Responding To Crises Of Human Rights – From North Korea To Syria

Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organisations, which operates in more than 90 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington, DC. Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations. Ken Roth addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 30 March 2014. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of the address.

RESPONDING TO CRISES OF HUMAN RIGHTS – FROM NORTH KOREA TO SYRIA

KEN ROTH

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for showing up. It occurred to me, preparing for tonight’s talk, that this is a particularly tumultuous time for the human rights cause. There are so many challenges and crises that we were dealing with at the same time. So it might be a good way to illustrate, in a sense, how the human rights movement works.

Many of you understand that one thing human rights groups do is investigate abuses around the world, and issue reports. But people are not quite as aware of what we do with those reports, and how we use that information to force governments to change, to curb their human rights abuses. So I will give you all a tour du monde, running through a few of the recent crises we’re facing and describe what our strategy has been for trying to address them. I shall try to address Syria, Sri Lanka, North Korea, Egypt and China.

Global tensions used to be simpler. At the height of the Cold War, you basically appealed to one side or the other to put pressure on abusive governments. You were either an ally or an adversary. Today, the world is much more multi-polar, partly as a consequence of emerging powers with their own regional clout and partly it’s a product of the declining moral authority of some Western countries – particularly my own, the United States – as they engage in issues like Guantanamo Bay, torture or drone strikes. It’s partly a product, too, of the European Union not quite punching at its weight because it has so much difficulty coordinating a unified policy. Of course, countries like China and Russia are still players. But they are also very much spoilers in a lot of our efforts to promote human rights.

One of the complexities we face is deciding whom we can work with. How do you put together the right coalition of governments so you can succeed in pressuring the target government to change? The world has also become more complex in a good way, in that we have more tools available to ourselves. Just think about the doctrines and institutions that are available today, whether it’s the responsibility to protect, or the International Criminal Court, the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, the emergence of peace keeping as not simply narrow, interjecting forces between two countries that are presumably at peace but rather a protection force trying to stop violent abuses against civilians.

These are all relatively new tools available, if we can invoke them, to try to change governmental conduct and protect rights.

Syria

So, I’ll give a few illustrations of how this works. I shall begin with Syria. The key to Syria has been the UN Security Council, which, needless to say, has not been an easy place to work with. By way of background, let me simply say that the Syrian government’s war strategy, Assad’s war strategy, has been one of war crimes. That is to say that, rather than simply shooting at combatants on the other side, which is permissible under the laws of war, Assad has chosen to target civilians who happen to live in opposition areas. He’s done this through the indiscriminate barrel bombing of opposition areas, by targeting hospitals, clinics and schools that civilians use, by trying to deprive civilians of the basic necessities of life – food, medicine, housing – that they need to survive. All of this with the aim of trying to, in part, turn civilians against the armed opposition and, if not that, at least force civilians to flee, to empty the countryside and make it harder for the rebels to operate there. From that perspective, it’s been very successful. There are two and half million refugees, there are six million displaced over all, some nine and half million who are dependent on humanitarian assistance. It’s been a disaster if you’re a Syrian civilian, but it’s been a ruthlessly effective strategy for Assad.

The international community’s response to this has been very much shaped by Libya, in that it is clear that, under the doctrine of responsibility to protect, Syria clearly qualifies. These are mass atrocities and the world should be doing what it can to stop the killing. But that does not necessarily mean military intervention. One of the factors in deciding whether to intervene militarily is whether you anticipate that the intervention would do more good than harm. People in very good faith have not been convinced that a military intervention would do more good than harm. To make it even more complex, governments that had voted to intervene militarily, or at least abstained in the Security Council, governments like India, South Africa, Brazil, even Russia and China, had very different feelings after Libya, when the sense was that NATO exceeded its protection mandate and moved on to a regime change mandate that has left people very unhappy.

The status quo then comes in part for those reasons and in part because Russia’s will stick with its ally Assad, to distinguish itself from, say, what Washington did with Mubarak. It has been very difficult to get anything done at the Security Council. Russia has vetoed three different resolutions for efforts to address the atrocities in Syria. There have been two exceptions. One was the chemical deal where Obama came close to threatening military action, which pushed Lavrov at the last minute to offer a deal where Syria would abandon its chemical weapons. Obama who was eager not to have to intervene accepted that deal and the Security Council ratified it. For all that, while chemical weapons are horrible and it is good to get them off the battlefield, they are responsible for only some one per cent of the deaths in Syria. The conventional killings, the deprivations, the bulk of this war crimes strategy has been untouched by that chemical weapons deal.

The only other occasion the Security Council was willing to act until very recently was on 2 October when it adopted a so-called presidential statement. This is a non-binding statement, it is less than a formal resolution. It urged Syria to allow humanitarian aid into the besieged areas and across the borders to the opposition-held areas, where the deprivation is the most severe. Assad, being no dummy, responded that he was not bound by a non-bindng statement, so he would not do to do it. And Russia refused to ratchet it up into a binding resolution.

A number of us noticed that Russia was releasing political prisoners at home because it wanted to avoid the bad press of having imprisoned citizens like the Pussy Riot women, Green Peace activists, Khodorkovsky and so on. Putin wanted to avoid bad press around the time of the Sochi Olympics, because Sochi was supposed to be a celebration of Putinism. And we figured, if he’s willing to take these steps domestically to avoid embarrassment around Sochi, maybe we can used a Sochi strategy for Syria.

So we began pushing the idea of taking the presidential statement and turning it into a resolution and introducing it at the time of the Sochi Olympics. Australia played a very important role in this because it currently has a two year seat on the Security Council. And it worked, with Luxembourg and Jordan beginning to draft a resolution. The difficulty was convincing the permanent five to go along.

I met with French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and he was enthusiastic; he thought this was a great idea, and he was going to push it. I met with the British Foreign Office, they were happy with the idea, and they pushed it in the UK. US Secretary of State John Kerry was not so thrilled. John Kerry was completely focused on Geneva 2, the peace talks, and he didn’t want to pressure Russia because Russia was a partner in peace in the Geneva 2 peace talks. It was not an accomplice in mass murder under this theory. So it took pressure from the other permanent members of the Security Council, the UK and France, and pressure in the press and the demise of Geneva 2, for John Kerry to bring the US towards pushing the idea of a humanitarian resolution at the Security Council.

Then it came down to Russia and China, the two vetoing permanent members. China was not going to do anything on its own. China was going to hide behind Putin’s shadow. So the whole thing came down to Putin. And they saw what was going on and they started to stall, and stall. There was one procedural excuse after another for why this resolution couldn’t possibly come before the Security Council until the Sochi Olympics were over. Fortunately, we were able to convince everybody else to insist that on 22 February – the day before the Winter Olympics ended – that there would be a vote. From this there was was no choice in the matter. Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin came into the chambers and said, “Of course we’re supporting this.” And it passed unanimously.

So we now have a resolution that orders – rather than “urges” – Assad to stop indiscriminately killing civilians, to lift the sieges and to open the borders to humanitarian assistance. It’s a good step.

Obviously, there’s a big difference between a resolution and reality. We all know that. The next step is to try and enforce that resolution, which is what we’re working on now. But we are in a very different position from where we had been, because we have a legally binding order that Assad do this. So we are working on the enforcement steps. It is very unlikely that in this post-Sochi era, with Ukraine and Putin turning his back on the West, that he’s going to cooperate anymore. So the issue is going to be forcing Russia to use its influence on Assad, as well as Iran.

It’s important not to forget Iran because it also has enormous influence. Russia and Iran are Assad’s two principle backers. In the case of Iran, it means dealing not just with the nuclear question but also with Iran’s influence over Assad. In the case of Russia, it means taking steps that the United States and Europe and the Western allies have been a willing to take with regard to Ukraine that they were never willing to take for Syria. Things like asset freezes. Things like contemplating various sorts of investment or trade restrictions. We’ve already seen in regard to Ukraine, these sorts of measures are biting Russia. The Russian economy has tanked since these relatively modest sanctions were imposed. With the rouble plummeting, the stock market plummeting, and Putin saying he might be able to work a deal on Ukraine, there is leverage over Moscow. Whether that leverage be used for Syria remains to be seen. But that’s what we’re going to work on.

The other thing that’s important to look at, and neglected so far, is the issue of justice. In Syria there are massive war crimes, massive crimes against humanity – not exclusively by Assad, but principally by the government side although the rebels have been responsible for their share as well. Russia is not going to allow Syria to be referred to the International Criminal Court. But the difficulty with Syria is the Golan Heights. If Syria were referred, as a whole, to the ICC (which is the way it would happen) theoretically – and I want to stress theoretically – Israel would have some modest vulnerability. The reason I’m minimising this is because there is zero chance that Israel would be pursued for what’s happening in Golan. There has been no change in the size of the settlements in Golan in recent history, as opposed to the West Bank where Israel is very vulnerable to prosecution under the ICC, were the Palestinian authority to invoke the ICC, which it may well do if the negotiations fail. In the case of Golan, there is no chance that Israel would be prosecuted. Nonetheless, that miniscule possibility is the tail wagging the dog, preventing the US from supporting an ICC referral in Syria.

There is another alternative – creating a special tribunal through the General Assembly. This is something that has never been done before but something that is theoretically possible using something like Uniting for Peace. Uniting for Peace is usually a concept associated with the General Assembly authorising military intervention. But it also can be used to establish a tribunal under a principle of universal jurisdiction, which would be less efficient than using the pre-existing ICC. It is at least a possibility.

These are things we’re going to be pushing. None of the permanent members of the Security Council are eager at all to establish a precedent in which the General Assembly can circumvent the Security Council to establish a tribunal, so it’s an uphill battle. We’d prefer the ICC, but one way or another, it’s important that justice be done, that we not allow these massive atrocities to be committed with impunity.

Sri Lanka

Let me move on to Sri Lanka which has been much debated here. To summarise, five years ago when the long war with the Tamil Tigers ended – a very ugly war with atrocities on both sides – in the waning months both remnants of the Tigers as well as tens of thousands of civilians gathered in a tiny area along the beach, which was declared a safe area, which the Sri Lankan military proceeded to shell indiscriminately for months on end, killing an estimate 40,000 people, in a massive war crime. The government of Mahinda Rajapaksa has proceeded to sweep this under the rug. They have been under pressure to do something about it. They’ve launched various pseudo commissions which always come up with nothing. The bottom line is that five years later nothing has happened domestically and nothing will ever happen domestically so long as the Rajapaksas are in control, because they are the ones who ordered it. And they’re not about to launch investigations that implicates themselves.

At Human Rights Watch, we are struggling with how to circumvent that. At the UN Human Rights Council we initially made a mistake; we brought Sri Lanka to the Human Rights Council in special session, right as the war was coming to an end, and this was before we had begun to turn the Human Rights Council around. Ironically, the Council actually congratulated Sri Lanka on its wonderful victory over the Tamil Tigers, and said nothing about the atrocities. It was a disaster. We came back and, with a lot of preparation that involved a very active effort to reach out to democracies outside the West, we were able to build a pro-human rights majority, one that was sufficient over the last two years to urge the Sri Lankan government to conduct an investigation. We are aware that this won’t happen but it is a necessary prerequisite. This year, an international investigation was established because Sri Lanka had done nothing.

Australia has not been terribly helpful in this process. Australia is not on the Human Rights Council but non-members can sponsor a resolution. Basically, all of Australia’s closest allies did sponsor the resolution – those who were on the council voted for the resolution. Australia wanted nothing of that. The resolution passed last week and Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister, came out afterwards and opposed it with a statement saying in essence two things. One, Australia did not believe that action that did not involve cooperation with the Sri Lankan Government was a good thing. Secondly Bishop objected to the fact that the resolution didn’t give adequate credence or recognition to the economic progress that is being made in Sri Lanka.

This is the Australian government’s position. Now why is that? We all know that Sri Lanka is a potential major source of the asylum seekers who are arriving by boat. The Australian government has taken the view that they can benefit from good relations with Sri Lanka in an effort to get it to cooperate in stopping people fleeing by boat. This is a short-sighted approach which ignores the reasons people are fleeing by boat. They are fleeing because of ongoing persecution. David Cameron, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting made a point of going to the Tamil north and denouncing the abuses. It is as if the Abbott Government is saying “things happen” in the context of torture. This is not the way you change a government’s behaviour to undermine the reasons why people are fleeing. And it puts Australia in horrible company. Indonesia, India, Philippines, Japan abstained on the resolution. Australia came out against it.

North Korea

Let me move to North Korea. I’m very happy that Justice Michael Kirby is with us, because he has been a real hero in this effort. If you look around the world, there are different kinds of terrible human rights situations. There are some places like Eastern Congo where millions have died as a result of conflict. There are places like Syria today where 140,000 have been killed perhaps. There are awful places in the world. But if you think about simply brutal repression, outside the context of a war, a government that has in this day and age managed to maintain a totalitarian regime of unspeakable cruelty, it’s hard to think of anything worse than North Korea. The UN Human Rights Council every year denounces North Korea – how could you not? There was a special rapporteur appointed that would report every year on how terrible it was, and they would pass another resolution saying it was terrible and move on.

A little over a year ago we were trying to figure out how do we bring it to a new level, how do we do something else? We came up with the idea of creating a commission of inquiry, a sort of a quasi-criminal investigation or evidence-gathering process that is often seen as a prelude to investigation. The first problem we faced was how to get the Human Rights Council to create a commission of inquiry. Nobody wanted it. The Europeans thought it was going to be too expensive, and they were happier to stay with the one-person rapporteur. The Americans didn’t want it because they were focused on the nuclear issue in North Korea and thought why bother with human rights issues. We needed somebody to take the lead. And the government we ended up convincing – and this shows you just how much the world is changing – was Japan.

Japan has never in its history taken the lead on a human rights issue. And when they think about North Korea, all they think about are the so-called abductees or those Japanese citizens who were literally kidnapped from the streets along the beach and taken off to North Korea to teach fluent Japanese to North Korean spies. They were forced to live the rest of their lives in North Korea without anybody ever acknowledging what happened to them. The Japanese are understandably preoccupied with this. The current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, comes from the political right, and his party’s foremost focus is the abductees. But the head of our Human Rights office in Tokyo was able to convince Shinzo Abe that the plight of the abductees would never improve unless he addressed the broader oppression in North Korea.

Shinzo Abe deployed Japanese diplomatic missions around the world to lobby for this, something that had never happened before. And it passed – overwhelmingly – a year ago. The effect of that resolution was to create the Commission Of Inquiry that Justice Michael Kirby headed. It did a superb job. Obviously, they couldn’t go into North Korea but the Commission travelled around the world, interviewing people who had been able to escape, who are able to describe the horrible cruelty, particularly in the labour camps, where executions are common, and starvation and death from disease are common. These are crimes against humanity of unspeakable proportions. In very compelling terms, the Commission described these and urged prosecution, ideally by the International Criminal Court, possibly by a stand-alone tribunal. It reported back to the council and the council has set up an ongoing mechanism to keep collecting information but also, most important, asked the Security Council to act.

We are moving to the Security Council. The big difficulty there, however, is going to be less Russia than China. The Commission was appropriately very critical of China because when people flee North Korea they go to China. And if they are caught they are sent back, often to be executed, at least to be stuck back in horrific labour camps. China just closes its eyes to this, saying they are only economic migrants, not refugees. It does this for very cynical reasons. It remembers the way the Berlin Wall fell, which, you may recall, was when Hungary opened the doors and suddenly let Germans escape through Hungary which started an exodus that very quickly led to the demise of Eastern Europe as it existed then. China is very fearful that if there is a possibility of escape to the relative prosperity of China, that there will be a mass exodus which will lead to the collapse of the regime. A big refugee problem for China is bad but worse, in its eyes, is the consequence of South Korea basically moving closer to the Chinese border. This would mean the United States, with its military presence, would move there as well.

This is the cynicism we have to fight against right now. We will push for a vote at the Security Council. If China vetoes, we will do something similar to what we’re contemplating with Syria – trying to go to the General Assembly and get a special tribunal established there. That’s where it stands and it is very much the product of the unusual leadership Japan has given.

Egypt

Let me say a quick word about Egypt, where there has been a real problem in terms of Western leadership. There has been a tendency to simply cosy up to whoever is in power in a fairly uncritical manner. This was certainly the case with Mubarak, for decades. It was ironic with Morsi, a political Islamic government respectful of rights and democratically elected, whom everybody hoped would succeed. It was thought it would be a government to abide by basic human rights standards. It didn’t happen. Morsi proceeded to govern with his 51 per cent of the vote as if he had received 100 per cent of the vote. He governed in a very exclusionary way. Now he has been overthrown by a military that claimed to be fighting Morsi’s excesses. Egypt is now governed by an unelected government which rules as if it has 100 per cent of the vote, when it’s never had a vote.

The liberals in Egypt, much to my chagrin, largely supported the military coup. They did this because they had become convinced that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to become another Khomeini’s Iran. I’m not convinced it was ever going to go that far at all. There were very significant constraints on the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberals these days are very much encountering buyer’s remorse as they find the military, predictably, not simply repressing the Muslim Brotherhood – which they’re doing viciously – but also turning on liberal critics as well.

It remains to be seen what happens when Sisi presumably is elected as President. There are two theories out there. One is that having been elected he will be more conformable, less threatened, and will rein in some of this repression. Much of the repression has gotten out of hand, even out of the hands of the military. They have so demonised the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists that a judge has condemned to death, on the basis of a two hour trial, 529 people because they were terrorists. And this is the extraordinary excess that has emerged fairly unfettered.

It’s possible that things will normalise with Sisi’s election. The reverse is also possible. He could, without any real checks on his power, simply further entrench this kind of severe repression. What happens is to a large extent going to depend on how the West responds. I worry about that because one of the reasons the West has been so eager to cosy up to whoever’s in power in Egypt is because Egypt is still seen as a key to preserving the relative peace with Israel and to containing Hamas. John Kerry, even before an Egyptian election, has been out there saying he thinks it could be soon be okay to resume military aid, that things are on the right track, that Egypt is moving towards democracy. Only the death sentences for the 529 have forced the US to back pedal a little. But the US is eager to resume normal relations. It is time to make clear, however, that normal relations are going to depend on an easing of this repression, a release of the political prisoners which now number tens of thousands, an end to the torture, some investigation and prosecution for the use of lethal force against peaceful protestors. This all remains to be done and it’s going to take sustained pressure from the West for it to happen.

One of the problems we face these days is that the Saudis and the Emirates are substituting for the lack of Western aid with billions of dollars in assistance. But they’re not going to be able to do this forever, particularly because, as in Russia with Ukraine, the Egyptian economy is tanking. They can’t attract the tourists, they can’t attract the foreign direct investment without some normalisation of the political situation. And that’s not going to happen without an end to the repression. So in many ways the economy and the economic disaster facing Egypt is ironically the best prospect we have of forcing the military to reassess their strategy and come up with a more lawful one.

China

Let me conclude with a brief word about China. There is a tendency to view China as somehow impervious to international pressure. And there is a tendency, very much shared by the Australian government, that if you’ve got to raise the uncomfortable, really distasteful topic of human rights, which has the potential of getting in the way of our trade, do it in a quiet backroom dialogue. So you have lots of Western governments setting up dialogues, where low-level foreign ministry functionaries meet in some dark back conference room and run through a day or two of discussion which then nobody hears about. This then relieves the prime minister or president from ever having to raise this awful topic in public remarks. That’s basically the Western strategy on China. This is misguided for two reasons.

China is susceptible to pressure on human rights. The most recent example – and there are many – is re-education through labour. Last November, China announced they were abolishing it. Re-education through labour is administrative detention. It’s a process where the police, without ever seeing a judge, were able to sentence you to up to four years in prison. And they were able to do this to dissidents, to petitioners, to Falun Gong, as well as to misdemeanour criminal offenders or religious deviants, or trouble makers, people they didn’t like for whatever reason. There was a domestic constituency trying to change this. A group made up of an emerging legal profession within China, which has professional pride. Re-education through labour did not comply with basic notions of due process. As well, there had been serious international pressure on China over re-education through labour. China floated the idea, the concept, of amending re-education through labour, of reforming it slightly. But opposition groups both locally and abroad pushed harder and finally they announced that they were abolishing it. That’s just one of many examples I could cite of a situation where pressure worked. This has led to a significant improvement in human rights practices in China.

The reason I believe a private approach on human rights, convenient as it is for not interrupting trade, is misguided is that the biggest change in recent years in China has been the emergence of social media. You’ve all heard of the Great Chinese Firewall. The firewall was design to prevent the Chinese people from having access to the dangerous, subversive thoughts that exist on various western websites. And so the Human Rights Watch website for example is blocked by the firewall. The Chinese firewall is irrelevant to social media because what social media makes possible is a conversation within China. You don’t have to go to any external website, it’s all happening right in there, inside the firewall. And 400 million people today are using Sina Weibo or WeChat, social media which are allowing them to talk about, on the one hand, what their cat had for breakfast, but on the other hand, what might be the latest outrage some local official has committed on the Chinese people. And you watch the Chinese government having to react to this.

There are various moments when there are surges of outrage and suddenly an official has to retrench or backtrack. The government is doing what it can to censor social media; they are throwing armies of censors at it, as well as participants. You have pro-Chinese government social media types joining the conversation, which is fair enough, but it is hard to censor 400 million people. They are arresting people and shutting down websites and participants but it is hard to control. If you are serious about promoting human rights, it makes no sense to ignore this new, very substantial power for change within China. You have to speak to the Chinese people.

Unlike in the past when the Chinese people couldn’t hear you because the media was all censored and the firewall prevented them from getting to some Western media outlet, now if they can hear you, they can get it out to all their friends through social media. If you speak publicly. Which is why the private backroom dialogue is so misguided. You can pretend to be concerned about human rights, but if you really want to make a difference, you’ve got to speak to the Chinese people so that your voice can be magnified in social media, because we know that that’s the most effective way today to try and move the Chinese government.