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Illustration by Natalie Lees
Illustration by Natalie Lees
Illustration by Natalie Lees

Human rights now face their gravest threat – Trumpism

This article is more than 7 years old
Natalie Nougayrède
With a populist in the White House, only resistance can protect rights the world struggled to enshrine

Remember the 1990s? Anyone who cares about human rights must now recall the era with a knot in their stomach. Compared with what’s happening today, that decade feels like a lost era of Enlightenment. Donald Trump’s installation in the White House is not just a threat to global alliances, international trade or even fact-based discussion – it risks unleashing a tsunami that could sweep away the human rights movement as it has so far existed.

It’s not just western democracies that are shaken by the inauguration of a crude bigot who has targeted women and religious and ethnic groups, and said he could envisage using torture. Across the world, imprisoned dissidents, repressed journalists, censored writers, hounded political oppositions, stigmatised minorities are all set to lose out – and that’s because defending them via international human rights architecture is now going to become a great deal more difficult.

If the US is led by someone who so overtly despises the notions of fundamental rights and human dignity, then the leverage human rights organisations can muster becomes ever weaker. Remembering the 1990s is painful in comparison because that’s when, after the end of the cold war and because of the outrage that followed the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda, great strides were made towards creating new instruments designed to uphold human rights. Consider the achievements: the international criminal court (launched in 2002), and the principle of “responsibility to protect” (adopted in the UN in 2005), which says that a state’s sovereignty stops when it is unable to prevent or end mass crimes on its territory. The backlash against such progress will have consequences for people’s lives across the globe.

Of course, the US has hardly been an infallible defender of human rights. Nor perhaps can one man in the White House single-handedly dismantle a body of international law and conventions accumulated over decades. We know the US record, or the west’s more broadly for that matter, is far from ideal. The list of recent moral and strategic failings is long – from CIA torture and renditions post 9/11 (the same web of decisions that gave us Guantánamo) to the badly misnamed “collateral damage” of wars and drone strikes, not to mention the complicity of cooperating with autocratic regimes and the failure to end the disaster in Syria.

Europe has done dismally also, including in its treatment of refugees and with its anti-terrorism laws. And when western pressure has been put on China and Russia, it’s been mostly because of their international behaviour, not because of the way they mistreat their own citizens.

But the difference now, with Trump, is twofold. First, the very words “human rights” are likely to disappear altogether from the official vocabulary that western diplomacy is meant, in principle, to rest upon. That veneer is likely to peel off. The spirit and philosophy of human rights, which no democracy can afford to openly trample without betraying its very essence, may become a thing of the past. Second, we are confronted with a situation where authoritarian leaders are empowered not as a result of coups or abuse, but as a result of free and democratic elections. In Europe, in India, in Turkey and now in the US, autocratic populists are on a roll not because they have illegally forced themselves on whole populations but because voters have chosen to support them. Centuries ago, Étienne de La Boétie wrote that “all servitude is voluntary” – perhaps he’s worth reading again today.

Look at the historical backdrop. For a long time, defending human rights was an embryonic and fragmented endeavour. The League of Nations (the UN’s short-lived ancestor, founded in 1920) only enshrined the protection of certain categories of people, for instance national minorities. It was the shock born of the atrocities of the second world war that launched a crusade for human rights – with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its centrepiece. Many more texts were to follow, including the 1987 UN convention against torture. But it’s in the 1990s that major progress was made.

China’s rise and Russia’s resurgence have, since then, been great challenges, not least because their governments have worked within the UN and other institutions to upend human rights principles, if not disembowel them. Russia’s intervention in Syria can even be read as a brutal inversion of the notion of “responsibility to protect”: military action designed not to stop large-scale atrocities, but to commit them (the attempt to empty eastern Aleppo of its population through refugee flows or mass slaughter). Yet western failures have also severely dented the human rights message.

In his inaugural speech, Trump said: “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” and “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first”. Some may applaud, judging that the way the US has thrown its weight around in the world has had a largely negative impact, but be sure human rights violators everywhere will feel they have now been handed an entirely free hand, because there was no reference whatsoever made to universal values.

The US remains the sole superpower and it has had a historical role in forging UN principles. This is why the arrival in the White House of a blatant racist, demagogue and would-be dictator such as Trump represents the biggest possible blow to everything that has been achieved in the realm of international human rights since the late 1940s. It doesn’t help that when Trump lashes out at the EU, he undermines not just the organisation but the values it is meant to uphold. Likewise, when Europeans applaud Xi Jinping in Davos, they help cast a dark shadow over the sanctity of human rights. No wonder human rights campaigners have been frantically sounding alarm bells.

But here’s the bright side: there is opportunity in crisis. It’s true, no one can now expect the US to strengthen or even salvage the international criminal court, whose mission is to fight impunity (the very reason why some dictators want to get rid of it). Autocrats everywhere will be able to point to Trump and say: “why pick on me?” A Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a boon, or at least an encouragement, for the human rights struggle. The Trump presidency will on the contrary put those rights to an unprecedented test.

Anna Neistat, at Amnesty International, describes it as “the greatest threat but also greatest opportunity for the human rights movement, because the advent of Trump means the end of a certain complacency. Talking to the like-minded simply isn’t enough, we need to convince the majorities” who elect populists. “It’s a critical, historical moment,” she added.

And therein lies the hope. It’s just possible that, as it contemplates an abyss, the human rights movement will find the energy for unexpected breakthroughs. The 1990s are well behind us. Now starts an era of resistance to Trumpism and its affiliates.

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