A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
Search This Blog
Back to 500BC.
==========================
Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Limits of Human Rights
“The challenge for every advocate of democracy and human rights lies in restoring a sense of inclusion, dignity and self-respect to the millions of people who are considered ‘useless’ today.”
( August 1, 2017, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The
most significant contributions of great scholars are often made after
death, as reality catches up with their insights and their work is more
deeply understood. I expect that this will be true of Wiktor Osiatyński,
a professor of constitutional law and human rights who served for many
years on the Global Board of the Open Society Foundations, and who died
this month in his native Poland.
I first met Wiktor Osiatyński in 2004. Then in 2012, when I succeeded
Aryeh Neier as president of the Open Society Foundations, he became one
of my most active and provocative advisors. Wiktor was always ready to
travel to any country to meet with anyone if it could advance the
Foundations’ pursuit of justice and human rights. As a result, he was on
the move on the Foundations’ behalf every year until his cancer
restricted him to telephone visits.
While the memory of these visits burns bright today in the minds of
those he met, Wiktor’s scholarship will shine more brightly over time,
and I expect it will be his final book, Human Rights and Their Limits,
that leaves the longest-lasting impression. Published in 2009, more than
a year before the start of the Arab Spring and at the very start of the
Obama presidency, the book was a decade ahead of its time.
Even then, Wiktor recognized the diminishing utility of human rights
claims in an age when both liberal and illiberal democracies had
replaced dictatorships as the most prominent violators of human rights,
and he focused his attention on strategic conundrums still unresolved
today. As the Harvard Law Review described his contribution at the time
of publication, Wiktor had succeeded in “redefining universal rights in
more pragmatic terms.”
Rereading Wiktor’s last book today, three of its arguments seem particularly striking.
First, Wiktor was not deceived by any temporary enthusiasm for human
rights among one or another of the great powers. He develops this most
carefully in his account of the birth of the United Nations, starting
with the British and the American promises of human rights guarantees in
the Atlantic Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at
the height of the Second World War.
Wiktor details how this may have been a successful gambit to bring
people and nations to their side in the war, but the promises were
insincere, or at least short-lived. By 1944, at Dumbarton Oaks, the
British and Americans agreed with the other great powers that they would
oppose any meaningful protection of human rights as part of the United
Nations, and this opposition was in full force a year later at the San
Francisco conference of the United Nations.
For Wiktor, this cynical invocation of rights by those in power was not
just a 20th century phenomenon. He saw the same temporary alignment of
powerful actors with rights defining the history of rights since Magna
Carta. “Powerful barons in the year 1215, the advancing bourgeoisie of
the eighteenth century, and the new political elites in 1948 and 1989
all adopted the idea of rights at a time when it could foster their
interests. Once they had assured access to power for themselves, they
often abandoned the idea of rights.”
The most recent and most cynical of these invocations of human rights by
great powers came from the U.S. administration of George W. Bush to
justify the invasion of Iraq, after the threat of weapons of mass
destruction proved baseless. The obvious sham in that justification
signaled the end of an era, and Wiktor recognized long before the
European refugee crisis or the candidacy of Donald Trump that the cause
of human rights was no longer useful to these powers.
“In the United States, the war on terror has dominated the internal
political agenda, pushing away civil liberties and being used to justify
undue increase of unaccountable presidential power. In Western Europe,
the need to deal with growing immigration and the fear of Muslim
minorities has taken priority over the protection of human rights.” Most
striking here is Wiktor’s realist conclusion that “[t]he present crisis
of the idea of rights seems primarily related to the fact that there
exists no strong power that could foster its own political interests
under the banner of human rights.”
Perhaps because of his cynical view of states, the second striking
argument that Wiktor makes concerns the vital role of NGOs in
constitutional democracies. It is civil society, not states, that
contribute most to the protection of rights. In his formulation: “The
exercise of freedom and protection of rights is proportional to the
strength and institutional organization of civil society.”
What makes this striking is Wiktor’s anchoring the role of civil society
in the nature of constitutional protections—protections that are beyond
the reach in normal circumstances of the executive and legislative
branches of government. Constitutions have become the strongest vehicles
for making human rights enforceable. But even when they are enshrined
in constitutions, these rights can only be claimed effectively by those
with access to the courts, the press, and other public forums. The rich
have no need for civil society in this regard, for they can go to court
to assert their rights on their own; but for everyone else, public
interest NGOs play this crucial role. When rights are made enforceable
through other mechanisms, such as international treaties, NGOs again
play this vital role. The analogy that Wiktor makes is to the role of
political parties in democratic theory.
In the nineteenth century, democratic theory accepted party systems as a
necessary mediating institution between individual voters and their
representation in government. Similarly, constitutional democracy should
acknowledge the need for institutions without which individual rights
are of limited use to anyone who is not rich and powerful …. Public
interest NGOs should be elevated to similar status in the theory and
practice of constitutional democracy as political parties.
Third, and perhaps most prescient, Wiktor saw the need for the human
rights movement to repair the gap that had opened up between itself and
the majority of the public. That gap needed to be closed, both in how
human rights organizations communicate with the public, and in whose
cause these human rights organizations take up. Communication had to
become less legalistic, more evocative. And the movement had to embrace
those left behind by economic growth in an era of globalization.
This last point would be the biggest challenge. The international human
rights mechanisms remained elite institutions, as did the entire UN
system. Wiktor thought it imperative that we develop a “system of global
governance that would be sensitive to the needs of the poor.” Yes,
there were institutions that were supposed to benefit the poor, but this
was too close to humanitarianism, and not the promise of human rights.
To claim rights, the poor would need real power.
As Wiktor explained it, “The idea of rights has seldom served the poor,
destitute, dispossessed, and oppressed. Such people usually do not claim
rights. Instead they ask for mercy, expect charity, and seek benefits
from benevolent masters …. [R]ights have usually been claimed by those
strong enough to demand them.”
Wiktor did not need Brexit, the Trump election, or the refugee crisis to
understand how globalization had opened up a schism between human
rights and people whose poverty seemed invisible to the masters of
globalization. “The challenge for every advocate of democracy and human
rights lies in restoring a sense of inclusion, dignity and self-respect
to the millions of people who are considered ‘useless’ today.”
The human rights movement has lost precious time since Wiktor wrote
about the limits of rights, and the situation today is even worse than
Wiktor imagined it in 2009. Not only did he assume that President Obama
would succeed in closing Guantanamo, but he assumed that the human
rights movement would have closed those gaps with the public by now.
Instead, those gaps seem to be yawning even wider.
It’s time to catch up with Wiktor Osiatyński. We need to recognize that
the embrace of human rights by great powers is always likely to be
cynical, tactical, and short-lived. That’s not a reason to avoid it, but
to recognize that those moments of human rights ascendance must be
leveraged by civil society to make more progress than the great powers
have conceded. We also have to insist on the legitimacy of civil society
organizations as independent pillars of constitutional democracy, able
to call on the moral and financial support of friends worldwide. And
those NGOs must themselves close the gap with the public that threatens
their relevance today.
Perhaps most important, to fully realize rights one has to recognize
their limits. Rights are only one instrument for embedding strong values
in our governance. Politics is another, and Wiktor was increasingly
aware of the danger of crowding out politics with too many rights. He
considered constitutions important crucibles for rights, but he
recognized that democracies are equally important containers for
politics.
If human relations are reduced simply to the fulfillment of rights, he
cautioned, our lives, indeed our humanity, will be greatly diminished.
We would do well to heed the advice he gave his students and with which
he concluded his last book: “Do not try to use rights as a universal key
that will open every door in front of you. Rights are very important
for humankind. Do not take part in their abuse or abet their inflation
to the point that they may fall into oblivion.” He signed that advice,
“Your grateful teacher,” and I, for one, count myself his grateful
student.
Chris Stone is the president of the Open Society Foundations, where this peice first
appeared. He is an international expert on criminal justice reform and
on the leadership and governance of nonprofits. Prior to joining Open
Society, he was the Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal
Justice at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and
director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Before that,
Stone spent a decade as director of the Vera Institute of Justice. He
founded the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and served as a
founding director of the New York State Capital Defender Office and of
the Altus Global Alliance.