Human Rights Should be "Imposed"

I am so tired of people criticizing human rights as "Western" and being "imposed" on others. For example, at a Human Rights conference this weekend, two presenters wrote a paper arguing: since there was not complete consistency in the definition of "corruption" in the international community, then everything is relative.

The larger point was that both law and economics are not neutral but represent important policy choices with winners and losers. Also, that culture influences such policy choices. And thus, contrary to the neoliberals, we should recognize discretion for governments to make such choices. All good points. I agree that justice is dependent upon culture a lot, and (generally) that unless people feel that there has been justice, then justice likely was not done.

However, it doesn't follow at all that the entire concept of human rights is completely indeterminant. Or that human rights talk leads to a carte blanche for the more developed countries to violate the sovereignty of less developed countries (the writers' real words). To the extent that definitions of a crime, or conceptions/substantiations of what amounts to a human right violation, overlap across cultures, then you actually have a definition  (see Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice). That is the position of anyone who is not a strict formalist, and the authors themselves ranted against formalism. I am so sick of these anthropological critiques of human rights which start with the assumption that cultures are monolithic and static, and completely legitimate and immune from outside critique. If you start with those academic, outdated, silly assumptions, then yes, your results will be set.

In the the real world though, cultures are not static. They are influenced more and more by "outside" cultures such that all cultures are now a mix of "local" and global/foreign cultures. Therefore, to say, at this point in history, that human rights are "Western" is stupid. The non-Western world signed and supported the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With their participation, the limited rights contained in the ICCPR were expanded so as to include social and economic rights, which you see in South Africa's Constitution today. Historically, it was then the conservative leaders in the U.S. who betrayed Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision (Eleanor chaired the drafting of the UN UDHR) and decided to pull the plug on the human rights project and hijack and impede the United Nations through endless vetoes. Thus, it is not the so-called "backwards" peoples of Africa or Islamic governments who have stalled the Human Rights project, it is the backwards people in the United States who have done so. Although FDR's Second Bill of Rights was forgotten in favor of Nixon and MrCarthyism, it was immensely influential across Europe and every state that has been formed since (for example, South Africa).

Further, even if human rights and anti-corruption standards are "foreign" and "imposed," so what? They were certainly imposed at Nuremberg. They were imposed when the leaders of the European countries signed the European Convention of Human Rights. They are imposed when the European Court of Human Rights forces compliance with the standards laid out. All of customary international law may be imposed on States, even those that took the minority view originally and objected to the practice. Everytime human rights and anti-corruption measures are enforced by a court they are "imposed." Enforcement of human rights standards and anti-corruption is necessary a situation of "imposition" because they are measures to be used when the government is not obeying the interests of the people, or a sub-set thereof. The talk of human rights being "imposed" is silliness. The question is whether they would be "imposed" any more so than they were here in Europe, and whether the negative impacts of such "imposition" outweighs the benefite.

The question is whether the result was good, not the source. Even so, human rights are not "Western" ideas. The earliest writer that I know of to discuess human dignity, the foundation of human rights was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He drew on Jewish, Muslim, secular, and Christian sources. He translated his ideas into the hierarchical Christian medieval worldview of his time. The concept of inherent human dignity has since been re-translated and applied to other situations. The Human Rights project always represents translations and applications of human dignity concepts into local cultures. From what we know about how cultures pick up, change and adopt new ideas shows that that always is the case. It is the case here in the West, where Human Rights are accepted as domestic concepts. Christianity has no concept of women's rights or freedom of speech. The Bible treats women far, far worse than the Koran. Yet, most modern Christians have come up with a vision for themselves and society that incorporates human rights standards into Christianity. I have heard many a sermon on respect for inherent human dignity. Churches have pushed for human rights at various times in history. There is no reason the same cannot be true for mosques, and in fact, many already do so. To then say that human rights is incompatible with this religion or those peoples' cultures would be to use a double standard. It would be a betrayal and a shame.

There is not a double standard between the most developed countries and the least developed countries in the application of human rights, whereby the most developed countries try to force their culture on the less developed ones. The OECD (organization of the richest States) monitors corruption cases in the member countries to ensure that the political leaders and prosecutors are pursuing the big corruption cases, so what I am saying it not just based on hypotheticals.

In the real world, the West/North has set up governments in less developed countries with strange borders and has not developed or supported the accountability mechanisms that we have in our own countries. We have allowed things to occur in Africa that we would never allow in Europe (compare Kosovo to Rwanda). The stick fights/stick dances that served the function of finding a new leader when the time had come is analogous to impeachment. When a tribal leader has a dispute with others he may go visit the local witch doctor to resolve the dispute, a strangely dressed man who the village believed to possess special powers or at least protended to believe it. That sounds a lot like a judge in the U.S., whose judgments serve as a saving face mechanism for important decisions that the government needs to make, but making them requires the government to admit that it made a mistake, or a part of make one. We have destroyed these traditional acountability mechanisms, set up governments with strange boundaries, and then not supported the new government with ICC subsidiary prosecution power for gross corruption, nor have we given the tools sufficient to built stable, strong states that can pursue the public interest against bribes from multinational corporations from the most developed countries, nor have we properly policed those corporations from more developed countries. There is a widespread recognition of the last point among human rights lawyers and advocates, and things are starting to change. For example, see the WIWA case, among others. Further, the international organizations in the most developed countries, such as the IMF, have not adhered to appropriate anti-corruption standards. See, for example, Indonesia and Suharto. The logical result is to ensure anti-corruption standards are complied with and that we have good definitions of human rights and what equal corruption, not to simply say the whole thing is relative, just because there is hypocrisy among the neo-liberal U.S. clowns under "The Washington Consensus." The mere fact that the authors are able to point to signs of hypocrisy and bad practices, shows that they do not really believe everything is relative.

The speakers tried to muttle to debate and muddy the waters by talking about close cases of corruption and human rigths violation occuring in the U.S., such as a for-profit health care system, which if many of those things occured in less developed countries, we would call such agreements a bribe. Well, the U.S. health care system is massively corrupt and leads to widespread violations of economic and social human rights (right to life, right to health care, etc.). 44,000 people die each year. There are $1.5M in bribes being paid per day to keep the system the way it is. Joint claims by private/government parties under the False Claims Acts have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in recovery. Yes, the logical result of applying corruption standards is massive prosecution and It could not be clearer. There is no definitional hypocrisy among human rights lawyers about that. Americans have a disease whereby they cannot apply basic moral principles that the apply to others to their own actions. That doesn't mean that those principles are relative or non-existant. It means the U.S. violates those principles and it should not be tolerated.

Corruption is the logical result of the Bush Administration's neo-classical economic drive for drastic privitization. At the core of this ideology is the bluring of public and private interests ("greed is good"), which is the essence of corruption and the perfect storm for creating it. Thus, we saw both in the Hurricane Katrina recovery and the Iraq War contracting schemes where public money disappeared into private hands without the work getting done. This is the logical and completely predictable result of neo-liberal economics. Further, it is the logical result of a lack of understanding of second generation human rights (social and economic rights with horizontal applicability, and thus positive obligations on states for realization of those interests). If the state has no obligations to ensure access to education, housing, and devent health, then why not just appoint a horse breeder to run FEMA? Why not just take public monies and funnel it to your friends at Halliburton and other places? The logical result of only understanding first genereation vertical rights ("freedom from" government doing this or that), without social and economic rights, is that anything that limits and cripples government increases human rights, leading to a government that is inept and useless ('small enough for fit in your pocket,' Barry Goldwater). That is the position of the Republican Party, it is the perfect storm for corruption, it inevitably leads to human rights violations, and it is not a matter or relativity. It is a culture that is not equal. When it occurs in any other country, the Republicans would recognize it as corruption.