Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

In my post of  17 January I mentioned Russia‘s report on human rights in the EU (https://thoolen.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/russia-publishes-report-on-human-rights-in-the-eu/) and I now want to refer to a thoughtful comment by Aaron Rhodes (founder of the Freedom Rights Project and former Director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights) in The Commentator of 27 January. He argues inter alia that:

“The report is thus likely to be dismissed as little more than a bad-faith political attack, especially in view of Russia’s own problems — a case of “the pot calling the kettle black.” In fact, the proper functioning of the international human rights system depends on serious dialogue about human rights among states, and on the exchange of constructive criticism. Russia’s report, as officials pointed out, echoes reports of a number of international bodies and human rights groups. Most of the criticism has a basis in reality….The fact that a state violates human rights does not of necessity invalidate that state’s observations about the situation in another state.  Even some of the charges made by North Korean representatives against Western states are true, regardless of what motivated them.

……

The value of civil society in monitoring human rights conditions,…, is that civil society groups are not intrinsically influenced by political interests and subject to bias. The Moscow Helsinki Group, which was established in 1976 and later destroyed by the KGB, placed itself squarely outside politics, and sought to guide its observations by a strictly detached, scientific ethos. The credibility of such influential formations as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International rests on the degree to which they can detach themselves from political agendas and motivations, and from other prejudices.

But, in recent years, the civil society human rights community and its ethos of political neutrality have grown weaker. Under the influence of a “post-modern” approach to law, politics and reality, fewer people believe in the possibility, or the desirability of objective social scientific research. Meanwhile, human rights has become a growth industry for governments and international organizations. More and more governments produce reports on other governments, some of which mimic those of nongovernmental organizations.

State structures gobble up scarce resources that ought to go to civil society if donor organizations want credible research, but sometimes donor organizations don’t understand this. The pressure to fund hungry bureaucracies is leaving civil society out in the cold. Local European human rights organizations are weak, and vulnerable to domination by political parties, because funding organizations, including the EU itself, only support civil society in countries where they see major threats…

Russia’s report contains some truths, but the larger truth is that human rights facts and political power must be separate if there is to be an objective, factual basis for evaluating governments. The EU needs to evaluate Russia’s report at face value, and also commit itself to assisting the work of independent nongovernmental monitoring, including those that focus on conditions in the EU itself. That would be the most appropriate response to what Russia has done.“