Human Rights Watch (HRW) is one of the world’s most influential human rights nongovernmental organizations in the world. It seeks to advance human rights by holding governments accountable for crimes and atrocities through publicity and shaming. In Righting Wrongs, Kenneth Roth, who led HRW for nearly three decades, describes how he built and developed the organization and how it went about trying to highlight human rights abuses through its advocacy and publicity campaigns. According to Roth, the organization’s strategy was to develop credible reports on crimes and atrocities and then publicize the offenses.
Three features characterize HRW’s approach to human rights. First, since governments are a chief cause of human rights abuses, legal accountability provides the most effective way of “righting wrongs.” Crimes, whether committed in war or peacetime, need to be prosecuted and the culpable need to be punished. Since states are often unwilling or unable to bring offenders to justice, international criminal tribunals can play an important role in prosecuting major offenders.
A second feature is the belief that a body of international law exists that provides standards for judging human rights abuses. Such law includes international law on human rights, such as the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights; international human rights law, which sets standards for governments; and international humanitarian law, which establishes norms governing warfare.
A third assumption is that the human rights quest requires a comprehensive approach where all rights are regarded as equivalent. While American foreign policy scholars have emphasized the priority of basic and political rights over social, economic, environmental, and gender rights, Roth argues that rights should be conceived as “a totality.” He does not explore the nature of rights. For him, devoting time to clarifying the moral foundations of rights or the effort to distinguish basic, universal rights from political, socioeconomic, cultural, environmental, and gender rights is a distraction from the task of improving the human condition.
Since Roth’s book captures the prevalent perspective of the progressive globalist approach to human rights, it provides an appropriate means to assess the adequacy of HRW’s work. In the following, I briefly critique the organization’s strategy.
First, criminal justice is essential in a humane, well-functioning state. Human rights can only be secured in a community if a government has the legitimacy and authority to enforce its laws. But when a state lacks legitimacy, or when a government uses its authority to abuse human dignity, or when civil strife breaks out, the regular processes of criminal justice are unlikely to resolve conflict and restore peace. In such circumstances, the fundamental task is to restore civic order through political reconciliation. Retributive justice can provide a temporary balm but will not restore trust among competing political groups. In other words, the retributive justice strategy rooted in legalism will only work after the foundational work of political reconciliation has been undertaken. In Exclusion and Embrace, theologian Miroslav Volf observes that restoring community is the precondition necessary for justice. He claims that if righting wrongs is the focus, you will have neither justice nor peace. An example of the restorative justice approach is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which made truth-telling about past abuses the basis for amnesty.
Although Roth’s book is chiefly concerned with righting state wrongs, often the most serious offenses arise not from government actions but from the absence of a functioning state. For example, Haiti, a country currently ruled by gangs, is a society where life is nasty, brutish, and short—to use Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of a society without government. Despite the immense human suffering in the country, Roth fails to address the problem of weak and failing states.
The strategy’s second premise—that international law provides a secure basis for pursuing justice—is equally dubious. Defining and enforcing international human rights is problematic because the world is not a coherent political community but a global society of sovereign states. There is no global authority that can define and enforce such rights. More fundamentally, human rights can only be secured through the rule of law arising from society. Since the world includes many different types of regimes (e.g., democracies, populist regimes, dictatorships, and authoritarian governments), states will vary greatly in their willingness and capacity to secure rights. The inadequacy of Roth’s globalist perspective is illustrated by the failure to highlight the major human rights abuses arising from totalitarian regimes. Although China receives major coverage, the book fails to examine North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and other similar autocratic regimes. Interestingly, Roth devotes major attention to Israel and the United States, two democratic countries where the rule of law is honored and courts are independent.
Roth critiques the “double standard” claim by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who argued in an influential article in 1979 that the US government should be more concerned with totalitarian governments than authoritarian regimes since the former pose a far greater threat to individual freedom than the latter. Ironically, Roth himself succumbs to double standards by focusing on alleged abuses and crimes committed in democratic states, while deemphasizing or neglecting the atrocities committed in failed states or the harsh, brutish life imposed by Islamist radicals or Communist thugs.
Finally, HRW’s all-inclusive approach to human rights is also woefully inadequate since the failure to differentiate and prioritize rights claims leads to distortions and a lack of focus on basic rights—the universal rights associated with the equality, dignity, and freedom of every human being. If such rights as freedom from torture, racial discrimination, voting rights, trial by jury, the right to a job, the right of assembly, freedom of speech, the right to legal counsel are all morally equivalent, how can a government secure such a varied ensemble of claims? The all-inclusive approach, however, is a progressive facade that human rights advocates use in giving preference to some claims, such as LGBTQ rights and the crime of apartheid, and neglect other rights, such as religious freedom and freedom of the press. Organizations like HRW play an important role in highlighting crimes and abuses carried out by governments. But instead of undertaking the difficult task of rehabilitating states through nation-building, they pursue a retributive strategy by encouraging prosecution through international courts and tribunals. By focusing exclusively on legal accountability, they disregard the important work of political reconciliation. Since human rights are only secure when rooted in a stable, humane political community, the creation and/or restoration of trust is the most important task in confronting wrongdoing. If the world is to be more humane, there needs to be not only more justice but also more civic peace rooted in social solidarity.
