The failure of human rights
by Tom Sullivan
Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School looks at how the human rights agenda crafted in the latter 20th century has foundered in the 21st. Nine “core” treaties with weak enforcement and loose interpretation. Idealistic perhaps, but too impractical. Inauspiciously, given this week in the U.S., Posner begins his long examination in the Guardian with examples of extrajudicial killings (summary executions) by police in Brazil, “not as a matter of official policy, but as a matter of practice.” (We can relate.) Posner writes:
The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. The ambiguity, which allows governments to rationalise almost anything they do, is not a result of sloppy draftsmanship but of the deliberate choice to overload the treaties with hundreds of poorly defined obligations. In most countries people formally have as many as 400 international human rights – rights to work and leisure, to freedom of expression and religious worship, to nondiscrimination, to privacy, to pretty much anything you might think is worth protecting. The sheer quantity and variety of rights, which protect virtually all human interests, can provide no guidance to governments. Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right might prevent a government from protecting another.
Everybody gets to pick and choose. The Americans focused on political rights. The Soviets on social and economic ones. But even if enforcement is lax, the effort at least requires governments to take human rights seriously.
But while governments all use the idiom of human rights, they use it to make radically different arguments about how countries should behave. China cites “the right to development” to explain why the Chinese government gives priority to economic growth over political liberalisation. Many countries cite the “right to security,” a catch-all idea that protection from crime justifies harsh enforcement methods. Vladimir Putin cited the rights of ethnic minorities in Ukraine in order to justify his military intervention there, just as the United States cited Saddam Hussein’s suppression of human rights in order to build support for the Iraq war. Certain Islamic countries cite the right to religious freedom in order to explain why women must be subordinated, arguing that women must play the role set out for them in Islamic law. The right of “self‑determination” can be invoked to convert foreign pressure against a human-rights violating country into a violation of that country’s right to determine its destiny. The language of rights, untethered to specific legal interpretations, is too spongy to prevent governments from committing abuses and can easily be used to clothe illiberal agendas in words soothing to the western ear.
The result of NGO efforts to expand and secure human rights, says Posner, has been too top down, and more directed to satisfy the psychology of donors than the needs in individual cultures we fail at understanding. It is the same failure in top-down development economics. He suggests an approach to promoting well being in other countries that is “empirical rather than ideological.”
But given the turmoil of the last few weeks, perhaps America should get started by removing the beam from its own eye.