Author: chswebsite

Gabriel Hetland
University at Albany, State University of New York

The idea that human rights should, indeed must, be defended appears unobjectionable and beyond question. During the 1970s and 1980s the concept of human rights played a key role in struggles against military rule in Latin America. The most famous case may be Argentina, where the Mothers (and later Grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo waged a decades-long struggle to bring Argentina’s military to account for widespread human-rights violations. This struggle was a key part of the broad popular movement that topped Argentina’s dictatorship and led to the restoration of democratic rule in 1983.

Human rights struggles were important in many Latin American countries during this period. The brutal experience of military rule convinced many popular organizations and leftist political parties that human (and political) rights that formerly might have been considered secondary or “bourgeois” – in particular the right to due process, and protection against torture, execution, and unlawful imprisonment (along with access to voting, and rights to freedom of speech and assembly) – were in fact critical, both in and of themselves, and as necessary conditions for waging broader struggles to tame, transform, and transcend capitalism. Evidence of the systematic denial of human rights in the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and other countries claiming the socialist mantle convinced many on the Left, in Latin America and elsewhere, that human (and political) rights could not be set aside in the name of socialism or revolution.

There are compelling reasons then, for anyone seeking a more egalitarian, democratic, and fair society to support the notion of human rights. At times, however, the concept has been used in highly questionable ways. Take how one of the world’s leading human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch (HRW), has employed the idea of human rights in the case of contemporary Venezuela, alongside and in contrast to other Latin American countries. Close examination of HRW’s statements and actions towards Venezuela (and Colombia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina) show how struggles over human rights may serve organizational and imperial interests over and above the interests of the downtrodden, forgotten masses whom human rights organizations claim to defend.

Few countries in the world have been subject to more attention from HRW in recent years than Venezuela. Since 2014, HRW has issued 3 reports and more than 70 statements (op-eds, commentaries, dispatches, news reports, etc.) related to Venezuela, more than any other Latin American country, except Brazil. These reports and statements document the worsening political and socioeconomic (or “humanitarian” as per HRW) crises that have engulfed Venezuela since 2014. As anyone familiar with the news is likely to know, Venezuela is currently in the midst of a severe, multi-dimensional crisis. HRW’s work captures important aspects of this crisis, such as severe and appalling shortages of food, medicine, and basic goods, acts of state violence and repression, and the government’s increasingly select adherence to democratic norms (visible in the decision to suspend constitutionally mandated regional elections for over a year).

There are clear grounds upon which HRW and others can legitimately criticize the Nicolás Maduro administration. Yet, one need not be a blind Madurista to find HRW’s work vis-à-vis Venezuela and other Latin American countries troubling in three ways.

The first is the openly partisan nature of HRW’s criticism of Venezuela, which is directed exclusively at the government, making it appear that the current crisis is entirely the fault of the Maduro administration. This omits the broader historical, economic, and geopolitical context in which Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has taken place. As scholars of Venezuela have shown (but HRW seems to ignore in its work), the Venezuelan government has not acted in a vacuum but under significant constraints, most notably the constant, often violent opposition of domestic elites and the US government, which have repeatedly sought to destabilize and remove Venezuela’s government. By neglecting to criticize human rights violations perpetrated by the opposition (and often supported by the US) – e.g. recent instances of low-income Venezuelans, often people of color, being burned alive by opposition protesters; and destruction of badly needed food stored in government buildings – HRW has undermined its credibility. The organization thus appears less as a universal defender of human rights than a partisan actor.

The second is the double standard by which HRW has treated Venezuela and other Latin American countries. While Venezuela has been relentlessly criticized for any and all acts of “democratic backsliding” (some of which, to be sure, merit critique), HRW has been silent in the face of arguably more egregious violations of democratic norms elsewhere. The most obvious example is the Brazilian parliament’s removal of Brazil’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff, in what critics label a “parliamentary-institutional coup,” which took place over two acts, in April and August 2016. HRW did not issue a single statement discussing, much less condemning, Rousseff’s ouster. HRW’s (non)actions were similar with respect to the similar parliamentary “coup” that removed Paraguay’s president Fernando Lugo in 2012. HRW responded to this with a single short statement expressing concern that Lugo’s impeachment “showed a lack of respect for due process.” The contrast with HRW’s relentless words and actions against the Maduro administration (e.g. lobbying numerous Latin American governments to suspend Venezuela from the Organization of American States) is notable.

The third troubling issue is the fact that HRW’s work in Latin America overall (and not just regarding Venezuela) appears to align very closely with the interests of the US government. (This is troubling for multiple reasons, not least the fact that the US does not have a sterling record of supporting human rights in Latin America, to say the least.) HRW has, for instance, issued no critiques of Argentina’s conservative president and stalwart US ally, Mauricio Macri (apart from a statement imploring Macri, “Don’t Ease the Pressure Over Venezuela’s Abuses”), despite Macri’s firing of over 1000 public employees just after taking office, and recent harsh crackdown on Bolivian immigrants in Argentina. It is also worth noting that HRW aligned itself with former US ally Álvaro Uribe (a notorious human rights abuser, whom HRW criticized in the past) to oppose the historic 2016 peace accord forged between Colombia’s government and the FARC. HRW actively campaigned for a “No” vote in public referenda on the accord, an outcome many observers felt would lead to a continuation of human rights abuses within Colombia.

This brief examination of the contrasting ways the concept of human rights has been used and abused in Latin America over the past forty years has two broader lessons. The first is the need to situate concepts, like human rights and democracy, within broader historical, regional, and global context. The analysis presented shows the concept has been wielded in very different ways by grassroots activists (e.g. the Plaza de Mayo Mothers/Grandmothers) and powerful, transnational organizations (HRW). The second, related, lesson is the need to examine the webs of power within which concepts like human rights (or liberty, freedom, etc.) are wielded. In other words, comparative-historical sociology is needed to differentiate the use and abuse of such concepts.

Gábor Attila Tóth
Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin

The annus mirabilis, the year 1989, proved that the spirit of liberty still lives in the hearts of East-Central European men and women. The autumn of that year was the historical turning point for the transformation from Soviet-type authoritarian regimes to democracy. The single- or dominant-party systems collapsed through a series of negotiations and compromises between the old regime and the democratic opposition. In Hungary, the substantively new Constitution was promulgated on 23 October 1989, on the thirty-third anniversary of the 1956 revolution, two weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 1989-born democracy can be characterized by the main institutions of constitutionalism: free and fair elections, representative government, a parliamentary system, an independent judiciary, ombudspersons to guard fundamental rights, and a Constitutional Court to review the laws for their constitutionality.

Although Hungary set up what looks like a path to a mature democracy, the country faced from the beginning serious legal and extra-legal difficulties. There were social and political tensions at work under the surface of the new legal system. Most importantly, the political left and right were involved in a cold civil war with each other, and could not cooperate in partnership under and for a shared constitution. They not only saw each other as competitors in the contest for an election victory but also as enemies who were detrimental to national existence and progress. A poor tradition of democratic political conventions, weakness of civil society, imperfections of public education, and other sociological factors all made the constitutional balance fragile. In other words, political reality threatened seriously the fulfillment of constitutional ideas.

In the 2010 parliamentary election, the then-opposition party Fidesz won a landslide majority of 68 per cent of the seats with 53 per cent of the votes. It was a majority sufficiently large to adopt a brand-new constitution called Fundamental Law. In line with the new constitutional framework the government enacted legislation affecting the independent judiciary; limiting the powers of the constitutional court; establishing a powerful media authority; transforming the Electoral Commission; narrowing public forum for free speech; removing legal rights of underprivileged churches etc. The government which imposed these radical changes remained popular and had been reelected with a similar majority in 2014. What’s more, recent opinion polls suggest that if an election were called today the government would be elected again.

On the face of it, what the people want, the people have. In other words, the new Hungarian legal system arguably represents an ‘illiberal’ or ‘winner-takes-all’ concept of democracy and rule of law. Many observers of the Hungarian transformation apply the term ‘illiberal democracy’ to Hungary because political power is based upon repetitive elections, but the power-holders systematically violate the freedoms of the people they represent. More than this, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has proudly announced his government’s break with liberal type of democracy. This is of course far from unprecedented. In reaction to unsettling constitutional developments allied with the decline of global freedom, a new school of thought has emerged to account for the fact that many such emerging regimes ostensibly behave as if they were democracies, but are majoritarian rather than consensual; populist instead of elitist; nationalist as opposed to cosmopolitan; or religious rather than secular. I think, however, that what we are experiencing is not democratic at all. The unrestrained decision-making in the name of the majority has set the country on a road to the ruin of democracy and this road leads to authoritarianism.

The most important new feature of authoritarianism is that, under a façade of constitutionalism, it claims to abide by democratic principles. The Hungarian government, feigns to be normal constitutional democracy, legitimizes itself through popular elections and referenda. Incumbents are elected leaders who adopt constitutions and laws that apparently correspond to legal systems in democratic countries. The constitutional rules and institutions are often not essentially different from those to be found in constitutional democracies. However, the Fundamental Law belongs to paper constitutions often characterized as ‘semantic camouflage’ or ‘façade constitutions’, designed to create systematic advantages for the incumbents.

Today many authoritarian systems constitutionally retain multiparty elections and provide scope for activities of opposition movements. Political rights include active and passive electoral rights by direct, secret ballot, based on universal and equal voting rights. What makes them distinctive is that the election is managed so as to deny opposition candidates a fair chance. Legal norms and practices ensure the dominance of the ruling party. The voting practice in the Hungarian constitutional system is hegemonic by nature, meaning that this system is deficient in many constituting elements of free, fair, and competitive elections required by both international human rights law and principles of constitutionalism. By virtue of this, the head of government may keep the process and outcome of the vote under strict control. An ODIHR (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) mission concluded that the 2014 parliamentary election was not fair and that the basic framework within which the election was run violated key OSCE guidelines. The governing party enjoyed an undue advantage because of partisan changes in election law, e.g., unequal suffrage, gerrymandering of electoral districts, a rise to the electoral threshold, restrictive campaign regulations, far-from-independent assessment of the election and biased media coverage that blurred the separation between political party and the State. In sum, the practice of voting is controlled by those in power, and rival political movements are severely constrained. As a result, citizens are not offered a free and fair choice among various competitors in elections.

Existing institutional checks within the constitutional system are also illusory. The Constitutional Court plays a legitimizing role instead of fulfilling its task as final guardians of fundamental rights. The constitutional ‘reform’ resulted in politically expedient modifications to anything from the personal composition (‘court packing’), competences, and institutional and financial independence of the constitutional court. (In a similar fashion, see the most recent transformation of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal.) Decisions of the constitutional justices, appointed according to the will of the authoritarian leader, contribute to the reinforcement of the system.

As a contemporary authoritarian constitution, the Fundamental Law formally declares liberty and equality rights for their citizens, but these are hardly legally enforceable. It constructs a constitutional catalogue of fundamental rights, ostensibly based upon the international standards arising from the European Convention of Human Rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. Yet the constitution in fact contains a number of sections in direct contradiction with international human rights law, typically, recognizing certain fundamental rights, but only to the extent that these rights serve the interests of the ruling political group. Good examples might well be that in line with the Fundamental Law, rules on public education, social and health-care and taxation may give preference to the ‘historical churches’ over other churches, and the churches may be given an advantage over other institutions (NGOs, foundations, associations); the Fundamental Law has been criticized since it does not treat same-sex couples as equals; family is defined by a provision under which only a man and a woman are allowed to marry; the right to asylum is granted only “if neither their country of origin nor another country provides protection” for the asylum-seeker. Moreover, the Venice Commission noted that several parts of the Fundamental Law on the citizens’ responsibilities and obligations seems to indicate a shift of emphasis from the obligations of the state toward the individual citizens to the obligations of the citizens toward the community.

The government tends to restrict freedom of speech by capturing media. The relative popularity of the ruling party derives from the global trend toward populist leaders who exploit popular anti-system and anti-establishment sentiments; but it is also the case that a significant section of the mass media is de facto captured, including de jure takeover of public media. In this way, the general public is subject to systematic manipulation by the government. The examples include a series of government-run poster campaigns and ‘national consultations’ designed to stir up public feeling against refugees.

Although criminal prosecution is still a tool for government, political opponents opt for a less blunt approach, opting to sue journalists and civil rights activists for defamation to silence dissent, rather than resorting to imprisonment, or blatant prohibitions or suppressions of journals, books, films, or websites. Since restrictions on free speech protect the members of the majority (citing, for example, the dignity of the nation, the country, or dominant ethnic or religious groups), instead of members of vulnerable social groups, such regulations constitute one aspect of an authoritarian approach.

Contemporary authoritarian governments do not necessarily prohibit civil society organizations, preferring instead to impose administrative burdens and found pro-government quasi-NGOs to oppose them. In Hungary, leaders of the opposition parties and social movements are frequently characterized as betraying their nation, or agents of external powers. Similarly, indirect racial or ethnic exclusions as well as repression of civil society are among the characteristics of the system. Although civil society organizations are not prohibited, following the legislation in Russia, Belarus, and Israel, the Parliament adopted a ‘foreign agent’ law; its primary aim being to curb cooperation between international and domestic NGOs. The government’s attempt to eradicate the highly respected and independent Central European University can be also seen as a feature of a rising authoritarian regime. Moreover, government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs) have been set up and financed by the governing party in order to imitate civil society, promote authoritarian interests, and hamper the work of legitimate NGOs (See similar cases in Egypt, Russia, Syria, Turkey).

An important stepping stone to authoritarianism seems to be the ill-defined powers, including emergency powers, of the executive, the ‘guardian of the Constitution’. By invoking threats posed by terrorism, financial crisis or other imminent dangers, the head of the executive could successfully introduce arbitrary emergency measures. What is culminated in Hungary is primarily not a fear that alerts us to our vulnerability, but rather a rioting phobia. The real fear of the unknown, worry about change – cultural effects, crime rates, costs and so on – are manipulated by political leaders who exploit human fragility. In Hungary, the administration of nationalist ideology, the extended state of exception, and the government-run xenophobic billboard campaign are the symbolic and factual means of the manipulation.

Some would understand the Hungarian state of affairs as Rousseauian. In my view, neither volonté general, nor volonté de tous is helpful to justify the system under the Fundamental Law. To be sure, while the constitutional system in Hungary appears to be majority backed by the electorate through both popular votes and referendums, this electoral success is based on one-sided modifications to the constitution and electoral laws, mass manipulation, unfair elections, and fear of referendum initiated by groups of individuals.

I think that the political system in Hungary is closer to Carl Schmitt’s ideas on the distinction between friend and enemy; enforcement internal political homogeneity; the role of the executive, a ‘sovereign ruler’, who creates a new constitution in the name of the people, and is recognized as the ‘guardian of the Constitution’ as opposed to the constitutional court. These are justificatory ideas for an authoritarian legal system, which enforce obedience to the central authority at the expense of personal freedoms, rule of law, and other constitutional principles.

Timothy M. Gill
UNC-Wilmington

Following World War II, state and social leaders across the world recognized the need to establish multilateral institutions that championed the global promotion of human rights. As a result, they created the United Nations (UN) in 1945, constructed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, established the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948, and wrote the American Convention on Human Rights in 1969. Thereafter, international leaders have signed and ratified several international agreements, including the Convention against Torture.

The U.S., however, has maintained a conflicted relationship with human rights.

In the immediate post-WWII period, conservative senators blocked the U.S. from adopting many international treaties, fearing that the international community might use them to overturn states’ rights and end segregation. Some conservative legislators have continued to voice concern for U.S. national sovereignty and states’ rights in the face of international treaties. Indeed, this was the reason that several Republican senators recently gave for refusing to support the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, even though the treaty was modeled after domestic legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

On the other hand, some U.S. leaders have embraced human rights and, at times, secured the ratification of human rights agreements.

During the early 1970s, Representative Donald Fraser (D-MN) resurrected the idea of human rights within Washington by hosting a series of hearings within the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, which involved visits from victims of right-wing Latin American dictatorships (Sikkink 2007). And, by the end of the decade, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter utilized the language of human rights to unite several factions within the Democratic Party – those concerned with the domestic behavior of communist governments, particularly in Eastern Europe, and those concerned with U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships, particularly in Latin America.

If there remained any question, though, concerning the Trump Administration’s position towards human rights, its stance has become clear over the last several months.

In his first trip abroad, President Trump visited with members of the royal Saudi family that continue to brutally rule over their country. Trump failed to offer any critique of the Saudi regime, instead visiting a Toby Keith concert and attending a meeting on counter-terrorism efforts. Indeed, Trump has made a habit of promoting working relations with several authoritarian leaders throughout the world. In an interview with Fox News correspondent Bill O’Reilly over the Super Bowl weekend, for instance, Trump reiterated his call to work with Russia and, when O’Reilly called Putin “a killer,” Trump responded, saying that there “are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent?”

Beyond Putin, Trump has invited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for a trip to Washington. Orbán has targeted Hungarian NGOs that criticize the government, deployed anti-Muslim rhetoric, and recently threatened to shut down the Central European University. Trump has also praised the policies of similar strongmen in both Kazakhstan and the Philippines, where extrajudicial murder has now become all but uncommon throughout the archipelago.

Under Trump, the U.S. has begun to relax Obama-implemented restrictions on weapon sales. In March, for example, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson decided to lift human rights conditions on the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain. Despite selling over $115 billion worth of arms to the human rights-violating government of Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration terminated plans to sell the Lockheed Martin-produced fighter jets to Bahrain in September 2016 lest it improve its human rights record, as it particularly concerned the treatment of Shiite government protesters. In May, Tillerson also quite plainly stated that the U.S. must often place national security and economic interests over U.S. values of freedom and democracy, leading to much criticism from within and beyond the ranks of the Republican Party.

These moves will surely send a signal to authoritarian governments throughout the world. Sunjeev Bery, an advocacy director with Amnesty International, for example, has stated that arms deals with Bahrain “place the U.S. at risk of being complicit in war crimes, and discourage other countries, like Saudi Arabia, from addressing their own human rights records.”

The Trump Administration also clearly evidences disdain for multilateral institutions. Earlier in March, the U.S. failed to appear before the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for a hearing involving U.S. immigration policies. Witnesses condemned the new administration’s attempts to ban individuals from particular countries from entering the U.S., and human rights activists have lambasted the Trump administration’s decision to skip the hearing.

At the same time that the Trump Administration has protested the IACHR, it has championed attempts by the OAS to push the Venezuelan government, another country that has condemned its IACHR hearings, to pursue several political-economic reforms, including a recall election on President Nicolás Maduro. Interestingly, Venezuela remains one of very few countries that the Trump Administration has targeted. The Treasury Department, for instance, has placed sanctions on the Venezuelan Vice-President Tareck El Aissami for his alleged involvement in drug trafficking, and U.S. state leaders have continuously condemned the Maduro government.

The real difference, of course, between countries like, on the one hand, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and, on the other hand, Venezuela and Cuba, that the Trump Administration seemingly cares about is support for national security interests. While the Venezuelan government has recurrently criticized the War on Terror since its inception in 2001, Bahrain has aligned with Middle Eastern forces such as Saudi Arabia, another U.S. ally and gross human rights violator, to target al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other anti-U.S. forces in the Middle Eastern region.

Despite some earlier question marks concerning the new administration and its policies, it’s now clear that the Trump team possesses little regard for the global promotion of human rights.

To be sure, the U.S. has long maintained a historically ambivalent relationship with human rights, multilateral institutions, and authoritarian leaders. Since the late 20th century, however, most U.S. presidents have accepted the importance of human rights as a significant factor that should, at least, partially shape U.S. foreign policy. In places like Saudi Arabia, though, we have seen how national security interests have repeatedly taken priority.

Under the new administration, human rights have been gravely downgraded as a foreign policy concern. Indeed, since Trump came to power, the U.S. has hardly spoke out against any country beyond Venezuela and Cuba. In doing so, Trump has shown that only left-leaning governments that reject U.S. national security interests are deserving of criticism. Such a policy harkens back to the darkest days of the Cold War – where the U.S. accepted, and even promoted, right-wing dictators, so long as they lavished praise upon the U.S. and targeted left-leaning activists (Grandin 2007; Mann 2012; Sikkink 2007).

As the last few months have shown, the next few years will surely involve a struggle to keep human rights concerns on the agenda. But, as the outcome of recent proposals by the Trump administration also shows, it’s a fight that can be won.

References

Grandin, Greg. 2006. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the
New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Mann, Michael 2013. The Sources of Social Power, Volume 4, Globalizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sikkink, Kathryn. 2007. Mixed Signals: US Human Rights Policy and Latin America. Washington: Century Foundation.

Marilyn Grell-Brisk with Timothy M. Gill

Targeted immigration bans, imprisonment of political opponents, abuse of refugees, disregard of immigrant and worker rights, murder, torture —the current social-political-economic landscape in the world appears bleak. The present preoccupation with these issues in our public consciousness, create a sense of urgency and continued crisis. It is not surprising then, that there is a renewed focus on the question of human rights. In the series of short articles that follow, we take a look at human rights within historical, national and global contexts. Gabriel Hetland asks us to examine the very idea and concept of human rights through the example of Human Rights Watch in Latin America. He calls for the issue to be analyzed more thoroughly and from a comparative historical perspective. This is exactly what the other articles do, while keeping the national contexts in the forefront. Gábor Attila Tóth, juxtaposes the question of human rights with freedom and liberty in post-communist Hungary. How do we understand vanishing liberties accomplished through seemingly democratic means? In the case of Russia, Anna Paretskaya discusses the repression of political opponents through the very medium that should allow for expressing disagreement with one’s government —the press and media. The last article by Timothy M. Gill, approaches the topic by looking at how the rise of Trump has changed the discourse on human rights in the United States, a country which for so long purported to be the steward and protector of human rights around the world.