“Order! Order!” Rarely does this vocal stamping of the foot succeed in restoring courtroom lawyers to reasoned debate for long. In the same way, foreign policy analysts have been pleading for something they call “world order”. We live in a world where so many challenges transcend borders: threats to the stability of the global economy, climate change, cyber conflict, terrorism, and risks to reliable supplies of food and water, just to name a few.
Today, the world seems uncommonly hard to manage. The international fabric is fraying. Whether it is the Saudi-Iran conflict, mayhem in Syria, Russia’s seizure of parts of Ukraine, China’s pushy tactics in its extended coastal waters or the Islamic State (IS) threatening to wreak havoc in the Middle East and beyond, the world is coming apart at the seams. In 2016, the call for world order will be partly met but, as with the honourable Judge exertions, the sense of impending chaos will endure. You would think something is wrong when foreign policy pundit Henry Kissinger writes a book called “World Order” warning that “chaos threatens”.
Quite remarkably, in the light of world history, at a time when the United States enjoyed unprecedented and unequalled power, its leaders used it to fashion a world order, based on treaties and global institutions. But today, that world order is increasingly contested and left unused as world disorder, impotent to deal with the emerging threats to world peace and stability. Today, the virtues of an open world, of democracy and the universality of human rights and personal liberties, enshrined in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are under threat even in countries that have embraced democratic ideals.
Likewise, there is a tendency to forget that there are two aspects of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which focus both on political and socioeconomic rights. In a world experiencing a war and an existing order based on barbarism, intolerance and neo-colonialism, it is of great importance to establish alternatives and take active responsibility or risk becoming either passively or directly involved in supporting today’s prevailing insecure and inhumane order.
Seen in a historical perspective, issues like human rights and promotion of world peace cannot be divorced from international power relations and the growing problems of uneven and unequal development. In fact, the poverty and wealth dichotomy is the prime source of world instability. In other words, as long as the North-South gap continues to grow, the prospects for increasing peace and human rights are bleak indeed. As long as the West is fighting the so-called terrorist threat with military, it isn’t just losing the fight against terrorism – it is fuelling it across the globe.
Many believe that international human rights law is one of our greatest moral achievements. But there is little evidence that it is effective. A radically different approach is long overdue. Some of the major human rights violating countries include India, the world’s largest democracy, Pakistan, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Iran. These countries all have judicial systems, and most suspected criminals are formally charged and appear in court. But the courts are slow and underfunded, so police, under pressure to combat crime, employ extrajudicial methods, such as torture, to extract confessions.
We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria.
The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States, have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Universality of human rights is facing the strongest challenge yet. Double standards and selectivity are becoming the norm. Security cannot and must not take precedence over human rights. The biggest danger to human rights is when political and economic interests are allowed to drive the human rights agenda. However, as Amnesty International has noted several times during the past decade or so, the biggest problem is that the world’s only superpower, the United States, deploys a hypocritical stance at not recognizing the extent to which human rights abuses are going unchecked in its own territory. The US government has a selective approach to human rights – using international human rights standards as a yardstick by which to judge other countries, but consistently failing to apply those same standards at home. Furthermore, US government policies often lead to human rights being sacrificed for political, economic and military interests, both in the US and abroad. By providing weapons, security equipment and training to other countries, the United States is responsible for the same abuses it denounces in its State Department reports.
At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish. The United States and Europe have recently condemned human rights violations in Syria, Russia, China and Iran. Western countries often make foreign aid conditional on human rights and have even launched military interventions based on human rights violations. The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the well being of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning.
The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades failed to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning.
