Taking the Long View on Human Rights Change
A Series…
Every year, the various charities, institutions and activists that comprise the human rights sector report on the most noteworthy developments and trends. Much of what is highlighted and reported is transitory and reactive. This is understandable, as the documenting and decrying of abuses are the raison d’être of much of this work. Nevertheless, this reactive approach misses a lot of opportunities for change and prevention. In this series, I’ll be looking at how more long-term trends and a broader perspective might generate greater impact than just “naming and shaming” alone.
Why the Reactive Focus?
People who are concerned with human rights generally are focused on making the world better; that’s why they see themselves as activists, not historians who catalogue the past. Why, then, is so much professional human rights work aimed at retrospective reporting?
It’s hard to know how to change things unless you know how you got here. The main strategy many international human rights groups rely on and advocate is “naming and shaming.” This consists of bringing human rights abuses to light — a retrospective pursuit — and demanding their cessation and justice for victims and perpetrators — the prospective component. This, by the way, is also the backbone also of the non-judicial UN human rights processes, where countries must report on their performance in protecting rights and then get raked over the coals by other nations or experts whom the NGO community has primed.
Naming and shaming, though deeply ingrained in human rights culture, is a strategy not without controversy, and a line of scholars have questioned whether it actually causes governments to amend or to stiffen their abusive practices. Yet even if it doesn’t seem to produce much change in the most obdurate and insulated governments (think North Korea), it produces many immediate benefits for the human rights organization and its constituents. Among these are publicizing its investigations, explicating and reiterating human rights norms, giving victims recognition and a platform, and energizing the global public (including donors and bystander governments) who can vicariously participate in exposure and denunciation.
The end of the year is often a key fundraising period for charities, and human rights groups are no exception. That means highlighting particularly awful atrocities and cases and the organization’s battle against them; Amnesty International’s press release titled “Human Rights wins in 2022,” is an example. Sometimes the battle is enough to persuade donors to support a group, regardless of whether there was actual policy change — and sometimes there are measurable accomplishments, in new laws and norms, perpetrators punished, victims protected. Other times, organizations stretch to claim accomplishments even if they are not the sole result of their actions, or where the direct causal link is obscure. We should have some tolerance for this, as achieving results in human rights is highly contingent and depends on many social actors and processes, difficult to predict or measure.
Once the December fundraising is over and the new year comes, many international organizations will produce “state of the world” reports that compile their research and reflect key points of their advocacy. Sometimes these documents are jumping-off points that help their members and supporters spot trends, stimulating plans for the next year. Human Rights Watch’s just-published World Report gives a taste of the exercise, opening with an argument that shifting international power dynamics present opportunities for countries to work together to make positive change. Amnesty International in 2021 highlighted the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on rights, push-backs on protests, and global North pushback on migration. Freedom House documented how authoritarian governments fragment the Internet and called for greater policy coordination among democracies on issues like privacy, content moderation, transparency and encryption. Such broad themes will be reflected in advocacy as they engage with key governments going forward.
I urge you to read these very useful reports. You will find mention of legal victories, or ongoing campaigns such as stigmatizing the use of explosive weapons in civilian areas, or calling for protecting education of women in Afghanistan. But you will not find much in the way of strategic projections or predictions, much less granular plans in these documents.[1]
So Where Is the Forward-Looking Material?
It is notoriously difficult to predict developments in international relations, though pundits try. Human rights performance is even trickier, given that the motivations for good deeds by nations are more complex than just simple self-interest. After all, who benefits from a nation’s good deeds in human rights? It’s only indirectly the government (assuming the policies are popular), and immediately the people of that nation or even another nation. No one could have predicted with confidence the dissolution of the Soviet Union), Arab Spring and it’s quickly reversed gains, or Putin’s unsuccessful invasion of Ukraine — much less the rights fallout of these events. Other human rights milestones can be just as unpredictable, even when they are the product of long struggle. Same-sex marriage was unthinkable, until quite suddenly in 2000 it wasn’t any more.[2]
No one in the “business” of human rights[3] wants to make predictions that turn out wrong. And plans often depend on donors’ willingness to support them. Long-term and unrestricted financial commitments are rare, though not quite as rare as in the pre-Covid era. It is no secret that some of the most important accomplishments of the human rights movement took decades — the basic human rights treaties, the International Criminal Court, the recognition of women’s rights as human rights. But to sustain campaigns on these issues, you need a constant stream of new reporting, poster-children for the cause, and short-term victories to renew donor commitment. NGOs are not universities, with people conducting long-term research, nor think tanks with endowments and distinguished and tenured participants. Even when well-established, they are relatively fragile in terms of their financial and legal position.
So sometimes you have to go to the universities, the think tanks, and the international organizations to get the long-term view. You also have to open the aperture more widely than the naming and shaming lens to see what is coming in terms of global economy, trends in conflict, or technological revolutions that are likely to influence human rights progress.
In the coming posts, I’ll be looking at some of the long-lasting issues that stand in the way of progress in human rights and predictably will threaten it in the year to come. After that, I will start flagging issues that are just emerging, that require planning and focus in the next years if we are to avoid their worst human rights effects. In doing this, I will rely on a wide variety of sources, from the human rights movement and from many other disciplines as well. Since I don’t have to pitch for my operating budget, it’s ok if I turn out to be wrong. In fact, I would love your thoughts on whether I’ve missed important issues or just looked at the wrong things. Most of all, I hope to provide some dots to connect on a long-term approach to human rights work that are missing from the usual literature. Human rights change can be abrupt, but it is long in gestation, and requires careful attention to sustained structural change, even while we pile up the record of abuses year after year.
NOTES:
[1] One notable exception is the International Crisis Group, which publishes top conflicts to watch in the coming year; the 2023 list includes Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sahel, Haiti, Pakistan and Taiwan.
[2] In December 2000 the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage, despite public opinion strongly disfavoring it. Many other countries followed its example in the following decades.
[3] In referring to the professional human rights actors as “business” I mean no disrespect, but there is an economy here in terms of institutions and their donors, as well as the media which publicizes and profits from human rights stories. One of the key targets of this “business” is a domestic and international governance community of political and humanitarian actors who either are in a position to influence human rights policies or specifically tasked with following and responding to NGOs and media on these issues. Effectively reaching this audience, of course, enhances the professionals impact and public support.
