For human rights advocates, 2013 brought many grim setbacks. Yet there were still some important signs of progress.
JUNIOR D.KANNAH/AFP/GettyImages
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BY Ken Roth
With the slaughter of civilians in Syria still horribly
unrestrained, it is easy to be discouraged about human rights. There is, of
course, every reason for outrage about Syria, and about the international
community's narrow focus on peace talks, unlikely as they are to succeed
anytime soon, without any comparable effort to stop the killing of civilians
while the fighting continues. But there has been human rights progress in many
areas in 2013. That is of obvious importance for the immediate beneficiaries,
but it also should encourage efforts for progress on persistent abuses
elsewhere. Here are a few of the human rights milestones of the past year:
Abusive Rwandan-backed rebel group in Congo crumbles. The eastern part of the
Democratic Republic of Congo has probably had more conflict-related deaths than
anywhere else since World War II. A plethora of armed groups have killed and
raped civilians with impunity. Among them is a succession of rebel groups
sponsored by Rwanda, both to protect it from any resurgence of the forces that
committed the 1994 genocide and to exploit the region's vast mineral resources.
The latest rebel incarnation, which emerged in May 2012, was the M23, led by,
among others, Bosco Ntaganda, who was wanted by the International Criminal Court
for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Rwanda got away with instigating these atrocities due in part to
the lingering guilt among the international community for failing to stop the
genocide. The killing in 1994 was halted only by an invasion of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, today Rwanda's president. Another factor
has been the international admiration for Rwanda's impressive economic advances
in the post-genocide period, albeit under the leadership of an autocratic
government that brooks no dissent.
Things began to change in June 2012, when Human Rights Watch and
a group of United Nations experts uncovered compelling evidence that Rwanda was
providing military support to the M23. For the first time, powerful Western
governments -- including Rwanda's most important backers, the United States and
Britain -- began to criticize Rwanda and even to suspend assistance. Rwanda
simply denied supporting the M23, undermining the government's credibility and
reconfirming the importance of pressuring it to stop.
At first the pressure succeeded in forcing the M23 to pull back
from Goma, the area's largest city, and it later contributed to Ntaganda's
surrender to the ICC. Still, for over a year, it was not enough to stop the M23
from preying on the people of the region. When the M23 opened an offensive in
October 2013, however, Rwanda's role was all too clear. This time, United
States Secretary of State John Kerry and British Foreign Secretary William
Hague telephoned Kagame and told him to stop. He
did. Deprived of the military support it needed to survive, and facing
intensified pressure from a reinforced UN peacekeeping force (see photo above),
the M23 crumbled within days. For
the first time in years, eastern Congo is apparently free of the predations of
a Rwandan-backed armed group.
China abolishes
"re-education through labor." Many
falsely assume that China is immune to pressure on human rights. In reality,
that is more a convenient excuse for governments seeking China's commercial
favor than a realistic assessment. China's judicial system is notoriously
compromised, formally under the direction of the Communist Party, but at least
it offers the pretense of a trial before a court. However, China has also long
maintained a parallel system of administrative detention in which the police,
without any judicial intervention, can sentence people to up to four years of
forced labor, often under harsh conditions. The most active part of this system
was known as "re-education through labor."
Those caught up in it ranged from minor criminal offenders to dissidents,
religious minorities, Falun Gong practitioners, and petitioners seeking
redress. As recently as January, 160,000 people were serving sentences under
re-education through labor.
Human rights activists and Chinese lawyers have long campaigned
against this huge loophole to any promise of a fair criminal-justice system.
For many years, China had been making noises about "reforming" the
system. Critics expressed skepticism, fearing that this would involve only
cosmetic changes, such as adding a judge to the police panel that makes
detention decisions. But in new President Xi Jinping's first reform move, the
government announced that it was abolishing re-education through labor (along
with a slight loosening of the one-child policy). There are still other ways
the police can detain people without trial -- drug users and sex workers will
likely be the principal victims -- but this most common method now seems to be
on the way out.
The "Responsibility to
Protect" is still vibrant. In
2005, the world's governments made an historic pledge that they would step in
if a national government failed to stop mass atrocities. The R2P doctrine, as
it is known, has since been invoked successfully, most notably in Kenya and the
Côte d'Ivoire. Some, however, have begun to argue that R2P is unraveling. They
cite its controversial use in Libya (as NATO moved from protecting civilians to
regime change), as well as the world's failure to stop the slaughter of
civilians in Syria.
But in 2013, the doctrine showed a renewed vitality. When mass
slaughter on sectarian grounds broke out in the Central African Republic,
France and the African Union (AU) sent troops to reinforce overwhelmed AU
peacekeepers, the United States contributed more than $100 million, and, as the
year drew to an end, the United Nations was preparing for its own peacekeeping
mission. Much more remains to be done to pull the country back from the brink,
but the international community's responsibility to act is well understood.
In late December, political conflict and ethnic slaughter also
threatened neighboring South Sudan, which broke away from Sudan and emerged as
an independent nation only two years ago. Within
days, the UN Security Council approved an additional 5,500 peacekeepers for
South Sudan, a swift response suggesting that, at least in the right
circumstances, the R2P doctrine is still a force to be reckoned with.
The UN Human Rights Council
begins to live up to its promise. The
council was established in 2006 to replace the UN Human Rights Commission,
which had lost credibility as repressive governments flocked to it in an effort
to use their votes to avoid censure. The council had tighter membership
standards, but for its first few years was little better than its predecessor.
In recent years, however, the council has come into its own. A key factor has
been the Obama administration's decision to join it after the Bush
administration shunned it. Other governments have also played an important
role, including Mexico, Switzerland, Chile, Botswana, Brazil, Argentina,
Mauritius, Benin, Maldives, Costa Rica, and a number of European Union states.
Together they made a successful effort to bridge the political divides and
overcome the apathy that often stood in the way of effective action. Even
traditionally more reluctant countries, such as Nigeria and Thailand, were
persuaded to play productive roles.
The positive results are most visible in the case of Sri Lanka.
In 2009, when some 40,000 civilians were killed in the waning months of the conflict
with the Tamil Tigers, the council's initial reaction was to congratulate the
government on its victory. But for the past two years, the council has pressured Sri Lanka to honor its
pledge to investigate war crimes by both sides and bring those responsible to
account. Similarly, in March 2013, among other useful steps, the council established a commission of inquiry to
collect evidence of North Korea's crimes against humanity -- the first step
toward possible prosecution.
Two former African leaders face
prosecution. During
his reign as president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, Hissène Habré is alleged to
have committed systematic torture and thousands of political executions.
Deposed, he fled to Senegal, where he lived in comfortable exile as the
country's former president, Abdoulaye Wade, obstructed repeated efforts to
prosecute him -- in Senegal, in Belgium, and via mandate of the African Union.
Yet Habré's victims, and activists working with them,
persevered. Their fortunes began to change when Macky Sall assumed Senegal's
presidency in 2012 and the International Court of Justice ordered Senegal to
prosecute Habré "without further delay." In June 2013, Senegal
arrested Habré, and he remains in custody for a trial anticipated in late 2014
or early 2015. Habre's trial would mark the first time in modern history that
the courts of one country tried the leader of another for alleged grave crimes
under international law.
Similarly, an internationally established tribunal in September
2013 affirmed the conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of
Liberia, for planning and aiding and abetting atrocities by rebels in
neighboring Sierra Leone, including by trading his arms for their diamonds.
This sets a precedent that may come to haunt other leaders who assist
atrocities in other countries by providing military support to abusive forces.
Exposing the National Security
Agency's mass surveillance to public scrutiny. President Barack Obama
is still trying to prosecute Edward Snowden, but he deserves a hero's welcome
from everyone else for the tremendous service he did by exposing the NSA's
massive surveillance ofelectronic communications and activities. If not for Snowden, we wouldn't
know the extraordinary breadth of the NSA's data collection practices -- such
as the fact that the agency collects metadata about potentially all phone calls
in the United States because, under woefully outdated rules, none of us has any
legitimate expectation of privacy about this information on the grounds that we
shared it with the phone company.
Snowden also helped to highlight the NSA policy that foreigners
outside the United States don't even have a recognized right to the privacy of
the contents of their communications. He revealed that the NSA doesn't believe
it affects our privacy when it collects our communications, only when it
examines them. That amounts to saying it would be okay for the government to
collect a video stream from your bedroom and store it on a government computer
so long as it wasn't watched until the government came up with some reason to
do so.
And without Snowden we wouldn't realize how weak the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court has been in reviewing all of these
transgressions -- though we shouldn't have been surprised given that its
judges, all hand-picked by the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, hear
only from the government and lack technical expertise. None of this has been
fixed, although recommendations from a reform panel that Obama established
address some of the issues. But after Snowden's disclosures, it is hard to
imagine the world simply moving on as if nothing has happened.
A treaty to protect domestic
workers takes effect. The
world's most vulnerable workers are probably the millions who labor in people's
homes, most of them women and girls. Working in isolation, often far from their
own countries, they are ripe for economic exploitation, physical and sexual
abuse, and trafficking. Yet they historically have been excluded from the
rights afforded most other workers under national labor laws, due to a
reluctance to legislate working conditions in the home, often coupled with the
myth that these workers are treated like members of the family.
That should begin to change with the new Domestic Workers Convention, which took effect in
September. It entitles domestic workers to most of the same rights that
laborers outside the home have long enjoyed, including such basics as a weekly
day off, limits on hours of work, and a minimum wage. In the two years since
the convention was adopted, dozens of countries have strengthened labor-rights
protection for domestic workers including comprehensive reforms in the
Philippines and Argentina and new protections in Brazil's constitution. There is still a long way to
go, but increasingly domestic workers' second-tier status under national labor
laws is coming to an end.
Burma releases most of its
political prisoners. The
reformist government of Burma's President Thein Sein is at best a work in
progress. The military still dominates the government and shows no willingness
to change the constitution to, for example, permit Aung San Suu Kyi to run for
president. War crimes committed in the ethnic conflicts in Burma's border
regions remain unprosecuted. New violence has erupted against Muslims,
particularly the Rohingya minority, led by Buddhist extremists and often
tolerated by the security forces, with muted criticism from key national
figures such as Aung San Suu Kyi.
But there is important good news. Independent organizations,
while still subject to constraints, are flourishing more than at any time in
the past 25 years. The media, while still embattled, are more outspoken. And
hundreds of political prisoners -- the vast majority -- have been released. Some new people have been charged
on political grounds -- a trend that needs to be stopped -- but there is no
question that political detention has decreased dramatically in the last year.
Marriage equality is on a roll. It has been legalized
in not only 18 U.S. states (and the District of Columbia), which the U.S.
government must now recognize, but also in 16 countries, plus
parts of Mexico. Governments joining the trend in 2013 were Brazil, France,
Uruguay, New Zealand, and Britain (though it has yet to take effect in the
latter).
A step forward for the right to
health. Because
of the narrow focus of the U.S. Constitution, most Americans do not realize
that international human rights law includes not only civil and political
rights but also economic, social, and cultural rights. An example is the right
to the highest attainable standard of health. Obamacare might have been much
less controversial if more Americans treated access to medical care as a basic
human right. But one area where progress was made globally on the right to
health involved the danger of mercury poisoning. Much of the world's artisanal
gold mining uses mercury to separate gold from ore. Mercury is toxic, and
particularly harmful to children. Exposure can cause life-long physical and
mental disability. A treaty adopted in October requires
governments to eliminate the most dangerous uses of mercury in mining and
promote alternative forms of gold processing that do not require mercury.
An official assessment of
Bush's torture policies seems nearer. On his
second day in office, Obama pledged to end the Bush administration's
"enhanced interrogation techniques" -- the U.S. government's
preferred euphemism for torture. But shamefully, Obama has refused to prosecute
those who planned and ordered the torture, encouraging future presidents to
treat it as a policy option rather than the crime that it is. What's more,
Obama has even fought efforts to investigate the torture, and cited the need to
preserve state secrets to block victims' civil lawsuits.
That has not stopped the Senate Intelligence Committee from
conducting an extensive investigation and producing a 6,000-page report. While still classified, it reportedly
rejects the CIA's claim that the "enhanced interrogation techniques"
yielded key information for the capture of Osama bin Laden or any other
information of value, and finds that the CIA lied to Congress, the White House,
and the Justice Department about the effectiveness of the program. The CIA
(meaning the Obama administration) has been fighting tooth and nail to block
publication, even as its own unpublished internal report is said to have
reached similar conclusions. But as the year came to a close, this
obstructionism seems increasingly to be failing. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the
chair of the committee, has said she intends to seek declassification of a
300-page executive summary -- the only accounting for Bush-era torture that
we're likely to see anytime soon.
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