At my internship last summer, what I really took away was the importance of pioneering a new approach to human rights. The 20th century approach to human rights was in defining human rights standards - like the International Covenants on Civil & Political Rights, and Economic, Social, & Cultural rights. I’m sure you know how incredibly important these covenants were - they revolutionized the way of thinking about human rights, and they provide some benchmark through which to keep countries accountable. They provided NGOs with a guideline - what standards to follow, what rights to lobby for. They provide a pathway forward. The debate still continues about economic, social, and cultural rights: what obligation does this mean, exactly, for governments? Many people still argue about how exactly to implement these standards.

But this hasn’t been enough, and what we need now is a new and different approach. We need to shift away from a time of declaration and into the era of implementation.

What does this mean? It means we have many of the right laws on the books, particularly enshrined in international covenants and agreements, but we simply haven’t been able to implement these laws properly. Even though the current debate is about social & economic rights - in particular, the rights to things like health, education, credit, water, or even “development” - the older, more accepted civil and political rights are not guaranteed in most countries, either.

Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - the two most prominent human rights organizations of our time - are doing amazing work in terms of bringing to light the human rights abuses taking place around the globe. However, while Amnesty’s work might result in releasing individual political prisoners, this approach to human rights lobbying and petitioning does not result in systematic transformation. While Amnesty’s lobbying might get a few political prisoners out of jail, the original system that oppressed them and their rights remains. Some might be saved, but more and more will continue to be imprisoned, tortured, or threatened in other ways.

What is needed is systematic change. The systems need to change, themselves, in order for lasting change to occur. Like any other aid organization, the work done by Amnesty is simply like a band-aid on a gashing wound if the broader system and situation in the relevant country does not change. The goal is not just to save individual people, but to change the system and address the root of the problem such that in the future, more people do not undergo the same fate.

How can this be achieved? Systematic change mostly depends on democratization and good governance. It depends on instituting leaders who are accountable to their people and genuinely want to contribute to development and positive social change for people in their countries. In countries with dictators, extremely weak or collapsed governments, or perhaps worst, genocidal governments and leaders, the efforts of human rights organizations simply cannot have a lasting effect. Both an overly strong state/dictatorship and an extremely weak, failed government are both recipes for chaos and violations of civil and political rights.

And at the local level, everyday people are being tortured, denied access to lawyers, and suffer for years in jails without ever going to trial. Prison conditions in many developing countries are terrible. I’ve written about this before. How does systematic transformation work here? Building up domestic legal systems: putting in place more legal aid lawyers, trained judges, prosecutors, paralegals, and other stakeholders who are desperately needed to end legal abuse and human rights violations. Police forces have to be trained in non-coercive interrogation methods.

We need more systematic approaches to addressing civil & political rights by changing the system, and by implementing rights standards on a local level - especially in the latter area (improving legal systems). Why is there so much focus on the former, individualized approach and less focus on systematic reform? It’s a lot harder, a lot more complex, and a lot less straightforward, that’s for sure. But it’s needed if we are to progress in systematic change in the human rights arena.

Thanks to Running Chicken, I found an excellent new article by Hunjoon Kim and Kathryn Sikkink: Explaining the Deterrence Effect of Human Rights Prosecutions for Transitional Countries. The article basically concludes that:

We find that human rights prosecutions after transition lead to improvements in human rights protection, and that human rights prosecutions have a deterrence impact beyond the confines of the single country. We also explore the mechanisms through which prosecutions lead to improvements in human rights. We argue that impact of prosecutions is the result of both normative pressures and material punishment and provide support for this argument with a comparison of the impact of prosecutions and truth commissions, which do not involve material punishment.

If the article’s findings are correct and the statistical methodology is sound, then this is a great finding and can really help international justice move forward more confidently in the future. I am especially impressed by the finding that the normative impact of prosecutions has actually resulted in deterrence, since many have argued that international justice has not been communicated well on the ground, thus resulting in little impact on deterrence. More quantitative studies should be done on this particular question to further confirm these conclusions.

One of the questions that I had when I first read this was whether there would be a difference between post-conflict transitional justice and justice during conflict - such as the intervention of the ICC. Certainly, post-conflict transitional justice is often undertaken by regimes that are willing to prosecute members of a previous regime, and it would be understandable for those countries to ultimately have a better human rights record. However, the same cannot be said for international bodies undertaking prosecutions during a conflict, as indicted war criminals could simply exacerbate repression and continue to flout international law.

However, they addressed these questions as well, finding that prosecutions under civil wars do not have a different impact on repression than those in peace; indeed, prosecutions during civil wars may even lead to greater improvements on human rights records than prosecutions during peacetime. This is an incredible and truly groundbreaking finding, because it has applied statistical methods to the peace v. justice argument that has thus far been based on mostly qualitative case studies.

Indeed, I do think that many people are coming to the conclusion that the peace versus justice is a false dichotomy. While there was at first much backlash regarding cases in Uganda and Sudan, ultimately those who are indicted are responsible for massive human rights violations; while “peace” might depend on them temporarily, it would probably be best in the long-run if those responsible are simply taken out of the picture. I think the question now shouldn’t be whether we should wait to indict a war criminal or not, but should be about the enforcement of these arrest warrants. Faster and more efficient ways of apprehending war criminals would not only contribute to the deterrence effect, but it would also reduce the possibility of an indicted perpetrator continuing to wield power and exacerbate conflict at home.  Certainly, the challenges are numerous — but I really do think the next step should be to innovate better ways to arrest war criminals and gain international cooperation for their work, rather than to continue the debates about peace versus justice.

Charles Taylor Trial (Credit: BBC)

I just ran across this fascinating Time interview with Stephen Rapp, who was previously chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (H/T Shelby Grossman). Rapp states:

The concern all of us had was that we were conducting justice in a comfortable courtroom with long trials and well-paid attorneys. Prisoners had single cells, and they had committed the worst crimes. A mile away in the local prison there were simply no resources. Cases can’t go forward, witnesses are lost, and people stay in detention for many years at a stretch. [If I was] to do it over, I would try to develop a court within the national system. That would be my preference. Maybe not a court that costs $30 million a year like the Special Court, but an appropriate court.

This is something I thought about while writing the post “Villains & Supervillains,” after my trip to The Hague with the ICC Student Network last year, but never fully articulated.

I understand that many of these “supervillians” - war criminals, genocidaires, leaders who have led crimes against humanity, are some of the worst perpetrators in that world. For that reason, they receive special attention, and they are given fair trials and adequate living conditions. They are allowed to represent themselves in court, and a great deal of attention is paid to their trials to ensure they are truly fair. This all makes complete sense, because their trials are, and should be, high profile and well publicized in order to draw attention to their horrific crimes and resulting punishments, and thereby contribute to ending the atmosphere of impunity worldwide. Without fair trials and without widespread publicity of these proceedings, there is no chance that the justice being done will deter future perpetrators (though the possibility of deterrence itself is arguable).

But the greater travesty and grosser injustice is the fact that we are pumping millions of dollars into international courts which have doubtful impacts, and are simultaneously completely ignoring the life-threatening conditions in the national justice systems of many developing countries. Isn’t this ironic? While war criminals are getting the royal treatment, everyday people - many of them poor - are arbitrarily detained in various African countries, often for stealing a piece of bread or for political reasons. In many African countries, torture continues to be widespread as an interrogative tool despite laws in the books prohibiting it.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 80% of prisoners are in pre-trial detention, and there is no law criminalizing torture. In Kenya, even petty offenders must wait an average of 5 years to have their case heard. In Kampala, Uganda, many prisons are overcrowded, often at 300% of capacity. And in Nigeria, women are held alongside men in prison, often leading to rape and sexual violence. In Zimbabwe, news reports have shown emaciated inmates starving to death from lack of food, often forced to catch and eat rats to survive.

The criminal justice systems of many developing countries are in far worse conditions than that of the U.S., and are arbitrary, unfair, and life-threatening. If the international community devoted one-tenth of the attention to this issue as they do to providing fair trials to supervillains, then many more innocent lives would be saved.

As the status quo stands, a guy who is responsible for the genocide of thousands gets a lawyer of his own and a fair trial, while the poor, innocent, arbitrarily detained are tortured and starve to death without ever having access to counsel. Is this fair, or just? I don’t think so. This doesn’t mean we should pay less attention to war criminals, but that we should work harder to ensure a fair trial to those who are not.

An old man walks along a beach and sees a young boy throwing something into the water. As he approaches, he sees hundreds of starfish lining the beach, washed in from the tide. The young boy is rushing around, throwing the starfish back into the water one by one. The old man asks why he bothers, it’s pointless. There are too many starfish to help them all. As he flings a starfish deep into the water, the young boy replies, “It mattered to that one.”

The moment I heard this quote, I absolutely loved it. It’s a beautiful story that reminds us that change starts small, and with the individual. Sure, we can have grand visions of eradicating poverty or ending torture - but we must not lose sight of the individual while pursuing these grand visions. Sadly, I think this often happens in development/human rights work. When we become so caught up in our abstract theories and statements, we lose sight of what really matters: the individual. The farmer enduring daily poverty, the refugee displaced by conflict, the victim of torture in Guantanamo Bay. Let’s not lose sight of these people in our quest for “social change.” Let’s not forget to hear the voices of the poor and marginalized when we’re devising solutions to help them.

It makes me wish I could have a more direct impact on people’s lives. Makes me wish I could just directly help a “starfish.” All this work I do, whether it’s marketing/communications for non-profits or writing a senior thesis on transitional justice — is it making any impact? I have no idea. That’s why I really, really, want to be able to work in the field next year so I can see what is happening on the ground. If the opportunity to work abroad doesn’t work out, I’ll at least begin volunteering in something more tangible - whether it’s tutoring or working with immigrants/refugees. I just want to know I’m making an impact. Sometimes, all this non-profit work seems to be anything but.

I ran across this interesting quote recently in this report:

Reverend Miguel d’Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, President of the General Assembly, tried to frame the dialogue with a “concept paper” that argued that R2P was just colonialism in a new package. D’Escoto wrote that the correct way to eliminate genocide and other mass atrocities was to reform the world financial system, redistribute wealth, and reform the UN Security Council. He said in the UNGA dialogue, that “Recent and painful memories related to the legacy of colonialism, give developing countries strong reasons to fear that laudable motives can end up being misused, once more, to justify arbitrary and selective intervention against the weakest states. …We must take into account the prevailing lack of trust from most of the developing countries when it comes to the use of force for humanitarian reasons.”

And while his critique may represent one extreme, the controversy swirling around R2P has a number of countries concerned that R2P is merely a justification for interference by developed countries in the affairs of developing nations.

I find this comment extremely interesting — is the way we’re attempting to fight genocide today even an effective method of doing so? Though the Save Darfur movement has mobilized millions against genocide and created the first activist movement to do so, it hasn’t necessarily been effective in translating advocacy into action thus far. Perhaps the R2P concept must be part of a much larger process of reform and redistribution that might be more effective in the long run.

I don’t think that R2P will necessarily be misused by powerful countries to intervene in poorer countries. Indeed, countries like Sudan or other countries at risk for conflict/genocide are not necessarily countries the U.S. has an interest in. Despite the concept of R2P and the citizen movement, the U.S. hasn’t taken strong action on Darfur. The U.S. similarly may not have much interest in other at-risk countries.

But I would question, ultimately, whether the idea of R2P is even what is most necessary. As alluded to in the quote, we have to somehow be working towards prevention of genocide, towards a more just and equitable world order in which genocide would never be possible in the first place. Currently, we are so focused towards intervention that the larger piece of the puzzle - prevention - has almost been forgotten. Of course, the roots of genocide are in discrimination, inequality, and poverty. Working to eradicate these strands of hatred through development efforts might be a part of the prevention process. Rather than simply depending on individual countries to step in and play the savior, we need to simultaneously develop a longer-term vision and international framework for ensuring that genocide does not become possible anywhere in the future. While advocacy and R2P is necessary for Darfur, these tools may not be sufficient to prevent the emergence of genocide elsewhere in the future, and a more holistic strategy for prevention must be developed.