A few days ago I posted a discussion of Amnesty International's recent claim that the biggest attack on human rights, principles and values was that mounted by the liberal democracies in the 'war against terror'. Several objections have been raised to my critical treatment of Amnesty's claim, the most interesting one by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber. Chris thinks that Amnesty was really claiming that the liberal democracies are attacking not human rights, but human rights principles, and that the comma between 'rights' and 'principles' (in the Telegraph letter from AI) was an error, since it's not present in the comparable remarks made in Amnesty's Report for 2004. He thinks that this makes the AI claim more plausible, and at least more resistant to the criticisms I was levelling against it.
I'm in some doubt, personally, whether Amnesty really was drawing the distinction which Chris is invoking. However, the idea that the force of an argument should be materially altered by an (allegedly) misplaced comma is so delightful and charming that it would be churlish to dismiss it out of hand, and in any case the interpretation that Chris is suggesting does raise some interesting issues. So I'd like to try to address his views.
A preliminary point. Chris thinks that a commitment to universal human rights is perfectly compatible with believing that people can vary in their degree of responsibility for the crimes they commit. I think he's right about this, and I'm grateful to him for pointing it out. But I can't see that it alters the substantive issue here, since nothing he says, and nothing I can think of, shows how differences in levels of responsibility can bridge the gap in moral gravity between the human rights violations committed by the liberal democracies, and the great genocides, say, of the second half of the twentieth century.
Now to the main objection. Does construing Amnesty as having focused on the putative attack by the liberal democracies on human rights principles, rather than on human rights simpliciter, really make a difference to the plausibility of Amnesty's claim? To answer that question, we need to consider what it takes to attack a human rights principle. Is it attacked by breaches of that principle, i.e. by actually violating people's human rights, or is it attacked only by denials of its validity, either verbally or by legislation? If breaches of the principle are allowed to count as ways of attacking it, then we are back where we were originally. The extent of the abuses of human rights which were carried out during the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, and the terrible massacres in the Sudan, are going to greatly outweigh anything currently being done by the liberal democracies. So if that's how we understand attacks on human rights principles, the new interpretation of the Amnesty claim makes no difference to the argument.
We must therefore suppose that Amnesty thinks human rights principles are attacked only by denials, verbal or legislative, of their validity. Straight off, this seems to me to be desperately implausible. Consider the old Soviet Union, many of whose laws, so I am told, were impeccably respectful of human rights. But of course its practice was something else again. Under that terrible regime, millions were given hideous lives and deaths. Do we regard the USSR as a notable supporter of human rights principles? Surely not. Here, as elsewhere, with moral principles we think that what people do is relevant to the question of whether they really support the principles they profess. The alternative view privileges what we say, in or out of court, above what we do, in a very unconvincing way. (There are further complications with this topic, to do with weakness of the will, which I'm not addressing here because I think they're largely irrelevant to the relationship between mass murder and human rights principles.)
However, I'd like to give this argument the best run for its money that I can (though I'll return to the above objection, which I believe to be crucial, at the end of this post). So let us suppose - as I do not myself believe - that the proposed way of understanding support for human rights principles is correct, and attacking human rights principles is a matter of verbally and legislatively attacking their validity. Have the liberal democracies, as part of increased security measures in response to terrorism, been passing laws that attack the validity of human rights principles to a greater extent than the laws of other polities? Even to ask the question is to answer it. We are supposed to accept that the repressive laws of Zimbabwe, of China, of Iran, of Saudi Arabia, can't really compare, in their threat to human rights principles, with the Patriot Act in the USA. I find this hard to believe.
If the Patriot Act is supposed to be more of an attack on human rights principles than any other legislation, then it surely can't be in respect of its content. However, it might be argued that this is to misplace the focus of Amnesty's complaint. The problem isn't that the content of recent liberal democratic legislation is more erosive of human rights principles than any others, but rather that these countries are more powerful and influential than any others, and hence their undermining of human rights principles will affect more people than that of other countries.
If this is the claim, then really it can only apply to America. It's implausible to think that what Britain or France does can affect more people than what China does. And even with the USA, it doesn't seem very likely that the relatively small number of people directly affected by the Patriot Act can compare with the number of women, say, in Africa and Asia who are directly affected by legislation which undermines human rights principles about the equality of the sexes. The thought here must really be that the world's only superpower sets a terrible, and terribly damaging, example when it fails to respect human rights principles, and that's why its legislation constitutes the biggest attack on those principles in the last 50 years, as the AI Report asserts, even though the content of the legislation in question isn't as severely opposed to human rights principles as that of other countries.
I'm not entirely convinced by this picture of the rest of the world looking to America when it decides whether to endorse or attack human rights principles. It's certainly not what large parts of the rest of the world say they're doing. Are we to suppose that legislation like the Patriot Act will, by setting a bad example, encourage countries which would otherwise behave well to violate the human rights of their citizens? Perhaps in the light of that bad example China will invade Tibet, Sudan will engage in murderous civil war, and Cambodia will decide to turn on itself and commit a kind of auto-genocide? In reality, of course, these terrible things happened without the benefit of any bad example currently being set by the liberal democracies. No such example was needed.
But now, perhaps, we come to the kernel of truth in this very large nut of exaggeration. Maybe Amnesty thinks that, though no example is needed to provoke other parts of the world into ignoring the validity of human rights principles, the same can't be said about persuading these polities to change their commitments. Maybe the thought is that only if the liberal democracies, the natural home of concern for human rights, maintain their respect for human rights principles is there any hope of that respect spreading to parts to the world where it has hitherto been absent. (A nicely sophisticated example of this defence of the AI claim can be found here.)
If this is what Amnesty believes, then perhaps it should say so. But it's a problematic claim to make: as has been felicitously pointed out to me in correspondence, it's a latter-day version of the White Man's Burden, a view which many people would explicitly reject, for very convincing reasons. If Amnesty is now resuscitating this view, it should provide some clear account of how it will deal with the obvious problems it raises. And even if this is what AI believes, even if this is what's motivating its claim that the liberal democracies are mounting the biggest attack on human rights principles in the last 50 years, that claim remains entirely unconvincing, as I shall try to show.
I don't doubt that the liberal democracies do sometimes violate human rights, and even attack human rights principles, and that when they do this, it's disgraceful and should be criticised by, among others, Amnesty International. Like many other participants in this debate, I'm a long-time supporter of Amnesty's work. But this support needn't, and shouldn't, require us to overlook its shortcomings, particularly when it moves into the field of comparative political judgements. (The same is true of other institutions: those of us who support the BBC and all it stands for shouldn't feel obliged to fall silent if it fails to meet the high standards we've come to expect of it.) And the claim under consideration here is just such a serious shortcoming, particularly if, as perhaps AI believes, the role of the liberal democracies is crucial in promoting the spread of human rights principles across the world. If that role is so important, then all the more should we not exorbitantly attack the standing of the liberal democracies unless there is good reason to do so.
And do we have good reason to do so, in this specific case? I have argued that neither in terms of its content, nor in terms of the number of people directly affected, nor in terms of the bad example which might encourage others to breach human rights, is it plausible to assert that the liberal democracies' legislative response to terrorism is the biggest attack on human rights principles in the last 50 years. It might be true to say that the importance of that legislation lies in the way it fails to encourage adherence to human rights principles in others. Is that sufficient to validate the AI claim? To answer this question, we have to return to that original move of focusing on human rights principles, and the assumption that such principles are attacked less by breaches of human rights than by legislative denials or neglect of their validity. We have to consider whether that assumption is legitimate.
We are being asked by Irene Khan to believe that against the backdrop of forty post-war years of hideous violations of human rights throughout the USSR and its zone of influence, of the auto-genocide in Cambodia, the tortures practised for years in Chile and Argentina, and the 'disappearances' there, ethnic cleansing, torture and murder in former Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda in which nearly a million people died within a few short months, the systematic torture and murder of political opponents for more than two decades in Iraq, including mass slaughters of genocidal proportions against the Kurds and the Shia, the assault against the East Timorese by Indonesia with its thousands upon thousands of victims, the further thousands and thousands gruesomely killed in Algeria, the routine practice of torture in jails in Egypt, Syria, apartheid South Africa, present-day Zimbabwe, and Saudi Arabia, the murderous brutalities of Idi Amin in Uganda, the ferocities of the civil war continuing for years now in Sudan and the practice of slavery there, the nightmare treatment of the populace in the shadowlands of North Korea - we are asked to believe, against this blood-soaked backdrop, that legislative measures taken by America and other liberal democracies since September 2001 in the war against terrorism amount to a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years. The imbalance, the grotesque lack of proportion, in this judgement cries out for explanation itself, which explanation is perhaps to be found in the influence of political considerations which are outwith AI's proper (and irreplaceably important) remit.
No matter how we look at it, the assertion in Khan's letter, and in the 2004 Amnesty Report, is no more plausible on the 'human rights principles' construal of Amnesty's complaint than it was on the simple 'human rights' construal. The radical mismatch between the nature of the liberal democracies' record and Amnesty's assessment of its comparative significance is as evident under the former interpretation as it is under the latter. In the end, Chris's (supposedly) intruding and alien comma makes no difference. (Eve Garrard)