Fighting for Human Rights Without the U.S.

New America Media, Q&A, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Dec 09, 2006

Editor's Note: New America Media caught up with Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, during an event in honor of International Human Rights Day, which is Sunday. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke at the event. Roberto Lovato is a New America Media writer based in New York.

NAM: What will HRW's priorities be this coming year?

Kenneth Roth: Most urgently, we want to stop large-scale killing in places like Darfur and Eastern Congo. We want to stop the retrenchment in human rights in places like Russia and we want to push for a more responsible global role for countries like China. At the same time, we want to open up some of the closed societies in the Middle East. It's also critical that we fight the entrenched repression in places like Burma and North Korea. And we need to change the attitude toward fighting terrorism, so that it is inherently one that is based on a fundamental respect for human rights.

NAM: What are your concerns about human rights in the United States?

Unfortunately, U.S. credibility on human rights in the world has been shot by the way the U.S. has chosen to fight its so-called "war on terrorism." Kofi Annan stressed today that you can't effectively curb terrorism if you are violating human rights; you can't use secret detention facilities or torture to promote human rights. That's a message that is clearly directed at Washington.

NAM: Can the U.S. can redeem itself?

I don't think the situation is irredeemable. But it is going to require a repudiation of things like secret detention facilities and torture. It's going to require a clear pronouncement that these are not going to happen in the future, and it's going to require an attempt to hold the authors of those illegal practices accountable.

So on the one hand, there is a challenge for the new Congress to begin to redeem America's reputation and authority on human rights. But in the meantime, there's an essential need for other governments to come to the fore and take the leadership role that the United States has left wanting. That needs to come out of Latin America, and out of the European countries and from the more human rights-friendly governments of Africa and Asia. We can no longer rely on the United States to play that leadership role.

NAM: What effect has U.S. behavior had on the global human rights community?

It has had two devastating effects. First, it has meant that what has often been the most powerful voice for human rights is no longer credible and has effectively been lost to the human rights movement, at least temporarily. Second, U.S. practices have given a cheap excuse to other governments around the world to replicate American abuses. I was just in Saudi Arabia, and it's very hard to push for an end to torture or end to arbitrary imprisonment when they turn around and say, "That's what the Americans do." I was also in Egypt, and when I complained to the Egyptian prime minister about torture, he said to me, "Well, what do you want me to do? That's what the Americans do." So, America is such a powerful example, that when it sets a bad example, it encourages replication by unsavory regimes around the world. The U.S. has given them a way to deflect criticism. Since the protection of human rights depends on our ability to pressure governments to change, if they can deflect that pressure , it sustains these abusive practices.

NAM: What are your concerns around the issue of global migration?

In an increasingly mobile world, how do we ensure that people who may not be citizens of a country nonetheless have their basic human rights protected, particularly when it comes to the right to have their children educated, the right to basic health care, the right to be able to rely on police protection? These are rights that are often absent when people have to worry about their immigration status and that contact with authority will lead to their deportation. Governments have an understandable interest in policing their borders, but they have a duty to respect the basic rights of the people who for whatever reason find themselves in their country.

NAM: Turning closer to home, what about the treatment of immigrants in the United States?

We look at how migrant workers are treated. Do they have the right to organize labor unions? Do they have respect for the wage contracts, do they face discrimination? The U.S. is being somewhat schizophrenic about the migration issue. On the one hand, it has built an economy around 11 million migrants to do work that, for the most part, other Americans are not interested in doing. But then it has refused to grant them many of the basic rights that any person anywhere in the world should have. The U.S. has to find a way to regularize the lives of the migrants, whose work it depends on regularly. That's the fundamental problem facing the U.S. To build a wall along the border, to push people further and further out into the desert where they risk their lives, isn't addressing the problem. And that is, how does the U.S. match its economic interest in having migrant labor with the basic rights of those people to be treated as human beings wherever they are, regardless of their citizenship status?

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