NGO colleagues stand up to call for Ales Bialiatski's release from jail at the HDIM meeting last year. Photo by FIDH.
And so the annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe begins again, the meeting with one of those strange multilateral acronyms "HDIM" which you hope doesn't stand for "hope dim" -- because in fact this important gathering of both diplomats and activists, unique of its kind, is a hope for many to try to publicize ongoing and even massive human rights violations in Eurasia.
Yes, I single out Eurasia rather than North America because in North America, there scale and magnitude of the violations are indisputably less, and more importantly, the remedies for addressing them with an adversarial bar, independent judiciary, freely-elected parliament, vibrant civil society sector, and free press are immeasurably greater.
I'm unable to go to the meeting, unfortunately, this year, because of other work and family commitments, but the meeting is in good hands.
The US delegation illustrates both the continuity of human rights concerns and diplomacy over the generations as well as decades of dedication to the cause of human rights.
The delegation is headed by Amb. Avis Bohlen who has had a distinguished career in arms control as well as diplomatic service in Eastern Europe. She is also known for her famous father, Amb. Charles "Chip" Bohlen, who dealt with the Soviets in the height of the Cold War. If you read the Wikipedia version, Bohlen was said to differ from George Kennan in the strategy for coping with the Soviet challenge, favouring accommodation rather than containment. The story is more complicated than that, but it is a never-ending challenge for the US today, and what the delegation's leadership tells us is that we still have American officials willing to accept this challenge and deal with it in an informed way.
Also on the delegation is Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, Chair, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, also known for her famous father, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, for whom the Congressional human rights committee is now named. Dr. Lantos has continued the tradition of taking up vocal defense of cases in Russia even when it is not politically expedient, such as that of Sergei Magnitsky. Putting CIRF in a leadership role on this delegation signals the seriousness with which the US takes religious freedom, which is one of the themes emphasized this year.
Others on the delegation such as Amb. Michael Kozak, Amb. Ian Kelly, Amb. Suzan Johnson Cook all represent decades of solid US experience dealing with the daily challenges posed by the continual defiance of human rights norms in one half of the Helsinki space in particular -- that dominated by Russia. There's a lot of equivocating and acknowledgement that "we all" have human rights problems, such as racial profiling or discrimination against minorities -- and we do. Still, let's hope there aren't going to be apologies for any situation in the US that has that ample civil society I just mentioned to address it, unlike Russia, which crushes civil society: one only has to look at the tides of immigration to the US, somewhat diminished and facing more difficulties in some places like Arizona though they might: it's a 7-lane Texas highway coming in, and a cowpath going out.
The HDIM meets at a time of unprecedented challenge to its very functioning -- Belarus (Belarus!) aided and abetted by the usual suspect in the post-Soviet space and unfortunately, some Europeans who should know better -- is trying to shorten the length of the HDIM agenda and days of meeting -- already over-packed -- and dumb down the agenda.
This is just like what Russia is doing here in New York at the UN with the intergovernmental working group set up to make the treaty bodies more "effective" and more "efficient" (read: with less independence as their members are intimidated and forced to submit to a "code of conduct" and without NGO input as their role is challenged and diminished and the role of new media covering the sessions with livestreaming facing resistance.)
Russia has just kicked out the innocuous USAID office from Russia, supposedly for interfering in elections or even espionage, although USAID has trouble interfering even with its own considerable bureaucracy and expense to get the job done, or even spying an opportunity to actually act in the real world. Putin may be surprised to discover some of his own cronies may have just been decoupled from their hook-up.
Putin's representatives at this meeting will feel smug and self-satisfied that they have removed an obvious interference of questionable intent and will snarkily point to America's own tragic losses last week as its ambassador to Libya and three of his fellow diplomats were killed apparently by a terrorist faction in the very course of establishing democracy abroad -- with the apparent acquiescence of the locals. The Russians endlessly make hay over this but can never explain why so many hundreds of thousands of their own citizens have slipped the leash to challenge Putin's managed democracy, and why it is necessary club and jail and ban so many of them if it's really only Hillary Clinton's funding that sustains it all.
Let's hope the American delegation stands up to this insidious narrative and double standard by pointing out that human rights are universal, in the Helsinki context in particular, promoting and protecting them was long ago disavowed as any "interference in internal affairs" and the Russians and their allies are clearly backsliding.
Say, detentions of partisan American journalists around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, always marked by civil disobedience and challenged by lawfarers, and breaking-up of demonstrations by Canadian students whose tuition went up can be seen as counter to the spirit of Helsinki and scrutinized with our anti-Western magnifying glasses as human rights violations, but I'll tell you what's far, far worse: getting a bullet in your head and dying for your exposure of torture and disappearances in Chechnya, like Anna Politkovskaya. So let's keep it in perspective, shall we?
I'm worried about how two issues will fare at this meeting, especially under the Obama Administration, which has not been very sturdy on them and has caved to various faddish politically-correct notions in the air.
The first is all issues around religious freedom, tolerance and free speech. The US Embassy in Cairo did not take the right approach on this as I've explained (and James Kirchick has explained better) and let's hope our diplomats in Warsaw get this and understand why the State Department rightly withdrew it.
You never know how much cross-pollination takes place between multilateral bodies in the US government, which isn't always so friendly to them on principle, but they should read up on the UN resolution 16/18 at the UN Human Rights Council, which was hard-won language that essentially made the distinction between mere "insult" in hate speech and the more precise concept of "incitement to imminent violence".
The shoddy hate video produced by some strange characters who may or may not be part of a larger hoax does not qualify under the definition of that resolution and other international law as "incitement to imminent violence" (a concept taken straight out of Ohio v. Brandenburg in the Supreme Court.
That's because the movie, as crass and nasty as it is, doesn't call on anybody to beat or kill or harm Muslims.
That the result of this hate movie is violence by those insulted doesn't mean that the "incitement" test was met -- that's not how the jurisprudence works. I've written about this at length here, and explained why we need now a resolution on "insult violence," just as we attempted with "honour killings," rather than accept at all anything that remotely goes into the badlands of "defamation of religions". Let's hope that each and every member of the US delegation gets this, and doesn't cave on this in any language anywhere, because it means conceding victory to years of hostile effort by the Organization of Islamic Community at the UN to impose a global blasphemy law on the world's countries and prevent criticism of abusive theocratic states.
There will be enormous pressure to have some kind of statements of conciliation or understanding or condemnation of hate speech, but the key is to focus on the speech itself, not on its outcome and to insist that the "incitement to imminent violent" test be met for the speaker, not the insulted. Nothing justifies violence -- one right doesn't trump another. Under no circumstances should anyone begin mumbling about how we need "responsibilities as well as rights" -- such "responsibilities aren't defined at Helsinki and can't be with the hostile actors there are there.
The solution to bad speech is more speech, not more creeping notions of "responsibilities as well as rights" that are not contained in domestic or international law for good reason: they are too easily abused by states to curb basic civil and political rights. If we're going to talk responsibilities, let's talk first about the males fired up with machismo who think they get to kill people over insult to their manhood wrapped around their religious figures. The purpose of Helsinki isn't to define rules for duels by insulted people, but to uphold universal principles of freedom of speech, association and religious belief as matters of international law, and advocate non-binding paths of education, dialogue and exchange as "baskets" that help these rights to have meaning and civility.
The other issue I hope won't suffer any damage is on Internet freedom. Not much progress was made at all in the non-official meeting in Dublin organized by the chair-in-office on the perfectly decent US draft resolution on Internet freedom -- it does not have full support from all OSCE members, but only something like 27 backing it, which lets us know the problem isn't just the post-Soviet states -- Ireland itself didn't support it.
Mercifully, there was no formal concluding document out of Dublin -- it wasn't an official conference -- but this being the era of faddish new media, there were tweets and a virtual conclusion provided by the summary record on a Youtube which skipped over the hard parts -- like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan blocking the Internet and beating up Internet journalists -- and focused unnecessarily on Western issues that are frankly about redistribution (socialism) like "net neutrality" and "Internet development".
Horribly, the version of the Internet freedom resolution that came out of the UN Human Rights Council mentions "Internet development" three times where one would have been too many as I explained-- because in UN-speak, "development" means the state becomes involves and "develops" itself and its own goals. Like the Tibetan once asked the Chinese bureaucrat rambling on about "development": "Who develops?"
Emotions can be played on with things like "oh, poor children need laptops" or "we need broadband in rural areas," but for that, you just have to see the rows of dutiful Turkmen children in their stiff native costumes and hair bows and ties sitting at their shiny Chinese-provided new laptops that....don't hook up to the real Internet. Or see the broadband that even Uzbekistan gets to rural areas but which blocks anything that might give anybody any ideas about the Arab Spring. Cuba has all those free innoculations, you know? But they also put in jail people who point out the whole society it sick...
The US should stick to its lasts, which amount to saying "offline rights apply online" -- and call it a day. No magic woo-woo about autonomous spaces, borderless realms where rights don't apply -- er, like copyright -- because we must "innovate" -- by which is meant that California companies should have right of way to make giant platforms that everyone depends on, enable free accounts and untrammelled uploads even of infringing content, then make intellectual property holders chase them with DMCA notices -- all the way scraping our privacy to sell to marketers.
And a shout-out to that US diplomat who complains to me when I stump on these issues that he has VPN to tunnel to his favourite American TV shows -- hey, whose going to keep making the TV for you for free? You can buy it on Google Play now, you know. And Google, bring home your taxes from Ireland! We need them in this country. Oh, and everybody please note: all your efforts in committees and commissions and plenaries to hammer out notions of hate speech and how to act on it are actually irrelevant: Google is now the world-wide adjudicator of these matters by its outsized and unaccountable intermediary row in "safe harbours" and if you complain about how this is done, you are threatened with not only a mute and ban out of an influential Google engineer's stream, but banning from G+ and all Google-related products to boot. Our new town halls are being run by cranky and oppressive neuralgic geeks who don't take kindly to challenges from the norms.
Even if a US judge ruled that the anti-Muslim hate video shoud come down -- and I don't believe he should or could if he were consistent with US Constitutional law -- it wouldn't matter because Google's very affordances would make it impossible to suppress. It would appear again and again like the Kanye West videos that Google stamps out reluctantly (because it loses ad revenue) when large record companies come calling with lawyers.
Google shut down the hate video in some countries even without any government or court request "just because" Google knows best. The Irish have let this enormous camel's nose in under the Helsinki tent: how will the Helsinki states cope with the giant non-state actors who run our entire lives which all moved online? How can we make them sign the Copenhagen agreement and stop their arbitrary mutes and bans?
Because their gloves are now off and the mask has slipped. While once the companies hid behind human rights coalitions like the Global Network Initiative pretending they were just about not letting Chinese dissidents go to jail (although they focused on their copyleftist agenda), today they've all banned together in a frank lobbying group in Washington openly working on "net neutrality" and against copyright in legislation like SOPA/PIPA. These should not have been subsumed into the human rights agenda and the international human rights movement is to blame for letting this happen.
An Internet run by government agencies redistributing broadband and undermining commercial businesses with intellectual property isn't free.
OK, enough from me, and here's a suggestion for every single NGO speaker: mention two people who used to be side by side with you, literally sitting at the same HDIM table year after year, and who are now in jail:
o Ales Bialiatski, head of Spring or Viasna, the Belarusian human rights monitoring group. Year after year Ales devotedly brought to the attention of the Eurasian publics the sad story of his oppressed country. Now he himself is in jail on an utterly trumped up case, acknowledged by Western governments as contrived for political reasons, involving funds to support the NGO sector. This issue is one that the Western states have capitulated on -- it's telling that a Polish and a Lithuanian bank cooperated with Lukashenka's henchmen
To start a resolution negotiation process on "foreign" funding for the NGO sector is only to regulate it and let it into the hands of unfriendly states out to kill NGOs. So that's off. But what's possible is to go on affirming that rights need...development! Yes, development from government and private sector to be implemented for all, and in the Helsinki family, no one actor promoting the goals of Helsinki financially or on a volunteer basis should be viewed with suspicion or hostility. There are no foreign spies in the Helsinki space, unless the Russians decide there are. Projecting much?
o Vladimir Kozlov, the head of the Al'ga! Party in Kazakhstan, whose trial, along with other opposition party members, is under way now and is being monitored by Freedom House. They're charged with "attempting to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan through agitation and organization of striking oil workers in the western city of Zhanaozen" -- although the oil authorities are the problem, and government troops are the problem, for shooting dead several scores of unarmed demonstrating workers last year.
I starkly remember in 2010 how Kozlov was reprimanded by the then chair-in-office of Kazakhstan at the HDIM in 2010. He read off a long littany of human rights violations, beatings, jailings, closures. He said calmly at the end something to the effect of: "We will seek accountability for these terrible violations. When we come to power, we will come after you," meaning -- as he explained afterward -- holding them to account.
The chair hysterically took this to be a call to violence and told him he would be prosecuted under incitement laws in Kazakhstan for his speech. What a way to run a Helsinki meeting! This Kazakh ambassador and her fellow delegation members and fellow travellers in the GONGO world did this again and again throughout the meeting. When Kozlov and colleagues from Kazakhstan and Poland's Solidarity held a joint meeting, the Kazakh head of delegation came bursting into the briefing room and demanded to have the floor immediately, because "it wasn't fair" that NGOs were speaking without a government official on their platform (!). I didn't know whether to be more appalled at her outrageousness, or the inexplicable support she got even from some American and European officials who should know MUCH better. She could have asked a question at the end like anybody else, NGO or official. There's no rule that you have to give equal time to the government at your NGO side meeting!
I wrote all these incidents down and addressed a letter to Philip Gordon, in charge of Europe in the State Department, and other OSCE-related officials and urged them that to intervene because after Kazakh stepped down from the chair, it would crack down on Kozlov and others.
Surprise, surprise, it did just that. The reponse from the West, resopnsible for the awful validation that chairmanship gave Kazakhstan, has been tepid in following up. To be sure, Evgeny Zhovtis is finally out of jail, but near the end of his term and in straightened circumstances of continuing intimidation of all civil society actors.
The Chinese dissident whom Yahoo helped put in jail served his whole sentence of 10 years, as the old Soviet zek saying had it, "from bell to bell". So many others in the OSCE space are doing the same, notably religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. I hope with the accent on the religious theme this year that these devout Muslims tortured and jailed after trials behind closed doors without adequate defense get not only a shout-out, but some real serious plan for how they can be released and re-integrated into society. Let's not be harping only about the difficulties of how you take former jihadists and release them from Guantanamo, which had a fraction of the number of people Uzbekistan thrown in cruel dungeons.
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