With Trump and Putin, bad time for Human Rights

As we are entering a world dominated by three men -Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping-, the mere idea of defending human rights is going to suffer, at least for a time.

This situation is being judged alarming enough by international Human Rights organizations for one of the main ones, Human Rights Watch, to make this concern the heart of its annual report, published last week. A sign of the times, this ritual was largely ignored compared to previous years : Cassandras are not popular.

Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch Executive Director, accompanied this report with a strong warning. Listen :

“The rise of populism poses a dangerous threat to human rights. Trump gained power in the United States, various politicians are seeking power in Europe through making appeals to racism, xenophobia, nativism, and misogyny.

They all have in common the claim to speak for the majority and to claim that majority wants rights violated in the name of securing jobs, or avoiding cultural change, or protecting against terrorism. (…) There is this tendency today to think that the strongman delivers best.”

He follows with a description of a tendency in which many politicians, including in France and Europe, will recognize themselves :

“Many politicians today are responding to this rise of populism by simply putting their head in the sand, hoping that the winds of change will blow over. Others are actually emulating the populists, hoping somehow to preempt them when in fact they’re just reinforcing their message”.

Obviously, we haven’t moved overnight from a human rights paradise to the trumpian-putinian inferno of their violations… There was, on the contrary, almost three strange decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in which Human Rights seemed to be a rising and -at last- really universal value, before undergoing a slow but steady erosion, both in practice and in the minds.

In 1993 -who still remembers ?-, four years after the promised end of the cold war, some 8,000 delegates, diplomats from all over the world, civil society in its amazing diversity, gathered for several days in Vienna -yes, the same city where far-right candidate almost became President a few weeks ago- for the largest international conference ever on Human Rights.

As a journalist, I covered this studious and festive gathering, as were all UN Conferences at that time, full of hope of a positive era. The United Nations were in a period of resurrection and the Conference gave birth to a “Declaration of Vienna” and the promise of a golden era for Human Rights. We know what followed.

What followed the Rwanda genocide, the Balkan wars, 9/11 and the jihadist wave, George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” and its violations of its own laws; But it was also Barack Obama’s incapacity to close the Guantanamo prison, or his record-breaking number of extra-judicial executions (France’s François Hollande claims his share too), or his increasing number of armed-drone strikes on countries not at officially war with the US.

What followed was also six years of bloody war in Syria and collective incapacity to stop it, jihadist terror and its series of blind massacres, mass surveillance, the reluctance if not open refusal to accept refugees, rising selfishness, and the rise of what Kenneth Roth calls, without a better word, “populism”, which is not the expression of the peoplebut its manipulation.

One has to question the failure of Human Rights defence in the period that is about to close with Donald Trump entering the White House on Jan. 20, 2017. In an interview with Le Monde over the weekend, former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, a long time opponent of “humanrightsism”, draws a tough lesson and calls on the West to “rethink” this approach :

“I am as attached to Human Rights as anyone else. But I feared for a long time that “humanrightsism” as the sole criteria for Foreign Policy would lead us in this dead end. We are there now.

We don’t have anymore the means for our emotions. And it’s out of the question to start colonizing again. We have to rethink all this : evaluate interventions, determine more rigorous and rational criterias for the future”.

This ideology of “humanrightsism” got indeed confused with western ideology, particularly after the 2003 US intervention in Iraq, which led to regime change in Baghdad based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction. This approach is now discredited, and if Syria shows the tragic consequences of non-intervention, there aren’t many people today to promote the idea of the West as the world’s gendarme and sole guardian of the universality of Human Rights…

But as always, the swing went too far the other way, as if Human Rights were only a western, or even European concern, and its universality an illusion or worse, a fraud. The best answer comes from civil societies of emerging countries submitted to authoritarian rule or the thumb of “strongmen”, and who are trying to resist in the name of these receding values.

If Human Rights cannot indeed be the sole criteria for Foreign Policy, as Hubert Védrine says, the absence of Human Rights clearly leads to arbitrary rule.

At a time when we fear being caught between a Putin who doesn’t give a damn about “humanrightsism”, both in Russia and in the countries where he has influence, and an ignorant and cynical Trump, it is the role and duty of civil societies to reaffirm loud and clear values that should not let to disappear.

As Kenneth Roth says in his introduction to HRW’s anual report :

“What we need is a real, vigorous reaffirmation of Human Rights. We need to explain that Human Rights are the best way to avoid corrupt and arbitrary rule. Human Rights are the best way to ensure that a government hears and can respond to the actual needs of its people. And Human Rigts are the best way to actually change governments if they stop delivering to their people.

Above all, the public needs to reaffirm the basic value that we shoudl treat others the way we want them to treat us. That’s the best way to ensure that we don’t end up on the wrong end of the stick when a government abandons its comitment to Human Rights.”

With those words, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch received a hars tweet from none other than Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Far-Right National Front in France :

“Who’s this Ken Roth (HRW), professional human rights defender ? Who appointed him ? What are his credentials ?”

A good sign that we should remain vigilant and pay attention to what the Cassandras have to say, before “strong men”, anywhere in the world, come and tell us what we have to think.