human rights globally, as Aslı Bâli details in chapter 13.
The book concludes with a series of recommendations for policymakers and activists alike. These build on a separate, virtual discussion Chatham House held between the authors and international and frontline human rights activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Those discussions and earlier discussions of draft chapters produced a set of practical and personal perspectives that we include in our recommendations here. Some of those recommendations call for the drafting and updating of treaties and covenants to address new challenges. Others focus on changing or expanding the mandate of existing multilateral bodies or outlining new agendas for activism and future scholarship.
This book seeks to provide concrete, practical policy recommendations in response to these modern challenges and to the gaps in policy, advocacy, and scholarship. If, indeed, the international consensus over human rights and the legitimacy and functions of international institutions to defend human rights are fraying or fragile, to what extent can they be recovered? More optimistically, can the present moment represent an opportunity to hear the voice of the Global South more clearly and to expand its role in redefining human rights domestically and internationally? What can activists, policymakers, and citizens do to shore up and protect the human rights system in which so many of us—as the young participant in the Chatham House roundtable reminded us—have grown up? And for those who are aware of the promises of political, civil, economic, and social rights but have yet to benefit, or who are watching them become increasingly distant—as in Brazil, China, Myanmar, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe—what can be done to realize or recover them?
We hope the analyses and recommendations presented here match the urgency of human rights challenges in a difficult, fluid, multipolar world, and point a way forward to renew the commitment to these rights. We believe that in sketching out some of the broader geopolitical and domestic threats to the international human rights regime, we can, in a limited way, start to deepen future discussion and research on this topic.
Notes
1. Christopher Sabatini, “Why Is the U.S. Joining Venezuela and Nicaragua in Discrediting a System to Protect Human Rights?,” Washington Post, January 17, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/17/why-is-us-joining-venezuela-nicaragua-discrediting-system-protect-human-rights/.
2. Julian Borger, “Bolton Praises Bolsonaro While Declaring ‘Troika of Tyranny’ in Latin America,” The Guardian, November 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/01/trump-admin-bolsonaro-praise-john-bolton-troika-tyranny-latin-america.
3. “Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan,” August 31, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/31/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-end-of-the-war-in-afghanistan/.
4. Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, 3 (Summer 1988), pp. 427–60, www.jstor.org/stable/2706785?seq=1.
5. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy (London: Penguin Books, 2018).
6. Gerald Neumann (ed.), Human Rights in a Time of Populism: Challenges and Responses (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
