Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth tell the story of the document some scholars call humankind’s greatest achievement.
Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth have spent years both studying the transformational effects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and working on the ground to make its vision of a more just, equal world a reality. On December 10th, the world celebrated not only the annual Human Rights Day, but also the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, which some scholars consider to be the greatest achievement in the history of humankind. It was the first time representatives of the world community declared that every person on earth was entitled to the same rights as every other, without discrimination, and no matter the circumstances.
It was an achievement that was both historically radical—legal slavery in the United States had ended just 80 years earlier—and yet one which made perfect, urgent sense in the post-World-War-II context of a humanity whose collective conscience was still reeling at the horrors and inhumanity of conflict. Appalled by the dehumanization and mass slaughter of the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis along with Roma, homosexuals and other groups, by Japanese atrocities including 2.7 million people murdered in Northern China alone, by the first use of atomic weapons, and by other acts of mass civilian killing, the world’s nations gathered to write a new definition of what it means to be human.
The result was the UDHR, which was drafted by a committee led by former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It was radical not just because it was so universal, but also because it was remarkably comprehensive—going far beyond basics like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It enumerated human rights to privacy, health, adequate housing, freedom from torture and slavery, the right to nationality, to take part in government, to work for equal pay, to have protection against unemployment, to unionize, to a decent standard of living, to rest and leisure, to enjoy culture, art, and science, and finally to a social and international order where the rights in the Declaration could be fully realized. Sikkink is a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS, where Roth just finished a senior fellowship. They join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to explain how the UDHR has forever changed the way we think about our fellow human beings, and to suggest policies that will keep pushing the global community toward a more just, fair, and compassionate world.
Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Sikkink’s work centers on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, transitional justice, and the laws of war. She has written numerous books, including “The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities,” “Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century,” and “The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics,” which was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award and the Washington Office on Latin America/Duke University Human Rights Book Award. She holds an MA and a PhD from Columbia University and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 90 countries. Roth has been called “the godfather of the human rights movement” for his role in changing the way rights violations were covered in the international media. He first learned about human rights abuses from his father, whose Jewish family ran a butchery near Frankfurt in Hitler’s Germany. 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. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, 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. He was most recently a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS.
Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.
The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows, and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.
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Intro (Kathryn Sikkink): I would first go back to the creation of the United Nations, which happened in 1945, where 50 countries of the world, the Allies, not the Axis powers, assembled in San Francisco and were creating this new international organization, a new charter. And there was a demand to get human rights into the UN Charter, and they succeeded in doing that. That was a demand led by NGOs that were present as consultants to the U.S. delegation to San Francisco, and it was led by small states, including the 20 Latin American states that were present there. First, they got human rights into the UN Charter, and then people realized we don't have a definition of human rights. But the charter did set up a human rights commission as one of the few specified commissions that the charter demanded. And that new human rights commission got to work. People, delegations arrived from around the world, and started trying to figure out a declaration, a definition of what we meant by human rights.
Intro (Kenneth Roth): It began to change really with apartheid in South Africa, which was just such an outrageous system that it was hard to say, "Oh, this is just South Africa doing its own thing the way any sovereign would do." That was the opening for governments to start commenting on each other's practices. It got a further jump forward with the 1973 Pinochet coup, which was then very much led by exiles from Chile who would go to Geneva and talk about the torture, the disappearances, the executions under Pinochet. And that also generated global outrage. So, it was really a handful of situations that broke the ice, where governments suddenly were not just comfortable saying, "Oh, that's what governments do. That's sovereignty.”
Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Some scholars and advocates consider it to be the greatest achievement in the history of humankind: a worldwide declaration made in 1948 that every human person on earth is entitled to the same rights as every other, without discrimination, and no matter the circumstances. It was an achievement that was both historically radical—legal slavery in the United States had ended just 80 years earlier—and yet one which made perfect, urgent sense in the post-World-War-II context of a world whose collective conscience was still reeling at the horrors and inhumanity of human conflict. Appalled by the dehumanization and mass slaughter of human beings in the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis along with Poles, Roma, homosexuals and other groups, by Japanese atrocities including 2.7 million people murdered in Northern China alone, by the first use of atomic weapons, and by other acts of mass civilian killing, the world’s nations gathered to write a new definition of what it means to be human. The result was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was drafted by a committee led by former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It was radical not just for it being universal, but also for being comprehensive—going far beyond life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to enumerating human rights to privacy, health, adequate housing, freedom from torture and slavery, the right to nationality, to take part in government, to work for equal pay, to have protection against unemployment, to unionize, to a decent standard of living, to rest and leisure, to enjoy culture, art, and science, and finally to a social and international order where the rights in the Declaration could be fully realized. Our guests today have spent years both studying the transformational effects of the UDHR in the world and worked on the ground to make its vision of a more just, equal world a reality. Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the award-winning author of numerous books on rights and international law. Ken Roth is just wrapping up his term as a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS and is the former longtime director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading human rights organizations which operates in 90 different countries around the world. They’re with me on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the UDHR to explain how it has changed forever the way we think about our fellow human beings.
Ralph Ranalli: Ken, Kathryn, welcome to PolicyCast.
Kenneth Roth: It's good to be here.
Kathryn Sikkink: Thank you.
Ralph Ranalli: So we're talking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was created in 1948, and it marked the first time the world had a documented global agreement that declared all humans as free and equal regardless of sex, color, creed, religion, and other characteristics. It's been translated into over 500 languages, and it's widely recognized as having paved the way for the adoption of more than 70 human rights treaties around the globe. What were its origins? Kathryn, do you maybe want to start us off on this?
Kathryn Sikkink: The Universal Declaration for Human Rights has its origins first in the interwar period, but especially after World War II. World War II made the issue of human rights on everyone's mind. We saw the terrible suffering and violence created by the absence of human rights in the world, and so, after World War II, scholars, diplomats, the NGOs and the general public were all committed to finally get human rights onto the world agenda and into international diplomacy. That was not only led by the great powers, like the United States and the United Kingdom, it was also led by many other countries in the world, including countries in Latin America.
Kenneth Roth: Yeah. I would just also say I think it's useful to see the Universal Declaration as part of this burst of standards setting that was very much, as Kathryn said, a response to the atrocities of the Second World War. So, within a few years, 1948, 1949, we saw not only the Universal Declaration but also the convention against genocide and the first four conventions of 1949 on the latter setting forth standards for the conduct of war.
Ralph Ranalli: What was the feeling in that post-war period? Because you had the horrible revelations of the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also those committed by Japan in China, where millions of people were also killed. What was the atmosphere like that created this window where you could achieve something that was this sweeping and this unprecedented?
Kathryn Sikkink: I would first go back to the creation of the United Nations, which happened in 1945, where 50 countries of the world, the Allies, not the Axis powers. World War II was still going on and still being finalized. So, these 50 countries assembled in San Francisco and were creating this new international organization, a new charter. And there was a demand to get human rights into the UN Charter, and they succeeded in doing that. That was a demand led by NGOs that were present as consultants to the US delegation to San Francisco, and it was led by small states, including the 20 Latin American states that were present there.
First, they got human rights into the UN Charter, and then people realized we don't have a definition of human rights. But the charter did set up a human rights commission as one of the few specified commissions that the charter demanded. And that new human rights commission got to work. People, delegations arrived from around the world, and it started trying to figure out a declaration, a definition of what we meant by human rights. If I can just give one little example to give an idea of what was going on still, the representative from China was a man named P.C. Chang. He was in New York because his university had been closed when it was overrun by the Japanese, by the Japanese invasion of China. So, he happened to be at Columbia University, and the nationalist government realized he was there and appointed him to be a member of the Human Rights Commission. So we have to realize it was a time when people were having trouble traveling, and yet they persisted, meeting to try to hammer out this definition. So, there's a sense of urgency. I think, at the same time, as this was definitely still a post-war scenario, Europe was in terrible disarray, there was immense flows of refugees, reconstruction was barely underway. So, I think that has been the atmosphere of the time.
Kenneth Roth: The only thing I would add to what Kathryn is saying is that the Charter does include the term human rights, but it actually means something a little bit different to what it's come to mean. That, I think, also reflects the limitations of the Universal Declaration in that, if you look to the Charter, it talks about promoting and encouraging respect for human rights. It doesn't use the terminology that today is associated with a bit of a tougher approach, which is protecting human rights. Promoting and encouraging sounds like every government's-
Ralph Ranalli: Kind of aspirational?
Kenneth Roth: Yeah. Every government's supposed to do what's best, but it was still a very state-centric approach. You can see this really for the first two decades of the Universal Declaration because, if you go to the first of this United Nations Commission of Human Rights, its first task was to draft the Universal Declaration, but it then was the guardian of the Universal Declaration. What that meant was having nice, polite conversations about human rights and never naming any offender. That was the case for the first two decades because it was just encouraging, it was just promoting, and it was considered undiplomatic to name names. That's not what diplomats do. They don't say, "You, government X, are suppressing the rights of your people." They just say, "Wouldn't it be good if everybody respected human rights?" So, needless to say, that's not a very effective way of doing the job because, if nobody feels singled out if there's any pressure, they keep doing their own thing. But that was the product of the era, where, even though the UN Charter introduced the concept of human rights, the UN as a tribe of governments still gave priority to sovereignty. And it was really supposed to be the duty of each state to do what it was supposed to do within the realm of human rights, but not really the subject of pressure from others. They could talk about it generically but not talk about it in too concrete a way. That would still be deemed interference in the government's internal affairs.
Ralph Ranalli: When did that change? You said it was the first two decades. I know Human Rights Watch, which you were the head of for a long time, was created in 1978 as Helsinki Watch to monitor the compliance with the Helsinki Accords specifically, especially in terms of human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. When did that change, and what drove that change?
Kenneth Roth: It began to change really with apartheid in South Africa, which was just such an outrageous system that it was hard to say, "Oh, this is just South Africa doing its own thing the way any sovereign would do." That was the opening for governments to start commenting on each other's practices. It got a further jump forward with the 1973 Pinochet coup, which was then very much led by exiles from Chile who would go to Geneva and talk about the torture, the disappearances, the executions under Pinochet. And that also generated global outrage. So, it was really a handful of situations that broke the ice, where governments suddenly were not just comfortable saying, "Oh, that's what governments do. That's sovereignty. Everybody figures out their own path to respect human rights." But you still heard from many governments, "To criticize them for their human rights record is to interfere with our internal affairs."
I would say that that didn't really tip until the emergence of a series of human rights organizations that really pushed the envelope, and that, when it was just left up to governments, they still were fairly polite with each other. It was only the emergence of NGOs that were not going to play that game, that were not going to accept the definition of diplomatic as never criticizing a government, just sticking in the realm of generic statements. They really changed that, to the point that, today, you still get this defense. And we can talk about who are the worst perpetrators of this internal affairs defense. The norm at what is now the Human Rights Commission, which was transformed into the Human Rights Council, now the norm is to comment on the behavior of particular governments, but not universally. Even some of the supposed guardians of the Universal Declaration fall short in some very important respects.
Kathryn Sikkink: Mm-hmm. If I could just get a little context around what Ken just said, first, this mention of the apartheid movement, of course the context there is decolonization. The world has gone from these 50 countries that were at San Francisco to today we have 143. Most of those new countries joined the UN via processes of decolonization. So, they brought new concerns and values, and one of them, of course, was demanding the end to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Then, secondly, about the point about Chile. We're talking about the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we're also talking about the 50th anniversary this year of the Chilean coup. And that was an issue. People say, "Well, why Chile? Why did Chile make such a difference?" It was an issue that the first world, the second world, and this new third world of decolonizing states could all agree on. The Soviet Union was worried about what happened to Salvador Allende and the electoral rocked socialism, but so were countries in Europe, and so very much were countries in the developing world. But once they broke the rules with Chile, they started naming countries by name in the UN Human Rights Commission. They started writing country reports in the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. Then you couldn't go backwards again. You created a new set of practices that needed to be extended to all states.
Kenneth Roth: Actually, if I could pick up on Kathryn's colonization and decolonization point, which is, I think, important because it was also the colonial process that laid behind this disinclination to name offender governments. Because, if you look at the world in 1948, at the time the Universal Declaration was drafted, who didn't want to talk about their human rights record? European governments that had colonies. Also, the U.S. government because of racism in the United States. So, some of the governments that today are seen as the big proponents of human rights were actually not going to get into the business of commenting on each other for fear of how they would come out in that process. It was the evolution of what today is known as the 193 members of the General Assembly.
Kathryn Sikkink: Oh, I said 143. I'm sorry. 193. Yes, correct. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry.
Kenneth Roth: That includes, on the one hand, many former victims of colonization, but also we have to recognize still many abusive governments. So this idea that you don't comment on each other's human rights offenses still resonates with governments that are deeply into violating their people's human rights. The biggest proponent of maintaining that system today is China. The terminology has varied year to year. Sometimes, they talk about win-win strategies, where everybody promotes their own thing and it’s win-win. We're not going to be critical. We'll talk about cooperative efforts as opposed to pressure.
The latest terminology from Xi Jinping is civilization. We should recognize that there are different civilizational paths to respect human rights. So there's the Chinese civilization that does its autocratic thing. Now, who defines what that Chinese civilization is? Not the people of China. They have no say. In fact, when the people of Hong Kong said, "We want nothing to do with Beijing's dictatorship," they were shut down. All the protests were ended. The national security law was imposed. But Xi Jinping, sitting there in Beijing, decides what Chinese civilization is and then says, "That's our route. Each government does their own thing. The UN should be promoting, not protecting human rights." That approach is still articulated, but it doesn't really resonate anymore. It's not the norm at all. And it now is de facto accepted that the UN Human Rights Council does regularly comment on governments' internal affairs—if you want to put it that way.
But there are others who—even surprisingly—really will not criticize another government standing alone for the most part. Even though it's a democracy, but it just is stuck in this old-fashioned view that to each their own when it comes to respecting human rights. So that is still out there, something we still bump up against, but it has been discredited. And the main reason it's been discredited is because of the emergence of NGOs, of human rights organizations that are just not going to settle for this cheap governmental excuse to get away without pressure with human rights violations.
Ralph Ranalli: Is there any, though, validity in any way to the criticism that the UDHR represents a fundamentally Western viewpoint? Because, Kathryn, you mentioned P.C. Chang from China. According to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the chair of the drafting committee for the UDHR, one of Chang’s arguments was that there was more than one kind of reality, and that the committee should be studying Confucianism as well as Western moral thought. Now in the human rights discussion there are some people who suggest that perhaps maybe the countries of the Global North are imposing a certain definition of human rights on the Global South, who may not share those same values. What do you think about those arguments?
Kathryn Sikkink: These debates go back to the debates within the committee that was drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It was a larger committee that included delegates from many countries around the world. But the five key people who were the core, really six key people who were the core drafting committee were, as Ralph just mentioned, Eleanor Roosevelt from the United States, René Cassin from France, and then these three other individuals from countries in the Global South. We said P.C. Chang. There was Charles Malik, who came from Lebanon, and there was Hernan Santa Cruz, who was from Chile.
Each of them brought different perspectives. P.C. Chang did bring perspectives from the Confucian tradition into the discussion. Hernan Santa Cruz was really the person who insisted that both economic, social, and cultural rights and civil and political rights both be included in the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. And he persuaded the main staff person, John Humphrey, who was from Canada and who was a social democrat or a democratic socialist, to make sure that that happened. So already there was a wide participation.
Now, of course, many, many countries, especially in Africa, were not yet decolonized. And so when they came into the system, they wanted to write new conventions. The second convention that was written, human rights convention that was entered into force after the genocide convention, was the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, what's called CERD. That's because these newly decolonized African countries or Caribbean countries were very worried about racial discrimination. They fast-forwarded to get that treaty to enter into effect before the two big covenants, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. So it shows that, when countries in the Global South were united around a theme, like racial discrimination, they really could put that at the center of the debate.
Kenneth Roth: Yeah. Let me maybe add to what Kathryn said. Kathryn described, I think, in drafting terms why the Universal Declaration really is universal. Let me look at this a bit more in operational terms, because I think one of the great legacies of the Declaration is that it did give rise to this global movement. Today, really in every country, you've got activists and groups that are trying to promote human rights. Even in places where it's oppressive for them to exist, they exist in exile. So, if you just look at this body of organizations that has emerged from the declaration, it underscores universality. That's not a doctrinal point, it's an operational point, it's a point of fact.
Now, to put this another way, when I was at Human Rights Watch, I did a lot of traveling. It was part of the job, and I would be all over the world. I never met somebody who wanted to be executed. I never met somebody who wanted to be tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned, or discriminated against, or deprived of housing or education or healthcare. If you look at it in terms of what do people want, they want these things. So it's easy for some autocratic government to say, "Oh, no, we just want a dictator. I'm going to have all the solutions here." But, in fact, people want these rights. And that is the great refutation of those who claim that these are somehow Western in positions.
Now, I think it's worth noting the three areas that are most contested, where you tend to hear this Western position point most frequently, have to do with women's rights, with the rights of sexual minorities, and with religious freedom. Again, the best refutation is to look at the people of the country. Take a place like Saudi Arabia. Now, some women may be perfectly happy subordinating themselves to their husbands—okay, that's their choice. But clearly, many Saudi women want a modern life. They want to be able to drive, they want to be able to travel without some male's permission. They want just basic freedoms. And it's not the West telling them to do that. Nobody's whispering in their ear and say, "Do this, do that." This is what they want. And the imposition is not a Western imposition. The imposition is by these conservative, retrograde leaders who want to maintain their patriarchal system.
You can say the same thing about LGBT rights, where nobody's telling people to be gay. That's who they are. It's the local conservative hierarchy that is trying to prevent them from being who they are, from leading their lives. So, I find that this argument that it's the Western imposition a facile, easy defense by governments that are trying to avoid scrutiny, but it just doesn't match up with reality. These rights are not imposed, these rights are what people universally want.
Kathryn Sikkink: One additional piece of evidence for that is, of course, the Universal Declaration got translated into all of these treaties, and then the treaties got ratified by many, many countries. So, the oddest thing is sometimes you have countries claiming that there's imposition, but then you say, "Well, but you ratified this treaty."
People have done research. Beth Simmons and others have done research on this. There's really very little evidence that diplomats twisted the arms of countries in order to ratify human rights treaties. Now, there's some evidence that countries thought it was cheap talk. They thought they could ratify the treaties and there would be no costs. That was the case. General Pinochet himself and his inner circle ratified the Convention Against Torture, and that was the treaty that ended up getting him arrested in London. But the second point is that countries ratify, they voluntarily accept the obligations under these human rights treaties.
Ralph Ranalli: What do you see as the major impediments to the advancement of this notion of universal human rights? Is it authoritarian nationalism? Is it just human tribalism? Is it neoliberal capitalism or economic Darwinism? What are the major roadblocks to a world where this notion of universal human rights advances even further? Ken, do you want to start with this one?
Kenneth Roth: I guess I'll take that easy question on.
Kathryn Sikkink: I'll start if you want me to.
Kenneth Roth: Whatever. Either way. Go ahead. Sure, Kathryn, go ahead.
Kathryn Sikkink: I would say first is, yeah, part of it is authoritarianism. We know that there's a direct correlation between authoritarian governments and bad human rights practices. And we know that authoritarian governments repress human rights because they want to stay in power. So they have a direct interest, they want to stay in power, they want to accumulate money, and they use repression as a tool to stay in power. So, yes, one big barrier in the world to human rights is that we have a lot of authoritarian governments and that the trend towards democratization has stalled. There was the third wave of democracy, and that brought a bunch of new countries into having better human rights practices, but that has now stalled. Unless we have a fourth wave of democracy, unless we restart the turn to democracy, human rights will not improve in the world, will not significantly improve in the world. That's the first thing I was saying.
The second thing I was saying, it's not capitalism per se, because some of the worst human rights violations have occurred in non-capitalist societies. The Great Leap Forward in China, the terrible purges in the Soviet Union. Human rights violations have occurred in capitalist and non-capitalist societies. Now, we could say that some of the excesses, I would say some of the excesses of hyper-globalization in recent years have exacerbated some of the economic and social rights. But I would not say that capitalism per se is at the root of human rights violations.
Kenneth Roth: Let me pick up with, first, I agree very much with what Kathryn said is the first cause. Autocrats, by definition, view human rights as a pain in the ass. They're an impediment to staying in power, and so they violate human rights to maintain all the great benefits of being in power, often corruption or just the prestige of it. So that's always going to be an obstacle, and there always needs pressure on these autocrats to change the calculation that leads it to be seen as beneficial to violate human rights.
Second, I would put in terms of maybe the populist threat, which is often combined with autocrats, but is, I think, best understood analytically as distinct. What the populists typically do is to demonize some unpopular minority and therefore make the deprivation of their rights popular among. and often they're a religious majority in the country. And that challenges the basic idea of community that lies at the heart of human rights. If you think of why I should respect your human rights, it's because we're in the community and I recognize that, if they come from your rights today, they'll come from my rights tomorrow. That's the classic Kantian understanding of it. But, if you're able to define a community in exclusionary terms and to treat these immigrants, these Muslims, or these gays as somehow outside the community, it becomes easier to violate their rights because this kind of reciprocity that is often at the basis of respect for human rights is lost. So, I think that there has been a real determination on the part of populist leaders to narrow the national community, and that endangers human rights.
Then the final thing I would note is that human rights need defense. If we go back to the origins of the Universal Declaration, with just each government to do their own thing, we're going to have an impoverished world when it comes to human rights. So you need not only non-governmental human rights groups but also governments themselves and UN officials and the like to be standing up for human rights consistently. When some of the major proponents of human rights have real double standards in the willingness to stand for human rights, it undermines the enterprise. It leaves the entire effort to defend human rights open to charges of hypocrisy.
Clearly, the U.S. government is guilty of this. It's actively defending Israel to the point where it's bombarding Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but it tries to rally people to stand up for rights of Ukrainians when Russia bombards civilians there. That double standard doesn't work very well. People see through it.
So, there's a need for much work in defensive human rights. Even some of the top UN officials. Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, just gave his big Universal Declaration of Human Rights 75th anniversary speech, ran through a bunch of countries, and somehow didn't get around to China, which in my view is the biggest global threat to human rights today. This is an utter abdication of his responsibility. It is utter cowardice. I don't know what he's thinking. This is not just one speech or a mistake. He's been in office for well over a year and in this time has never condemned Beijing for the crimes against humanity, the mass persecution and detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This is, in many ways, the most outrageous offense he faces, and he says nothing. Whether this is cowardice or some naive conception of what his quiet diplomacy will secure, it is nothing, I have no idea, but it is utterly shameful and it undermines this effort to defend human rights.
Ralph Ranalli: Can we talk for a bit about what I see as the very complicated relationship between religion and human rights? On the one hand, I think it's fair to say that certain religious tenants, particularly universal ones, like the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—have deeply influenced the notion universal human rights. But then, if you look at some of the worst and most intractable conflicts in the world, a lot of them have a religious component to them. Jews and Muslims in Israel and Palestine, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan. And that's not even to mention the suffering imposed on religious minorities around the world.
And history has shown that there are invariably people in every faith who are going to say, "My god tells me that I have a right to take your land, or to deny you the right to be a citizen, or to keep certain rights and freedoms for myself and my group while denying them to you." But on the other hand, the UDHR says, "No. Human rights are universal and indivisible no matter what the circumstances are." Is religion in at least some ways antithetical to universal human rights? How do you solve for religion in the human rights equation?
Kathryn Sikkink: First, I would begin by just going back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and say one of the most controversial issues in those debates was not that one has a right to have a religion but that one has a right to change their religion. That language went in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it led to some of the early abstentions or votes against the Universal Declaration. Then, later, there was an attempt right around the time we got the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination, the CERD treaty, there was attempt to get a treaty on religious freedom, protecting religious freedom, and that treaty failed. It's one example of a human rights treaty that could not get through. So, it's a very contentious issue.
Now, I would say not say that religion is a basis for human rights violations because there's also many examples of religious communities that were deeply involved in the promotion and protection of human rights. Back when I was a young human rights activist, when I first met Ken, and he knows the story well, the early human rights people were very involved with religious communities, missionaries, the World Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference. They were committed to promoting human rights. So I want to go back to something Ken said earlier. The problem is not religion per se, the problem is dehumanization. Religious groups, when they dehumanize other religious groups, are a huge problem for human rights. But you don't have to be religious to dehumanize. Some of these populists Ken was talking about are not religious, but they are dehumanizing others. And this dehumanization, this exclusion of people, Ken used this word, you're excluding people from the realm of obligation. You think, "They're not worthy of being protected." That's the root, not religion, in my mind.
Kenneth Roth: Let me just add to that. First off, Ralph, part of what you're describing as religious problems, they could be called ethnic problems as well. Israel-Palestine isn't really about religion. It's about two ethnic groups that are competing over the same land. It's not as if there's religious conviction here for the most part. There are parts on both sides who say, "Oh, yeah, this is our land. God said so." But, for the most part, it's an ethnic national conflict. And that is often true of things that are described in religious terms. But I think, as Kathryn said, religion often is an ally human rights because, if religion is trying to teach respect for the individual and a certain public morality, that often is quite compatible with human rights.
But there are certain views of religion which go beyond saying, "Everybody can pray to their own god. Everybody is entitled to this basic religious freedom," to saying, "I get to impose my religious views on other people." That's where, as Kathryn was describing, the contested right to convert comes in. Why should I care if you change your religion? What does it have to do with me? I still have my freedom of religion, but some people want to impose their views than others. And this is also translated into restrictions on women, into restrictions on LBGT people, into a way of not just ordering one's own private beliefs but using self-declared religious beliefs and opposing those on others. So, this just gives the veneer of legitimacy to what is really no different from what autocrats do. It's an effort to dictate the way their society would operate without input from the people.
Ralph Ranalli: We're at 75 years for the UDHR. What do you think would be the most appropriate way to celebrate it in terms of proposing policies—either national or international—that advance universal human rights? So I'd like your recommendations here for policies that would get us closer to this world where there's less conflict and more respect for rights that emerged as the UDHR vision 75 years ago. What would you both recommend?
Kathryn Sikkink: Some of these things have already come up, but I want to start with one that sounds facile, maybe. But I truly believe in human rights education. I think one of the reasons the Universal Declaration for Human Rights has been so important is it's a wonderful tool for human rights education. I think it's important to have people study it, but also to teach them about its origins. Because then, if you talk about all the countries, all the people involved in creating it, that helps people understand that this belongs to all of us and that it came from many communities.
Second, things we've already talked about, but let's put them in policy terms. We've already said that these authoritarian countries and leaders are a big problem for human rights. I've already said but I want to underscore here that we need to take up again this campaign for democracy. There was a time—and Ken and I both remember this—where there were human rights people to one side and democracy proponents to the other side during the Reagan administration. And I feel like, if we haven't put that behind us, we need to completely put that behind us. Promoting democracy helps promote human rights, and promoting human rights helps promote democracy. No one thinks democracy only means holding elections, right? There's a lot of authoritarians or very imperfect democracies out there that have elections but aren't truly democratic. So that's number one, I would say. It's very important to get democracy promotion that really geared up again.
As a political scientist, I can tell you the single biggest factor that correlates with human rights violations is war. In particular, these big civil wars. So, once again, all the work that can be done to end wars. Then, of course, we get in a difficult situation, and that's that human rights were founded right after World War II, which was one of those necessary wars for human rights. So, sometimes, I think in relatively rare situations, people have to be willing to stand up and fight, including fight wars, to protect human rights. I categorize the Russia-Ukraine War in that way. It's my personal way, but I believe that what's going on in Israel-Palestine today, the only way that we can start protecting human rights is to have an end to that war as soon as possible. Again, that's my position. So I'll pass it on to Ken because I know he has lots of good suggestions.
Ralph Ranalli: Ken, if you had your hands on the levers of policy power for one day, what would you accomplish?
Kenneth Roth: Let me answer this in terms of, sure, we are celebrating the UDHR. Let me talk about appropriate and inappropriate celebrations as a way of trying to address this policy question. What I view as an inappropriate celebration is conversations which stay at the level of platitudes and never discuss governance. As if we just have these standards floating around in the air and we're not going to bother applying them. And that is such a disservice to what the UDHR has become. It may be true to the initial limited intent of the document, but it stands for so much more now.
So I think that the way we celebrate this, we should, one, recognize the central role of non-government groups. They should be at those celebrations, and they should be protected. And it shouldn't just be governments clinking glasses of champagne with each other, but they should be rededicating themselves to protecting NGOs as essential for protecting human rights. The celebration should talk about violations and name names because that, in my view, is true to the real spirit of what the declaration has become, even if it wasn't what it was intended at first. And that's its strength. If you can't put pressure on particular governments, what's the point of this document? It's just an aspirational thing that sits there and is violated.
Then I also think that, because of the importance of being universal, of not having double standards, this is an opportunity for governments that say they promote humanity as part of their foreign policy to dedicate themselves to doing so without double standards, and to really reexamine where they stand and stop defending the abuses of their allies and criticizing the abuses of their adversaries. That doesn't work very well; people see through that. So, I hope that we recognize that the universality is not simply a description of what people around the world want, but it also should be a description of what governments do in defense of the rights details in the Declaration.
Ralph Ranalli: Great. This was a fascinating and informative conversation, and I'd really like to thank you both for being here.
Kenneth Roth: Thank you for thinking of us.
Kathryn Sikkink: Yeah. It's our great pleasure to be here.
Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you want to read more about the transformational impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has compiled a collection of 90 short essays by scholars and experts at the Kennedy School and around Harvard. To read them online, please visit the Carr Center at carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu or our PolicyCast website at hks.harvard.edu/policycast. And if you want to keep hearing more about policy solutions to big world problems, please subscribe to PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app so you don’t miss any of our upcoming episodes. And until next time, from all of us here at the Kennedy School, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.