Discussion Group Report

"If I'm barely scratching out a living in East Tennessee, worried about having enough money to get my kids a decent education or to make the payments on a bigger house, what difference do these abuses taking place so far away make to me?" asked a talk show host on a National Public Radio station. It was an excellent question; and William F. Schultz, the director of Amnesty International and former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, responds to it in the July/August 2001 issue of UU World.

He says human rights campaigners are not well prepared to answer it.

Over the centuries, he says, human beings have devised different sets of standards by which to measure our obligations to one another. Almost 4,000 years ago the Babylonian king Hammurabi issued a set of laws to his people. It established fair wages, offered protection of property, and required charges to be proven at a trial. The Romans were probably the first to establish the concept of citizen's rights, but the modern notion of rights derives from such seminal documents as the Magna Carta (1215), The English Bill of Rights (1689) , The U.S. Bill of Rights (1791), and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). The problem with all these statements is that they applied to only one set of people, and given the presence of women and slaves, not even to all of that set, that is, not to all English, American or French people; although the French Declaration attempted to articulate rights that held for all humanity.

Remarkably, it took almost 4,000 years from the days of Hammurabi for the world to agree on a statement of rights that applied to everyone--even to one's enemies!--simply because everybody is a human being. It took a world body (the United Nations), horrific carnage (the Holocaust of World War II), and an extraordinary woman (Eleanor Roosevelt), to carry it off; but in 1948 the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a formidable achievement.

Still, the problem has been enforcing these rights. The only ones who have the power to enforce them, are the very powers--nation-states--that might be guilty of violating them.

What powers can be brought to bear to help bring about the implementation of the Universal Declaration? One that has been used is moral suasion, an appeal to a sense of decency and fair play. Another is the law. But these alone are not enough to win a major audience. "Compassion fatigue" has been a popular explanation for the apparent limits to people's interest in foreign catastrophes. If the American public is to care about human rights violations around the world, Schultz believes, they must understand how these violations endanger their own interests. The validity of this assertion was brought home by the stunning impact of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which occurred shortly after his article was written.

When asked, before the attacks, whether what happens in Europe and Asia has any personal relevance, 55 percent of Americans said that events there have no impact on them. Such indifference was being reflected in the diminishing coverage U.S. media outlets were giving to international affairs. When asked by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations to describe what the United States should take as its most important foreign policy goals, only 39 percent of Americans named "Promoting and defending human rights in other countries."

"The average American," says Schultz, "is fuzzy about just how human rights violations affect the world around them...'Realism' has largely dominated foreign policy thinking, and 'realists have little truck with human rights." Alan Tonelson, a "realist" of the Economic Strategy Institute says, "In the absence of such a rival [the Soviet Union], the state of human rights around the world does not have, and never has had, any demonstrable effect on U.S. national security." George Kennan offers, "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights."

What realists fail to recognize is that, in far more cases than they allow, defending human rights is a prerequisite to protecting our national interest. Whether in war and peace, international trade, economic growth, the security of jobs, the state of our environment, the public health, the interdiction of drugs, or a host of other topics, there is a connection between Americans' own interests and international human rights.

"By emphasizing morality to the exclusion of pragmatism," argues Schultz, "we human rights advocates have allowed ourselves to be dismissed as idealists or ideologues, as either too mushy-headed in our thinking to be taken seriously or too rigid in our priorities to be trusted with power." We have too often in the past twenty years ceded U.S. foreign policy to those in government and business who care the least about human rights."

The commercialist argument, that the best way to ensure democracy and human rights is via economic growth, has caused endless debate, but businesses have traditionally seen human rights concerns to be inimical to theirs. "The truth is that not only can business be good for human rights, but human rights are good for business, and for labor," declares Schultz. Does a democratic community of rights carry with is real, practical, bottom-line advantages for investors? The futures of many Americans are now entangled with international investments. More than $350 billion of our money is in mutual funds that invest overseas, at least $160 billion of our retirement funds are invested overseas, and more than $285 billion is invested in developing nations.

If the commercialist argument were accurate on its face, Singapore should be a human rights haven--also Malaysia, the past Indonesia of Suharto, apartheid-era South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, or Nazi Germany, where at least 300 U.S. companies continued operations there even after the war had begun.

There is an even more fundamental reason why supporting human rights serves our national interest. Respect for human rights contributes mightily to political stability, and conducting business without stability is like playing Russian roulette... with all barrels loaded. Countries that abuse human rights are notoriously unstable, even when they appear as solid as rocks. When it comes to business interests, the "rule of law" encompasses three factors: combating corruption, providing transparent regulations for the conduct of business, and guaranteeing the fair enforcement of contracts.

We need to be unafraid to say, "Support human rights! They're good for us!" The Zuni Indians say, "We dance for pleasure...and the good of the city." "...we who care about our brothers' and sisters' rights," Schultz proposes, "should not be hesitant to acknowledge that we do so for many reasons, not the least of which is the good of the city."