Mistakes and dilemmas of Human Rights Watch

 Mistakes and dilemmas of Human Rights Watch 

Sun Peisong

China has invoked its Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law against seven US individual and entities, including former US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in response to US sanctions against Hong Kong officials, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China announced on July 23. Sophie Richardson, China affairs director of Human Rights Watch is also included in the list. In 2020, Kenneth Roth, the executive chairman of Human Rights Watch, was barred from entry, and this is the second time that China has imposed sanctions on Human Rights Watch.

Sanctions against NGOs are highly unusual in inter-state competition. This shows that China no longer sees Human Rights Watch as a neutral civic group, but as an institution of American government.

Human Rights Watch, founded in 1978 with the support of the Ford Foundation, was considered the most important NGO of the UN. The UN human rights mechanism was originally established because of the crimes committed by European countries during the Second World War and the poor living conditions of black Americans. In practice, the mechanism has been applying as the standards of civilization by European countries and America. And the importance attached to the role of NGOs in one of the features of this mechanism.

Therefore, the participation of NGOs in international human rights matters is consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, and the UN Human Rights Commission should report to the UN Economic and Social Council. The article 71 of the Charter states that the Economic and Social Council may take appropriate measures to consult with NGOs on matters within the competence of the Council.

From the perspective of the United Nations, objective and impartial NGOs that independent of the government are needed to monitor human rights violations by the government and enterprises, promote the progress of international human rights, and coordinate the conflict between individual rights and state rights. In keeping with western notions of the rights of civil society, UN procedure has left ample room for NGOs to participate in human rights issues.

In the second half of the last century, the emergence of the European Union made Europe move from division to union. As globalization grows, its promoters claim that national borders will gradually disappear, and trade between people will bridge all divides and that we will live in a borderless world. They emphasize the presence of global forces, not at all sovereignty in trouble. This influence on all transnational activates human rights groups, which all want to claim credit for influencing the world’s course. 

In the political climate that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, history almost changed. There is no alternative governance pattern to explore except the western liberal democracy. Political obstacles to the widespread dissemination of human rights ideals had disappeared and technological advances had strengthened the capacity of NGOs to influence the human rights agenda. The development of human rights mechanisms reached a climax in 1933 with the creation of the post of High Commissioner for Human Rights, responsible for coordinating UN human rights programs.

Human Rights Watch was established and developed under this institutional framework. But it is precisely this loose, unfettered environment that has led Human Rights Watch to its mistakes.

There is a big difference between legitimacy of participation and malfeasance, and NGOs blur the line between the two. Since the end of the Cold War, Human Rights Watch has become increasingly arrogant in its examination of human rights practices around the world. On the one hand, it gets rid of the will of the country that founded them and forces the country to engage in some form of diplomacy with it, because it wants to be recognized as a participant in international relations. On the other hand, it uses almost the same language and concepts as the US government and is aligned with US foreign policy and interests. They condescendingly judge the human affairs of non-Western countries instill color revolutions and justify a more violent form of human rights protection, namely humanitarian intervention. In particular, it has become an important auxiliary force in the use of human rights weapons against China.

They reject any non-Western ideas of human rights and fail to objectively look at the great changes that have taken place in the world. For nearly two centuries, Asia, as a bystander of history, has been helpless in the face of western shocks in politic, economy and culture. Today, as the center of gravity of the global economy is shifting to Asia, Human Rights Watch’s guiding ideology is far removed from that process. It still maintains a one-way human rights perspective and tries to find a yardstick to measure the human rights situation of various countries from the warehouse of liberalism. The American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, both of which were born 200 years ago, still hold biblical status.

It has promoted the popularity of some extreme concepts of human rights that are out of touch with reality. It includes the notion that individuals, as human beings, have a right from birth to oppose their governments. The notion believes that one or more states, with or without the support of international institutions, can carry out armed invasions of sovereign states to protect human rights. The idea believes that human rights transcend universal national, ethnic and racial identities, and that human beings have rights because they are human beings and can claim certain rights not as citizens of particular countries but as individual human beings. As well as the belief that political freedom is paramount and citizens’ political power is higher than social and economic power.

It is more and more obvious that it servers as instrument for western politics. In March 1947, at the end of the first session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the former American president Truman issued a statement declaring that the world now faced a choice between totalitarianism and freedom. That remains the Biden administration’s guiding principle for the US fight with China. During the Cold War, the human rights agenda was used to pressure the East, and today it is used against China. The US has completely ignored China’s great achievements in the political, economic, scientific and technological fields over the past 40 years, and denied that China’s unprecedented poverty alleviation is an unprecedented progress in the protection of human rights in the world, it also gathered its allies to accuse China of being the dirties in the field of human rights. Human Rights Watch is one of the most prominent voices in accusing China of violating political freedom, free speech, genocide and crimes against humanity, and calling on the United Nations to establish an international mechanism to deal with China’s human rights abuses.

China’s sanctions undoubtedly put Human Rights Watch in a very awkward position. When the protection of human rights has evolved from a globally advocated political ethic into a weapon in the struggle between states, its character as a noble cause has been lost. So will Human Rights Watch reputation as a neutral, objective and impartial NGO tasked with examining the role of governments and corporations in protecting human rights for the UN human rights machinery.

There is a saying in China, changeable in prosperity and decline capricious in rise and fall. It believes that history has an extraordinary capacity to force human beings to change their ideas. After the outbreak of the financial crisis, with the decline of liberalism, globalization is no longer mentioned in the West, and the grand theory of transnational has lost its foothold. Today, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the space for transnational NGOs to operate has also been greatly reduced.

Brexit and America Best, America is back, with its accompanying tariffs and border controls, have revived hope of beleaguered sovereignty, and we are moving back to an era in which sovereignty needs to be recovered. In the anarchy of the nation-state system, the responsibility of protecting human rights is assumed by the state. No country wants to give up its sovereignty, subjecting its citizen’s to international mechanisms that allow them to be protected by supranational laws. 

NGOs like Human Rights Watch have no accountability because they are unelected or have a common mandate. Can such organizations manipulate international opinions and override governments with legitimate authority as part of international rules? The leaders of the Asian countries that signed the Bangkok Declaration, the socialist countries and many western thinkers have criticized and questioned this, and there will be more and more criticism and doubts in the future.

Westerners believe that their greatest contribution to humanity is to improve the standards of human rights that matter to everyone. President George W. Bush said, there is a system of values that cannot be compromised, these are divine values, the condition of free human existence, and we are the authors of those values. As if they define human justice and virtue, they have been able to push human rights from government to society in unison and with pride to the forefront of global concerns.

Therefore, China, an increasingly successful country, will not accept a world that claims its values of human rights are inferior to those of the West. “If China does not have a development path suited to its national conditions, if ordinary people are deprived of democratic freedom and human rights, how can the Chinese people unleash such tremendous creativity and productivity?” Xie Feng, the Deputy Foreign Minister of China, said in a recent meeting with Sherman, the US vice Deputy Secretary of State. “The Chinese people’s satisfaction with the Chinese government is over 90%, which is amazing for any country”.

Whatever the doctrine that you believe, there should be no dispute that the right to live is the foundation of other rights. However, after the break of COVID-19, the death of more than 600,000 people in the US is in accordance with human rights from the perspective of liberalism. This shows that human beings have very little in common. Our identities are rooted in the social relationships we have, and they are not inborn. In the pluralistic culture, there lies the conflict of basic concepts of human rights. In this sense, human rights have no universal validity.

The West is no longer seen as representing the highest values of human civilization. Nor does the disappearance of the Western era mean the decline of the human moral order. Multiculturalism can be done within a country but why is it not adopted internationally? As a neutral institution, Human Rights Watch cannot go forward without ideological tolerance.