In the context of US–China competition, there is growing polarization between their rival paradigms of human rights. It therefore becomes both more necessary and more difficult for less powerful states to make their voices heard.
The human rights system has long been conditioned to accept and work with polarization. The bifurcation of the International Bill of Rights locked competing paradigms of human rights into the system. These came to be championed by rival political blocs in the Cold War. The ideal that human rights are treated as indivisible has for a long time seemed remote.
Polarization is a matter of political choices, rather than a fixed state. In the context of growing US–China rivalry, it is worsening again. Diplomats and UN officials from numerous regions interviewed for this paper were united in describing the growing polarization in the field of human rights diplomacy, as the two major powers push their respective agendas, often leaving smaller and non-aligned states in a difficult position. From the perspective of one Global South diplomat, ‘the tensions are as old as human rights. We cannot get rid of them. But they are now becoming more and more difficult for us to balance.’
The division between civil and political rights on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other, has arguably evolved into a new set of competing paradigms, which could be characterized as democracy vs development. Conceptually, each makes a reasonable pairing with at least part of the human rights framework, yet both are often presented by their main protagonists in a way that de-emphasizes the other. More importantly, the two paradigms threaten to subsume human rights into another agenda entirely: making human rights compliance a by-product of either democracy or economic development.
In the US, following the turbulence of the Trump administration, Biden has restored democracy promotion as a foreign policy priority. The showpiece ‘Summit for Democracy’ held in December 2021 aspired to ‘set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.’ Human rights were presented as one of the summit’s three pillars – a subset of the overarching task of promoting democracy. However, democracy neither captures the totality of human rights, nor is a democratic system a guarantee that human rights will be fulfilled. Meanwhile, Biden’s invocation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ in a May 2022 speech on military assistance to Ukraine (and the ‘ongoing battle in the world between autocracy and democracy’) underlined that the US quest to buttress democracy is in the end backed by military might. But memories linger around the world of US-backed coups, of US support for the autocrats who emerged victorious from the Arab Spring, and of violations of human rights in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
European politicians have tended to use less bellicose language than the US, but have long framed ‘democracy and human rights’ almost as a single concept (despite a more nuanced presentation of human rights in the 1992 Treaty on European Union). In the UK, then foreign secretary Liz Truss gave a speech at Chatham House in December 2021 entitled ‘Building the Network of Liberty’ as part of her effort to establish a doctrine for the UK’s post-Brexit role in the world. In that speech, Truss spoke of ‘standing up for freedom and democracy’ and pitted ‘the free world’ against ‘our adversaries’. It is not difficult to infer the targets of such rhetoric, but which audience, asked one interviewee, is it designed to convince?
The answer is not to be found in the Global South, as numerous interviewees made clear. One described a widespread attitude among African countries that human rights continue to be ‘linked to perceptions of Western regime change’. Meanwhile, a diplomat from Latin America saw the adversarial rhetoric from Global North countries as provocative and damaging, appealing for moderation:
Meanwhile, China has sought to position itself as a leader of the Global South by claiming and championing the old concept of the ‘right to development’. As with the protagonists of the ‘human rights and democracy’ framing in the West, this narrative seems to be underpinned by a measure of genuine conviction from China. But there is also no doubting how politically useful it is. According to one interviewee, it provides a way for China ‘to justify its achievement retrospectively’, while also reframing human rights in a way that helps it evade the criticism it has faced on civil and political rights violations since 1989. It emphasizes China’s substantial economic offer to the world and revives an old narrative about inequality between states and the betrayals of the Global North. Conceptually, since the right to development rests with states rather than individuals, it resonates well with China’s preference for a state-oriented human rights system in which individual rights and recourse are de-emphasized or removed altogether.
From the perspective of many countries in the Global South, it is impossible to disentangle human rights from issues of economic inequality and development.
As one interviewee explained, the right to development makes little sense as a formal right, but it has provided a relevant platform for the discussion of rights. Arguably the issues that it raises have become more evident in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other interviewees described it as an idea that had simply stagnated. One said: ‘the idea has lost momentum within Africa … We own it, but it did not work out because the West blocked it.’ But, while European countries including France and Germany once joined China as co-sponsors for a resolution on the right to development in the UNCHR, that agenda has become toxic to countries in the Global North, who now avoid the drafting group for HRC resolutions and vote against the resolutions. There is a perception now, expressed during a Chatham House roundtable on human rights diplomacy, that both proponents and opponents use the right to development concept to score political points against each other, with the result that ‘the right to development framing immediately politicizes something which should be positive’.
Yet, from the perspective of many countries in the Global South, it is impossible to disentangle human rights from issues of economic inequality and development. One interviewee said, a civil and political rights agenda presented in terms of freedom and democracy is often dismissed by African governments as ‘just another stick to beat them with’. It is also a way for the Global North to sidestep the issues those governments want to talk about. One diplomat said that ‘for most countries, we need to talk first about inequality’. Another said, ‘the world’s economic and financial architecture is structured in a way that stacks up against developing countries’, describing the G20 debt suspension plan in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘underwhelming’.
As of now, there is too little space available for a non-politicized conversation about the relationship between human rights, development and inequality. This is not helped by the lack of engagement on human rights from international financial institutions such as the IMF. In turn, as several human rights practitioners commented, a general lack of economic literacy within much of the human rights sector stands in the way of a more sophisticated, multi-stakeholder treatment of this issue.
As discussed in Chapter 2, the international human rights system has long been one of the arenas in which great power politics play out. However, the more entrenched the rival paradigms of democracy and development become in the context of US–China competition, the more difficult it is to negotiate the relationship between them. The promotion of vastly different conceptions of human rights in a context of wilful deafness to the other side is a serious problem. If positions continue to harden, depolarization becomes increasingly difficult to envisage. One Asian diplomat said, echoing counterparts from other regions: ‘Everyone sticks to their ideological position now, there really is no genuine dialogue.’
The impact of this is that the political risk (and potential cost) of engaging proactively in the human rights system is much higher for most countries in the Group of 77 (G77), particularly smaller states that lack economic heft, political leverage or powerful patronage. The strongest and wealthiest countries are the most capable of instrumentalizing the system and the most likely to avoid consequences for their own violations. Meanwhile, pariah states such as North Korea have little more to lose and others, such as Myanmar, are accustomed to withstanding regular condemnation of their human rights conduct and have developed survival strategies. The countries most vulnerable to the system are those that wish to protect their reputations and, potentially, advance their own agendas through the UN system. The incentives are stacked against such countries playing a proactive role. As one diplomat said, ‘rich countries can withstand the pressure, but smaller countries will face consequences for their votes.’ Another interviewee stressed that, for many African states, human rights diplomacy is so fraught with risks that it has become a matter of reputation management and little more.
One fear is that the political cost of taking a stand against a powerful state on human rights grounds, such as voting for a particular country resolution, would meet with harmful reciprocal action, such as a priority initiative or nomination being blocked elsewhere in the system. States in this position have good reason to submit to China’s antagonism towards country resolutions, for example, or may prefer to shift country-specific situations requiring the attention of the HRC from agenda item 4 (‘Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention’) to the more benign item 10 (‘Technical assistance and capacity-building’).
As states are wooed and pressured for their HRC and UNGA votes, they risk becoming unintentionally and harmfully entangled in great power politics. One diplomat from a country often aligned with the US said it is becoming more and more difficult to reject texts produced by China, which are becoming increasingly subtle and sophisticated, and this created a difficult dynamic to manage. Accordingly, for many states, abstention is often the safest course of action.
