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Albright, policy experts explore future of human rights
April 8, 2008
By Doug Green
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a distinguished group of speakers on Tuesday discussed how the next presidential administration can shape U.S. policies to better promote human rights abroad.
Speaking at a conference at Georgetown University Law Center, Albright argued that restoring the U.S.’s moral standing is imperative. In the developing world, where the average age is often around 17, Abu Ghraib, and not the Statue of Liberty, is frequently what resonates as a symbol of America, she said.
Others echoed her stance. John Shattuck, the former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, said that the next administration must, among other things, close Guantanamo Bay, restore habeas corpus, and work to shape the International Criminal Court. These efforts will help reverse a “severely undercut” ability to advance foreign policy measures that is linked to the U.S.’s “poor rights record,” he said.
In discussing the optimal mechanisms for promoting human rights abroad, Albright said a commitment to combating poverty, ignorance, and disease – what she called the real axis of evil – must underlie all efforts. Legally empowering the world’s poor is a critical part of this, she added, saying that four billion of the world’s six billion people are outside of the rule of law. Smart sanctions targeting leaders and not ordinary citizens are also important, Albright asserted.
On the topic of other foreign policy tools, Steven Coll of the New America Foundation and James Sasser, the former U.S. ambassador to China, stressed the importance of revamping American rhetoric, with both saying that President Bush’s emphasis on freedom over justice is misguided. Freedom House’s Jennifer Windsor, meanwhile, expressed concern that critical assistance to foreign NGOs would be jeopardized by a more rigid vetting system that the U.S. government is set to put in place for all grantees.
The question of how to press U.S. partners and allies on their human rights violations was also a central issue. On China, Sasser lamented that with the two nations more economically interdependent than ever, “friendly persuasion,” is the only lever that Washington has left. On Pakistan, Coll and Shattuck described current policy as overly focused on the war on terror construct, with Shattuck saying that reformists have been shortchanged. On Egypt, Windsor was adamant about the importance of supporting the country’s repressed human rights activists and civil society sector via both resource provision and diplomatic interactions.
The day’s second panel addressed social and economic rights, which the U.S. has been reluctant to embrace when compared with its NATO allies. Eric Schwartz, head of the grantmaking group Connect US, said that the integration of these rights into policy would bolster Washington’s capacity to influence international issues such as child labor, trafficking, non-discrimination and universal primary education. The other panelists sided with Schwartz, with Leonard Rubenstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, saying that approaching healthcare as a human right provides the afflicted and underserved with an organizing principle when care is denied. Rubenstein added that social and economic rights should be included in the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports, as he said used to be the case. Raymond Offenheiser, head of the development group Oxfam America, cautioned that the traditional concept of human rights assumes a strong state as the guarantor of rights, and that this is often not the case today, as weak states abound and corporations grow in influence. Margaret Roggensack of the NGO Free the Slaves emphasized the importance of public-private partnerships in protecting rights, citing the $10 million that the cocoa industry has provided in the past six years towards a landmark initiative to combat slavery and child labor that involves both local civil society efforts and government interventions to improve access to education in vulnerable communities.
The conference concluded with a tribute to the late Tom Lantos. The former Congressman and longtime champion of human rights died of cancer in February at the age of 80. Lantos’s loved ones and colleagues were on hand to attest to what Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) described as his unfailing commitment to fighting “oppression everywhere.”
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