I have to say as I contemplate the meeting for the 20th anniversary of the OSCE Copenhagan conference in 1990 coming up on June 20, that the image I see before me is one of the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, standing in the Haunted Forest, holding his big tail, eyes squeezed shut, saying over and over again:
"I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do believe in spooks."
That's because when he said he didn't believe in them, something had swooped down on him.
It seems a marvel now that in 1990, before the defeat of the August coup, before the fall of the Soviet Union, the participating states got this good of a document.
Standards about democracy and the rule of law and minority rights that have eroded terribly since that time, and are in grave danger of attempts to renegotiate them which would only go below those achievements once attained.
That's why I imagine the U.S. government hopes to get through this exercise with as little jostling as possible -- so that nothing worse happens to this particular set of standards, already under terrible stress.
Yet given that we're already in the Haunted Forest, shutting our eyes in fear and not boldly pressing forward is just going to make more evil creatures swoop down on us.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has struck a low blow to Copenhagen by calling for the registration of NGOs that wish to monitor human rights in OSCE countries and claiming that OSCE is "too easy" on NGOs. Of course, in his own country and others, they already have to do that. I shudder to think that a group's registration and right to monitor human rights -- "to know and act upon one's rights" so central to the notion of Helsinki -- would have to be subjected to the vagaries of 56 states, and turn into something like the dreaded NGO Committee (of states) in the UN, which passes judgement on whether NGOs get to keep their accreditation passes or not, and with anti-human rights states on it, can bar groups like Freedom House if they are critical of a state's poor record.
By contrast, the OSCE has been liberal in recognizing the right of association of citizens, and challenged governments to show cause for their claims that groups are engaging in terrorism -- something that Turkmenistan, for example, has casually -- and outrageously -- claimed about domestic critics who haven't used or advocated violence whatsoever.
Lavrov also took the opportunity to sink very low on finding fake moral equivalency on the Zhovtis case -- claiming that cases involving a car accident death by a U.S. diplomat in Russia and the crippling of a Russian in the U.S., as well as a German responsible for the deaths of two Russian pedestrians -- all terrible things, to be sure -- are somehow on par with Kazakhstan opportunistically jailing their chief human rights advocate on the eve of their chairmanship. Car accidents are terrible things. People found guilty of causing them with due process under the rule of law in a democratic country should expect that they would go to jail only if their negligence or intent was proven, and that they did not take measures to prevent such an accident. The failure to gain adequate compensation in an accident -- the dispute in the case referenced by Lavrov -- is hardly on par with taking away a man's freedom and sending him to a remote location when there is no evidence that he is at fault for this tragic loss of life. Going to jail for 3 years for a car accident isn't the norm, even in Kazakhstan.
What really seems to be chafing Lavrov is the fear of "orange revolutions" for which he's cooked up his registration remedy, even streamlined:
They can "just notify the OSCE secretariat that Country X is opening in Country Y a center for training journalists to cover orange revolutions — and this needs not even a reply from the secretariat," he told deputies, Interfax reported.
Er, no thanks. The OSCE secretariat can't be in the business of policing the traffic of bilateral relations among the states and it's worth reminding everyone that freedom of association doesn't require registration -- and states don't have to register with other states, opening up a training center -- they already have registered diplomatic missions.
The Belarusian mission to the UN once sent over an angry diplomat to the International League for Human Rights to protest our granting of a Belarusian organization, Charter 97, affiliate status to attend the UN human rights meetings with our NGO delegation. They said this group was "violating international and domestic law,"and had to "register as a foreign agent in the United States". Sigh. These guys don't get it. They're the foreign agents; we aren't.
There's no question that we're at a low point in the rights of freedom association -- and as I can't say enough, that's a right that does not need registration to enjoy. That fact often gets lost among the welter of workshops and drafting exercises that get done by various international consultants often having to serve either an authoritarian government's mandate, to get their bid accepted, or the watered-down mish-mosh that can result in an ODIHR compilation exercise of this nature.
But -- let's stick to the basics. "Know and act upon your rights". In Central Asia in particular, groups are not permitted any legal status, or very limited status under great pressure and constraints, and are particularly religious and political discussion or protest groups can be seen as terrible threats to the state. Even so, freedom of association - the right of Helsinki groups to do the watching - is the touchstone of all the other rights in this context. That's because these rather formal agreements had no life and no effect until Yuri Orlov and others in the Helsink groups in the Soviet Union began to take the issue of Pravda published August 1, 1975 seriously, and demand implementation of the human rights basket.
The document prepared for this exercise seems ok enough, but not terribly imaginative -- again, that's likely because of the "I do believe in spooks!" problem I mentioned at the top. Nobody wants anything worse to happen. They will pronounce that they believe in the spirit of Copenhagen in 1990 and disperse as quickly as possible with as much damage control as can be mustered.
It's worth stating that Copenhagan is probably one of the world's most definitive -- perhaps THE most definitive -- document about what democracy is. And it's very interesting that when the states set about defining these standards, they didn't just put in political parties' rights or NGO's rights, but mentioned the rule of law and due process, vital for securing these rights, and mentioned minority rights, which are usually what was at risk when freedom of association was suppressed in some OSCE states. It was all one package, and an interesting package, and one we'll never likely get again in our lifetime.
However, as an official once pointed out to me in the State Department, if documents are merely meant to remain as inscribed on stone and worshipped for their past beauty, but never put into practice now in our time, there's no point in continuing to bless the process.
I think we can see, however, from Lavrov's obvious trolling that what the Russians and their allies are more likely to do, rather than question any of the standards per se, is to create fake moral equivalencies and false symmetries, and try to trump up a dozen fake cases that paradoxically illustrate, in this hypertrophied flame war, an actual covert acknowledgement of the principles at state. So the U.S. and others should come equipped to fight that war of the facts if need be -- just what are the sentences for vehicular manslaughter in the OSCE states -- and so on and stress that citizens do not need to register to meet.
The document references the Moscow mechanism -- I was witness to its birth in a better era in September 1991 in Moscow. Then, the context for its proposal by Sergei Kovalyov and others on the Russian delegation (still within a cohort led by the Soviet delegation at that time) was the opposition to the coup. Any country should be able to inquire about an urgent human rights situation and send observers right away and get meetings with the state at a high level. Seems simple enough, but it has fallen into disuse, and flatly challenged, for example with OSCE monitors in Georgia. It would be interesting if some bureaucrat in a foreign ministry in OSCE somewhere could produce for us a list of all the times the Moscow mechanism was actually invoked and used in all these years. I think probably not often. It's like the Zen of most human rights work -- if you could really send a delegation on demand to a country any time to talk about anything painful, you wouldn't need to.
The paper trails off at the end asking if any new proposals should be made -- I'd say no, there's plenty still to implement from the old.
I know nobody will want to hear what I next have to say about all this, which is we need a Rapporteur on Freedom of Association. I once campaigned vigorously on this -- so vigorously and speaking so often that a disgruntled meeting chair from the U.S. even referred to me, when calling upon me again and again, as "the Participating State of Fitzpatrick".
Still, I raise it again simply because like press freedom and tolerance, this topic needs regular reporting and regular and consistent assistance to states and regular intervention. States like Uzbekistan should not be sending human rights groups packing, both domestic and international, without much more pushback than they get.
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