Women's rights advocates have launched a compelling and eloquent challenge to Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch.
My response -- while it sits in a moderator's queue:
The chief problem of Human Rights Watch in this and other matters related to the Middle East is that it sees itself as the sole honest arbiter of what constitutes compliance with human rights. Yet it does so in a highly politicized manner, not recognizing the essential *political* act of picking and chosing cases and priorities, and engaging with or rejecting this or that regime.
Human rights are universal and this universality dictates that all countries be equally subject to scrutiny, and that none with a "better" system get a pass. But human rights groups would do better to *go where the violations are* instead of endlessly balancing the saddle bags -- which in the case of HRW has often meant especially focusing on Israel because it can (Arab societies were closed to investigators) and because it thought it could have more of an effect (Israel was responsive to human rights criticism).
This sort of political judgement always made for controversy, and it's no different now with the Arab Spring in countries where HRW was not as active as it was on Israel in recent years, and where now in similar political fashion, it decides that now it has to bless seemingly "better" Islamic regimes that it believes will be "rights-respecting." HRW (where I worked for 10 years in the 1980s and 1990s) used to stick to monitoring states' compliance with internationally-recognized human rights norms, not decide which countries were "better" at human rights. That job of comparison was left to Freedom House, and yet Freedom House -- whose staff are on trial now in Egypt! -- are hardly awarding any early prizes for "rights-respecting" to the Egyptian government.
HRW's exercise in wishing thinking might be more persuasive if the examples it gave weren't so outrageous. Algeria -- as if the Islamist Salvation Front was going to maintain a liberal democracy and there'd ever be another free election, and as if there weren't thousands of victims of terrorist groups as well as the Algerian state, as the women activists who signed the appeal to HRW have eloquently testified. And Hamas -- declared by the US as a terrorist group. In an oppressive nation where a terrorist group is in charge, can you really speak of democratic elections? Even if you can, can you ensure truly democratic results going forward?
Democracy in the UN system has never been seen as merely a literalist majoritarian exercise, that didn't bring with it the obligation to protect minorities and indeed all human rights. HRW has never really grabbed ahold of the most important article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 30: "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."
That means that freedom of religion doesn't trump women's rights; it means freedom of expression doesn't trump freedom from discrimination, and so on. Indeed, determining that balance among rights is a political exercise and justly so, but HRW has never recognized it as such, nor recognized such judgement as a legitimate exercise for states.
And speaking of states, among the most compelling statements of the women who signed this call to conscience is the statement to Kenneth Roth, "You are not a state." It becomes increasingly hard for large and well-endowed non-governmental non-state actors to recall this in a world where they can amplify themselves not only with the huge mindshare of the establishment press, but with new social media. Even so, citizens must ask them urgently why they are willing to forego "all human rights for all" in a quest for political correctness by their own "progressive" lights.
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