This week we ask: if the international community can’t make states abide by their human rights obligations, what’s the point of invoking human rights?
Human rights atrocities make headlines around the world and are usually followed by a national and international debate over how the perpetrators should be punished, and how these events might be prevented in the future.
The government of the country where such human rights violations take place often comes under intense criticism and is pressured into creating processes of enquiry or passing legislation. And yet, often, little seems to change on the ground, and victims of human rights violations are rarely, if ever, are satisfied with the outcome. This begs the question: what is the point of these international calls for justice, if justice is rarely forthcoming?
A new book dealing with these questions and the contradictions in the international human rights order was released this year. Its author is Dr Kate Cronin-Furman, Associate Professor in the UCL Department of Political Science.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
human rights, mass atrocities, states, quasi, international, compliance, human rights obligations, atrocities, book, international community, pressure, accountability, people, prosecute, obligation, victims, institutions, enforce, behaviour, tribunal
SPEAKERS
Emily McTernan, Kate Cronin Furman
Emily McTernan 00:05
This is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we ask if the international community can't make states abide by their human rights obligations, then what's the point of invoking human rights?
Hello, my name is Emily McTernan. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Human rights atrocities make headlines around the world, and are usually followed by national and international debate over how the perpetrator should be punished, and how these events might be prevented in the future. Governments of the countries where such human rights violations take place, often come under intense criticism and are pressured into creating processes of inquiry or passing legislation. And yet often little seems to change on the ground. And victims of human rights violations are rarely, if ever satisfied with the outcome. This begs the question, what is the point of these international calls for justice if justice is rarely forthcoming? A new book dealing with these questions and the contradictions in the international human rights order was released this year. Its author is Dr. Kate Cronin Furman Associate Professor in the UCL Department of Political Science. And I'm delighted that Kate joins me now. Welcome Kate to Uncovering Politics.
Kate Cronin Furman 01:35
Thanks so much for having me.
Emily McTernan 01:37
It would be great if we could get started with a quick explanation of the human rights system or order that we're talking about today. So when a major human rights atrocity happens, what theoretically should take place next? How should victims seek justice? And what steps do international actors take to hold human rights abusers to account?
Kate Cronin Furman 01:56
Oh, okay, so this is a little bit of a tall order, actually, to describe the international human rights system. And the reason for that is that it's quite decentralised. So, in theory, what we might want to have happen, goes something like this. News of an atrocity reaches the international community, you know, splashed over the headlines in New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC. Victims and their allies on the international stage call for justice. And an international tribunal is created in order to prosecute and punish the perpetrators of these atrocities.
Now, that almost never happens. And the reason for that is, you know, something that all of us in international relations spend weeks drilling into our student's brain, which is that the system is non hierarchical, right? It's not like a domestic system, where there is a straightforward authority that can enforce rules and compel punishment. So, you know, instead, we have lots of different institutions that are tasked with monitoring and attempting to enforce piecemeal bits of human rights obligations. So we have a number of foundational human rights treaties that states sign up to voluntarily. And, you know, ordinarily, treaty enforcement is done by the other members of a treaty. Right?
So you know, your run of the mill, international law treaties, a trade treaty, for instance, we rely on reciprocity for enforcement, right? So two states are signed up to a trade treaty. If one of them shirks its obligations, the other one is going to suffer as a consequence, and therefore be incentivized to police the obligation and make sure that their fellow treaty members perform. That's not the situation in human rights, right? So you know, we have these large, multi member treaties, for instance, you know, the Convention Against Torture. Hundreds of members. But if one state doesn't abide by its obligations, so let's say France, is torturing journalists. You know, the UK is not harmed by that. Right? And it would make no sense for the UK to reciprocally break the obligation and torture its own journalists to punish France right? That's nonsensical.
So because we don't have that reciprocity incentive for the other members of a treaty to police compliance and enforce, you know, we have all of these other institutions that have sprung up to do this work. So the treaties have their own monitoring bodies, you know, through the United Nations. In the case of the Convention Against Torture, it's the torture committee. Or the committee for for the convention, sorry. And, on top of that, you know, because even you know, treaty monitoring bodies can't do all the work of keeping up with every state's human rights behaviour every day, all the time. We have nongovernmental organisations. We have a un tremendous industry of human rights organisations, grassroots, regional, international, that do the work of monitoring human rights.
So you know, some of the big ones whose names people might recognise are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But all around the world, they're human rights, NGOs doing the work of kind of monitoring states, human rights behaviour, and when they don't abide by their obligations, calling that out, right? So the kind of classic strategy of the human rights movement is something called naming and shaming. So naming perpetrators who have broken their human rights obligations and attempting to shame them into compliance. These organisations try to affect the willingness of third party states to intervene and to act in cases of egregious human rights violations. So basically, that is a very long winded way of saying that there are many actors at many different levels involved in the work of monitoring human rights behaviour, and attempting, in some sense to enforce human rights obligations.
Emily McTernan 06:53
Thank you, that was such a helpful description of what is clearly a really complicated system, the kinds of pressure then you're talking about the international community placing on human rights violators seems fairly weak, right? If it's just naming and shaming, and maybe some attempts to try and encourage others to do something about it, that looks like a quite a weak way of enforcing. If it's enforcement at all, these duties to abide by human rights.
Kate Cronin Furman 07:19
Yeah, I mean, you know, I spend a lot of my time, you know, in the classroom, and also in my research, trying to kind of think my way around to the fact that, okay, almost none of our institutions or actions in the kind of human rights arena, do what we would want them to do, right? So nothing, nothing works as ideally intended. But the converse to that is that it doesn't do nothing. Right? So I think often empirical political scientists, students, lay people reading the paper, sort of look at the UN, look at other, you know, efforts to improve human rights and, you know, get really discouraged, or quite cynical about it, and say, you know, well, you know, these, these institutions can't do anything, right? So, you know, because of power dynamics in the international system, you know, this is useless, and it's hopeless.
That is not right. And, you know, obviously, in all contexts, it can be hard to hold two things in our minds at once. Right? But, you know, I think this is, this is a really good example of two things being true at once. One, none of this works the way we would want it to none of it, none of it does what it is designed to do. But on the other hand, it's not doing nothing, there are really important and interesting effects. That one, you know, should be studied, and two need to understand in order to do the work more effectively.
Emily McTernan 09:18
Great. And we'll get to some of those things. I think, as we as we go on to talk about the details of the book. I wonder if before we could get there. I know that you have a background working in the international human rights area yourself. And the book outlines how some of your own experiences have shaped and informed your approach as a researcher. I wonder if you could tell us something in particular that you saw on the ground that motivated your work in the area?
Kate Cronin Furman 09:40
Yeah, absolutely. So I this is the story I tell in the book and it's kind of my you know, supervillain origin story or whatever. I started out as a human rights lawyer. And in my first job out of law school, I went to Cambodia where the Tribunal to prosecute Khmer Rouge regime leaders was being set up. And, you know, part of the work that I was doing there was, you know, studying the draft rules of procedure and evidence for that tribunal. And kind of assessing how well it matched up to international standards for fair trials.
So, I spent a lot of time, you know, going on what were basically info sessions that the tribunal staff were holding for people who had been affected by these atrocities. And one day, I found myself in a hotel ballroom, about eight hours drive out of the Capitol, where members of the prosecutorial team, were speaking to maybe 60 or 70, survivors of Khmer Rouge atrocities who had kind of come down from their villages in the mountains, to meet these international lawyers and hear what they had to say. And up on the dias, the tribunal staff, you know, gave their spiel about how prosecuting these decades old crimes would combat impunity, it would instil respect for the rule of law in the Cambodian system, and improve human rights for people currently. And then they did a Q&A. And it was clear that there had been a near total failure of communication. So when people raise their hands to ask questions, almost all of the questions were something on the order of, okay, you know, where were you in the 1970s? You know, did you know this was happening to us? We starved for four years? Why didn't the UN help us then?
And, you know, observing this, I was a really young lawyer. And this was my first kind of real job out of law school. I found it very disheartening, right? Because this was, this was the work that, you know, if you were going into the field of transitional justice, you hope to be doing, and seeing this total disconnect between, you know, the the lawyers doing the work, and the people that they were ostensibly helping was, you know, really kind of jarring.
So I started to kind of ask around, you know, what's, what's the theory of change here? What evidence do we have that doing the work this way helps people? And at the time, this is about 15 years ago, there really wasn't a tonne of research on the impact of prosecution of international crimes. That's, that's changed today. But you know, there wasn't, there wasn't much literature on this at the [???]. So eventually, I decided I was going to go to grad school, and you know, learn how to do math, and figure out how to study these questions myself. So that's kind of what what took me out of practice and to the Academy. And how I came to be writing a PhD dissertation on accountability for mass atrocities, which kind of ultimately formed the the kind of seed of this book I would say.
Emily McTernan 13:51
That's a really interesting motivation. So I guess one question that arises out of that, before we get to the main argument of the book would be, we talked about the types of organisations that are putting pressure on states to do something. And you're now talking about this kind of quite a historical approach that's being taken, right where we go in very late in the day and kind of uncover previous crimes. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what's the goal? What what is the what are these states being pressured into doing? Before we get into what happens in reality, can you outline what sort of steps states say they'll take to appease national and international critics? So you're talking, you've just talked about the kind of later in the day commission trying to uncover what has happened, what else is demanded by these actors that want to hold people to account for human rights atrocities?
Kate Cronin Furman 14:41
So there's a very clear norm in the international system. Now. Which, you know, is a fairly recent vintage, right? So you know, for, for centuries kind of the default approach to human rights abuses by a state of its own citizens was sort of the, I guess what I what I used to call the the Las Vegas principle. I'm not sure that this reference still resonates. But the sort of, you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. You know, the idea that what happens within a sovereign states borders is no [???] with us.
And over the last 70 years, that has changed. So today, there is a fairly clear norm that in the aftermath of serious violations of international law, so mass atrocities, meaning genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, it is obligatory to prosecute the people most responsible for the most serious abuses. That's kind of the the formulation. So that means that a state on whose territory serious violations have occurred, is expected, is pressured to hold people criminally liable. So to actually prosecute in a court of law, the people who are most responsible for what happened. Now, there are all sorts of reasons that that doesn't happen, right? So states in the aftermath of serious conflict, may have very fragile institutions, they may not have the resources, or, you know, the human capacity to do those prosecutions. It is often the case that people who were involved in atrocities in a high level role remain in power. So it's, you know, politically infeasible to do these prosecutions. And that's why we have, you know, now we have an International Criminal Court, right? And this is, you know, basically a court of last resort, right? So when states who, you know, should be prosecuting these crimes themselves can't or won't do it, the idea is that the International Criminal Court, then is there to backstop this. Which means that, you know, what states are effectively pressured to do is either do prosecutions themselves or cooperate with a relevant international institution.
Emily McTernan 17:30
Right, that's very helpful. Thank you for talking us through that. I wonder if now we could talk about one of the central parts of the central idea, perhaps of the book, this idea of the quasi compliance of a state, what were you trying to capture with this idea? And with what's going on when states look like they're complying, but don't. Is that Is that what we're getting at? Could you explain that?
Kate Cronin Furman 17:48
So when I went to kind of do my PhD research, I was trying to get a sense of the range of things that states do in response to international pressure for accountability for mass atrocities. And, you know, unsurprisingly, I found that, you know, full kind of cooperation, compliance is really rare. And, you know, that makes sense, because prosecuting mass atrocities is legally really complicated. It's resource intensive. And, you know, it is kind of a truism that the perpetrators of atrocities don't prosecute themselves. So anytime you have people in power, who are implicated, you don't see these prosecutions.
So you know, I was not surprised to see a lot of inaction in my data. What was a little more surprising was how often I saw states doing something really kind of confusing. So something that was not inaction, right, not kind of totally ignoring pressure from victims or international actors for accountability, but also not anything that looked like compliance with this obligation to provide accountability. So you know, there are states that set up kind of window dressing commission's that have a really nice mandate about looking into violations, but then, you know, results in like a whitewash, right? So, you know, one of the earliest examples I found was Sudan with regard to atrocities in Darfur, you know, with with a massive international outcry occurring the Sudanese government creates this commission to find out if there are if there was genocide or crimes against humanity occurring in Darfur, and then the commissioners are subjected to tremendous pressure from the government to exonerate them.
So, we see that we see kind of kangaroo courts, we see the very rushed prosecution of really low level people for atrocities and then maybe like one conviction, and then the court closes up shop and goes home. So I was really curious about why there was so much of that behaviour in my data. And kind of set out to explain what was happening there, why we would see this sort of in between response between doing nothing and actually satisfying the demands of, you know, victims and their allies and advocates on the international stage.
And so I kind of theorise this as an attempt to do just enough to disrupt international pressure and potential international enforcement without actually meeting the obligation. And I call this quasi-compliance because I have a background in legal practice and law, we use the term 'quasi', to refer to something that will be treated as if it were the thing that it isn't. Which is kind of a complicated formulation. But basically, you know, in law, we have quasi-contracts, right, where a court will find that even though the legal requirements for a contract don't exist between two parties, there is reason to act as if it does. So, I kind of consider the state's doing this in between stuff to be engaged in a similar performance of 'as if', right? Behaving as if they were complying, and attempting to get treated as if they were in compliance, even though the fundamental requirements of complying with the obligation aren't there.
Emily McTernan 22:05
And as you describe it, this, the point of this for a state is to try and avoid more serious sanctions coming its way. So looking like they are doing the work without actually doing the work.
Kate Cronin Furman 22:15
Yeah. And I think the kind of key thing here is that it's not really about convincing anyone, right? So you know, we, we might look at this behaviour, and think that it's about trying to kind of convince the international actors that are doing a lot of kind of human rights work and putting a lot of pressure on them, you know, that they've done enough and should be left alone. That's not really what it is. And it very rarely, actually has any impact on you know, your Human Rights Watch, or your kind of UK human rights bureaucracy and the government. Like those actors are not persuaded by this, right, they pretty quickly call it out, as, you know, not being good enough, and not kind of meeting the obligation.
So I, I understand this as, essentially, a response to that lack of hierarchical enforcement that we talked about a few minutes ago, in the in the realm of human rights. So basically, you know, in order for the international community to, you know, really do anything robust to enforce human rights, it almost always requires a coalition. So, you know, the kind of the sight of a lot of action around accountability for mass atrocities is the UN Human Rights Council. And that is a body where a majority of states on the council is needed in order to pass a resolution. And what that means is that, you know, it's not just those states who are really engaged and involved on human rights whose opinions matter, because they need to bring along a lot of other votes in order to actually get anything done. So I think of quasi-compliance as often being aimed at those sort of less engaged peer states on the Human Rights Council, or you know, any other institution where where debates about this are occurring.
And it's basically gives those states a reason to push back, right? And to not sign on to robust human rights enforcement. And again, it doesn't have to convince them. So I think, you know, what I, what I sort of find most interesting here, theoretically, is that you know, this is this. This is hypocrisy, right on the part of the quasi-compliance state, the state that is, you know, not meeting its obligation to provide accountability for mass atrocities. But it's not really hypocrisy that is about protecting its own reputation. It's hypocrisy that helps to protect its audience's reputation. Right? Because it lets those other states avoid the appearance of siding with an outright human rights abuser.
Emily McTernan 25:30
Right, interesting, because it gives them an excuse to get them off the hook for not acting, to enforce these human rights.
Kate Cronin Furman 25:37
Yeah.
Emily McTernan 25:39
Fascinating, how does this dynamic relate to another dynamic that we sometimes see where states deny that there is a human rights violation or deny that it's appropriate for the international community to impose these western conceptions of human rights on their own citizens and how they think a state should be run? Is that a similar giving an excuse to less motivated actors not to act to enforce compliance? Or do you think it functions differently to the types of cases you're discussing?
Kate Cronin Furman 26:09
So actually, the really surprising thing is that we see all of that simultaneously. So you know, one of the cases that I did a lot of work on is postwar Sri Lanka. And you know, this is a context in which there were very serious state perpetrated mass atrocities at the end of the Civil War in 2009. And that fact has been kind of a central feature of Sri Lanka's international relations over the past 13 years, where many members of the international community both states and non state actors have, you know, called out these atrocities demanded accountability, and been very kind of engaged on, you know, pushing Sri Lanka to improve its human rights record. And, you know, Sri Lanka is the case where we see the creation of several of these quasi-compliant institutions. But at the same time, we also saw flat denials that anything had happened, right?
So, for years after the end of the Civil War, the Sri Lankan government insisted that there had been no civilian casualties, that this was a humanitarian operation to rescue civilians, and that certainly, none of them had been killed by government forces. We also saw very consistent statements, that Western pressure on human rights was, you know, inappropriate, imperialist action that infringed on Sri Lankan sovereignty. So we saw all of these strategies kind of deployed side by side, and that is not uncommon. And I think that's part of what makes quasi compliance. So interesting is that we see states do this, even as they are denying that anything of interest to the international community occurred.
So I think, you know, this, this can be closely related. I think, you know, I have my second book project that I'm working on now is actually on denials of mass atrocities. And, you know, what, what that does on the international stage and how that works. So let me try not to start talking at length about that.
Emily McTernan 28:41
Fascinatin. I'm looking forward to hearing all about the next project. I wonder if before we go, is there an optimistic note that your book can leave with our listeners? So I guess, a listener might be thinking if the outcome is so often a lack of tangible change in these forms of quasi-compliance or denial? Why do international actors bother to put this kind of pressure on regimes that violate human rights? And perhaps what could a better system look like? Is there some way we can better enforce compliance and avoid these strategies of quasi-compliance by states?
Kate Cronin Furman 29:11
Yeah, I think that's a really important question. And, you know, part of the reason I wrote this book was kind of, in the hopes of illuminating windows of opportunity for, you know, victims and their allies in the aftermath of mass atrocities. So I'm very conscious that this is, in many ways, a discouraging account, right? Because it says that, when faced with a repressive state that doesn't want to improve its human rights record or doesn't want to provide accountability for mass atrocities, that, you know, international human rights pressure will never achieve its aims. Right.?
So that is potentially a really dispiriting message for victims of human rights abuses to hear. So I felt like it was really important in the book to kind of talk through and think seriously about, you know, what that meant for advocacy strategy. And I think there are some kind of glimpses of light here. Because the international system is complex, and you know, the point, I kind of started with that, even though pressure and human rights institutions don't, almost ever, do what we want them to, they're not doing nothing. Right? So they have impacts, and they have lots of unintended consequences. And I think that, you know, what that means is that, you know, we need to, we need to pay very close attention to where the actual potential levers for change are. And to think very strategically, about, you know, how we approach advocacy, for human rights, and specifically advocacy around accountability for mass atrocities.
So I think, you know, one implication here is that even though, you know, strong demands to perpetrator states to provide accountability, are not going to push them to do it. They will, they will have effects on third party audiences. Right? So, you know, when I, when I talked about what the impact of quasi-compliance is, it often really hinges on third party states being able to say, with a straight face, you know, this state is not so bad, they're working on it, you know, we don't need to pass the Human Rights Council resolution and panelling and international investigation, we don't need to censur them.
So I think, you know, part of the work here should be about making that an untenable position for those third party states, right? So, you know, [???] calls from international advocates from victims and their allies for accountability, you know, consistent statements about the egregiousness of the violations, those things can counter the effectiveness of a quasi-compliance strategy. And that's important, because that is going to contribute to, you know, not letting that state get away with with, you know, sort of staving off international action.
Emily McTernan 32:42
So thank you so much, Kate, for that wonderful discussion of human rights obligations, and that detailed analysis of the quasi-compliance strategy and how we might be able to get around it and do better for the victims of human rights atrocities.
We've be looking at a new book by Dr. Kate Cohn in Furman. It's entitled 'Hypocrisy and human rights: Resisting accountability for mass atrocities', and was published by Cornell University Press earlier this year. As ever, the details are in the show notes for this episodes, which also include a link to the book.
Next week, we will be discussing sexual minorities and the politics of visibility with Professor Ayoub. Remember to make sure that you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics. All you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was researched by Conor Kelly and produced by Eleanor Kingwell Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.