We must stand up to the politics of demonization
At a press conference in Paris, Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty calls out politicians like Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Victor Orban for their “toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanizes entire groups of people”, and says that the need to stand up for human rights everywhere has never been clearer.
Amnesty International today launched its annual report on the state of the world’s human rights. This is the first time we launch this global report in Paris. And the reason for doing that is closely linked to the message of the report.
There are few countries in the world where human rights are more tightly woven into the national psyche than in France. Human rights have been deeply embedded in French national values for hundreds of years.
Yet now France, a cradle of the values of freedom, equality and dignity — the values which underpin human rights — is itself at a tipping point.
As the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen stated:
“ignorance, forgetting or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments”.
2016 was a year sullied horribly by “ignorance, forgetting and contempt” for the human rights of women, men and children.
It was a year when a poisonous political rhetoric of “us versus them” surged across the world.
Whether it was the xenophobic and sexist rhetoric of President Trump’s election campaign, European leaders’ assault on refugee’ rights, President Erdogan’s massive crackdown after the attempted coup in Turkey, or the so-called war on drugs in the Philippines.
Leaders have unashamedly peddled a toxic rhetoric blaming whole groups of people for social or economic grievances. At the root of this rhetoric lies a dangerous idea that some people are less human than others.
People’s grievances often have a legitimate basis — whether protecting jobs or delivering security or ending criminality. But the solutions leaders offer are simply dangerous.
Amnesty International’s Annual Report documents the consequences of this poisonous politics of demonization. It is leading to a world that is more fragmented, more unequal, more insecure — for all of us.
We are seeing the consequences right now.
Here in France, a state of emergency is well into its second year and threatens to become a new normal. Hard-won freedoms are being traded away in the name of security.
International indifference to mass atrocities from Syria to Yemen and South Sudan has also become the norm.
2016 was the year we ceased to be shocked by the deliberate bombing of hospitals in conflict zones. Chemical weapons attacks on civilians and 171 villages burned in Darfur attracted only fleeting interest. 7,000 people were killed as a war on drugs in the Philippines became a war on the poor, 30,000 Rohingya were forced to flee their homes in Rakhine state, Myanmar, with more than 1,200 homes burned.
And while European leaders strove to keep refugees away from their shores, over 5,000 people drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2016 — more than ever before.
And any day now we expect President Trump to renew his efforts to ban refugees from several countries from the USA. People fleeing war and persecution like Syria. In the country that used to say: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.
This is the politics of demonization at work. Not only is this ban inhumane, it is just plain stupid.
We have reached a point where there is no longer any red line. Almost no action has become too appalling or indefensible.
In this new reality, it is easy to imagine a dystopian future where unrestrained brutality becomes the new normal.
The world is facing a serious deficit of bold, principled leadership. Instead of standing up for human rights, leaders have either spearheaded or capitulated to the politics of demonization.
But we don’t have to go down this path. Despite the parallels that many are drawing between the present time and 1930s Europe, we must not be fatalistic.
The message of this report is that where leaders fail, people must step up.
Amnesty International is calling on people to stand up to the politics of demonization.
Of course this is not as easy as it sounds. From Venezuela to Ethiopia, from Turkey to China, governments have clamped down hard on people fighting for their rights in 2016.
Yet across the world, the spirit of justice is strong and it will not be suppressed.
Across Africa, people’s popular movements emerged to channel people’s demands for justice and human rights.
On Europe’s Mediterranean coasts, people stood up to help refugees where governments failed so dismally.
And at the Baton Rouge protests last summer, Iesha Evans stood serenely as riot police rushed towards her — a captivating reminder that the spirit of the man who bravely stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 is alive and well.
Today, we need that spirit more than ever before.
