An important article by Mona Kareem -- must read.
It brings to a head publicly many debates held privately in the human rights movement.
She's absolutely right that big international human rights groups are infatuated with the idea of "human rights defenders" (a new term that didn't exist 30 or even 20 years ago, when the term "activists" was usually used or sometimes "advocates").They bless some people with this term and then selectively work on human rights in a country largely through the prism of such colleagues; this is exasperating to people in, say, Uzbekistan, where Human Rights Watch tends to feature a dozen jailed or harassed "human rights defenders," and doesn't have the same way to publicize and feature some 5,000 devout Muslim prisoners tortured and beaten and held in jail for long periods for non-violent crimes of claimed "extremism" -- without benefit of lawyers or due process. HRW itself struggles with how to get at these issues, but they, like others, fall back again and again to featuring "defenders".
I've followed this culture as it grew up and I realize how it got started: the need to have "counterparts" or people that were "like you". And over time, groups like Human Rights Watch began to obsess more about "defenders" -- urban professionals well-travelled and English-speaking like themselves often -- because they took care of other people and thus the violations of their rights took on a larger meaning as they were emblematic of the whole society. But the reality is, as Jules Feiffer once apparently said in a cartoon about the ACLU's work in the era of the Vietnam War, "you can't get good victims". You can't choose victims to publicize your case perfectly. People are complicated. They could be victims of press freedom suppression and also wife-beaters. Hence the concept of the more "clean" "defenders". Even so, it's a good concept that should be better articulated and preserved, even as efforts are made to work on the cases of those less popular and well known.
The Moscow Helsinki Watch group was formed in 1976 to monitor the human rights sections of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The concept became more widespread of monitors or defenders caring not just about their own free speech problems (like Sinyavsky and Danilel, authors jailed at the time) but concerned about others' rights (like Daniel's wife Larisa Bogoraz, a veteran defender who died a few years ago after a lifetime of championing many people's rights). The role of defender in the Soviet Union and Latin America existed long before the 1970s brought fascination with human rights, but the word was not always used -- the person doing the work might be a scientist or priest or labour organizer or doctor. Helsinki Watch -- which ultimately morphed into Human Rights Watch -- was formed in 1978 to support these "watchers" and each year, some monitors from somewhere in the world would be celebrated at an annual dinner and thus supported.
Even earlier in the 1970s, the concept of "human rights defenders" was articulated by the International League for Human Rights, the oldest all-purpose human rights organization registered at the UN in the 1940s. ILHR brought this term into circulation particularly at the UN, and focused particularly on lawyers harassed for their work, but also anyone who took up the role of defense of rights law. But it didn't become as popularized as the "watch" groups. The Lawyers Committe for Human Rights, originally a working committee of the ILHR which eventually evolved into the separate organization known as Human Rights First picked up the "defender" notion and initiated a number of year-round programs on this theme, selecting cases of people to help and feature.
Other groups began to follow suit and began to press for a "human rights defenders declaration" at the UN to try to protect people that the worst offenders among states like the Soviet Union, China, Iran and so on were always arresting. It was a torturous process of some five years but finally got passed in the year 2000 and then the term "human rights defenders" became more solidly used in the lexicon at least of international human rights bodies. A special rapporteur on human rights defenders is now appointed regularly to address such cases under the resolution.
But the question of "who is a human rights defender" is an age-old debate once began 40 years ago by Amnesty International when it conceived of the notion of the "prisoner of conscience" as someone who did not use or advocate violence. AI then defended people on that basis; human rights activists were those whose work did not involve the use or advocacy of violence.
This simple moral precept was thrown under the bus by Amnesty during "Gita-gate" when their gender advisor was dismissed for complaining about AI's turning of Islamists who advocated against women's rights and other civil liberties into heroes, with whom they appeared on platforms and went visiting to 10 Downing Street.
Amnesty has now thoroughly lost its way on this question, accepting discredited notions like "defensive jihad" that run counter to basic human rights.
So it's important to go back to the UN documents that were long negotiated on this subject.
First, there's Art. 30 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights:
"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."
So if an Islamist wants to take away freedom of speech and belief or nonbelief, or women's rights from other people even as he pursues his own freedom of religion, he is engaging just in this very activity contrary to Art. 30. It's very important. It's too often overlooked.
Then there's the UN Human Rights Defenders' Resolution:
These help a lot to separate the wheat from the chaff.
You can always defend the civil rights of anyone, even a murderer, on human rights grounds of due process, fair trial, no use of torture, and so on.
But you don't convert the *victim* of human rights violations which you condemn into the *defender* of those rights. He may not be.
And if you are a defender of human rights yourself, you should not condone violence or the violation of any rights.
Kareem in part makes sense to me, but in part is confusing. With this discourse, she seems to want to say that Western "bourgeois" rights lingo is unacceptable to authentic third-world peoples. But these notions aren't "Western"; they are universal. As Kofi Annan once said, an African mother doesn't need to know which article of the Convention Against Torture was violated to understand her son has been tortured. Yet Kareem seems to advocate not calling things by their real names for the sake of somebody's sensibilities in the wings whom I can't quite understand. Oppressive theocratic states? Islamists who threaten human rights defenders?
What I find even more dangerous, is the way that NGOs in our region take it for granted that they must follow western organizations in their approaches. Local NGOs believe that, by abiding to this set of rules and established rhetoric, their work will be more relevant. They do not realize, however, the danger in following others in their dealings with particular cases. Why do we need to call an Islamist a human rights defender in order to demand his release? Why does ‘free speech’ need to be our top priority? Why do western NGOs need to, for example, call female circumcision a form of ‘torture’, to be able to criticize it? And who approved the act of including such a variety of Arab detainees under the umbrella of human rights, when our heritage consists of social, religious, and political doctrines where the ideal of justice is prevalent.
You don't need to call an Islamist a human rights defender to demand his release *if he was arrested unjustly and his universal human rights are violated*. But what are you saying here? That is someone from "our cause" is arrested, "the movement" must demand he be released? It depends on the charges and the crime -- under universal notions, of course, not unfair notions. Violence and terrorist acts wouldn't be something that could be excused.
I don't understand why Western activists *can't* call FGM "torture" -- it is under universal international definitions. But if that somehow prevents action on the cause, call it what you will. Make that judgement yourself, however, don't browbeat internationals to lesson their own legitimate critiques. In some African countries, women's activists have to call rape clinics "family centers" or simply "community centers". It's not necessary to prove something with a name if that gets the job done; however, we can't pretend that rape is a matter that should just be "kept in the family" and not prosecuted, ultimately.
Mona also urges international organizations to take up the cause of the violation of Islamists' rights:
What also needs to be mentioned, however, is how much propaganda is directed against them from the Emirati media and in statements by state officials. The attacks on the Islamists, inside and outside of prisons, are oppressive and immoral; their families tell of denied prison visits, torture cases, and, lately, of how their bank accounts are being frozen just because they are relatives of Islamist detainees. Surely, this point is not to justify the thinking of certain political Islamists, but it is to highlight how state oppression becomes the deciding factor for NGOs on whether to include Islamists under the umbrella of human rights.
I don't think she has any trouble from AI or HRW there -- they do this to the exclusion of even admitting that Islamists are a problem at all (see reports on Nigeria and the Middle East).
The real issue is whether local human rights activists are going to step up and defend Islamists tortured in prison and denied basic humane treatment, yet not call out their own oppressiveness regarding speech and women because they feel their very lives are threatened by those same extremists. What are we supposed to do about that?
I totally understand that this is too dangerous in many local situations. But then don't spread that oppression of your own local situation to the international movement. What I seem to take away from this discussion is: you international human rights activists should shut up, you should stop calling people who aren't defenders that because it's embarrassing -- they aren't -- but you shouldn't call out their bad behaviour anyway. That's not a proposition I can accept.
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