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The world is going to pot, and the human-rights
movement is largely to blame. That bizarre critique, popular with
dictators and criminals, has taken hold even among some rights
supporters who are stunned by the assault on liberal values that
defines our age. Having proven unable to halt the negative tide,
human-rights advocacy, we are told, is in “crisis,” “has failed,”
and is in its “end times.” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
recently established a panel that will supposedly provide “fresh
thinking about human rights discourse” but will most likely
undermine gender equality and reproductive freedoms.
Clearly, rights activists must up their game. But
they should be under no illusion that the human-rights movement
alone can save the planet.
Many criticisms have been leveled at human-rights
discourse, but three stand out. Perhaps the most common is that
rights advocates have done too little to address economic
inequality. Indeed, over the past four decades, the international
human-rights movement has grown hand in hand with obscene
disparities of wealth.
A second concern is over-legalization. Norms and
standards go only so far if they are not implemented in real life. A
favorable court judgment that prompts celebration among activists is
often just the beginning of a long enforcement struggle. And a
preoccupation with legal claims has blinded the movement to the
underlying moral values that move many to action.
Finally, critics argue, the result of excessive
reliance on law has been to overlook people. On this view, rights
defenders have spent so much time refining arguments for courts and
legislatures that they have failed to consult adequately, let alone
cooperate meaningfully, with the victims, survivors, family members,
and others on whose behalf they purport to advocate.
These strategic failures have allowed
authoritarian leaders to paint rights advocates as an enemy elite.
In this vein, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has urged his
fellow citizens to “reject the fake civil-society activists […] who
want to tell us how to live and with whom, how to speak, and how to
raise our children.”
Yet the criticisms contain much truth, and they
lead to clear prescriptions. We must pay more attention to economic
suffering. We must relearn how to speak less like lawyers and more
like people. And we must work more collaboratively with likeminded
groups that don’t identify themselves as rights defenders, but whose
contributions – whether through science, technology, economics, or
the arts – can foster rights awareness.
Thankfully, some rights organizations are
listening. Amnesty International now aims to increase its membership
to 25 million, with a focus on youth, while Human Rights Watch
intends to collaborate more closely with activists in the global
South.
These suggested reforms will no doubt help. But
they will not be sufficient by themselves to reverse the populist
onslaught.
We in the human-rights movement must be realistic
about our distinctive but limited role in propelling change on the
scale needed to confront the current authoritarian threat. Rights
advocates have achieved a lot, and we will do more. But rolling back
reactionary politics worldwide requires not just rights activism,
but also deeper engagement in political debate and elections. That’s
a task not just for the rights movement, but for everyone.
Although the impact of rights advocacy can’t be
measured in monetary terms, the differences between the amounts
spent on it and on political campaigning are revealing. Although
annual philanthropic funding for “human rights and social justice”
has increased worldwide in recent years, it remains under $3
billion. That is less than half the cost of India’s 2019
parliamentary election, and 50% of the amount spent by candidates in
the 2016 presidential and congressional races in the United States.
Human-rights groups must acknowledge their own
responsibility for fueling excessive expectations of what advocacy
can achieve – whether out of a need to fundraise, an undue sense of
moral purity, or a related desire to rise above the dirty game of
politics.
And yet, even amid the prevailing gloom, political
organizing and elections are leading to positive change. Armenia,
Ethiopia, The Gambia, and Malaysia have all experienced progressive
electoral transitions in the past three years, while populists
suffered setbacks in the 2018 US midterm elections and in Indonesia.
These outcomes turned on issues such as corruption, climate change,
poverty, #MeToo, and others that both relate to and extend well
beyond human rights. And although rights organizations contributed
to these victories, so did political parties, labor unions, women’s
coalitions, environmentalists, and professional associations.
As these gains suggest, the battle against
illiberal populism will ultimately be won in the arenas of politics
and power – in voting booths, legislative offices, the media, and
the streets. Rights arguments will sometimes be critical, but not
everywhere, and not always.
So by all means, let’s celebrate the many
achievements of human-rights advocacy, and resolve to do better. But
don’t saddle the rights movement with the entire burden of
transforming the world.
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