Lotte Leicht, Human Rights Watch Director in Brussels, stresses that human rights are internationally recognized. As such, the international community can easily discern who is upholding human rights and who is not, and human rights violators can be held internationally accountable.
Watch an exclusive interview with Lotte Leicht emphasizing her critical remarks made during the panel discussion at the Heinrich Böll Foundation's conference "Values and Interests in Foreign Policy." (2:56 min).
Ms. Leicht describes the EU as paralyzed in regard to upholding human rights and said that it failed a "credibility test." This credibility test pertains to the EU's relationship with its biggest partners, namely the US, Russia, and China. The EU must hold these countries accountable for their human rights violations. The US is particularly guilty. Counts of torture and a failure to recognize social rights as such (economic living conditions, education, etc.) all brand the US as a human rights violator. In order to hold other countries accountable for human rights, the EU must first do so with its allies.
Georgia provides the newest circumstance that will test the EU's ability to uphold human rights. Ms. Leicht suggested that the EU should play a role in investigating war crimes and prosecuting them in the ICC.
Although often not fully implemented, EU treaties are indeed important, as they establish recognized standards for human rights around the world.
Lotte Leicht is the Director of Human Rights Watch in Brussles.
David Neil Lebhar holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Davidson College and is currently an editorial intern at atlantic-community.org.
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November 24, 2008
Member deleted
Direct violence and its visibility by organised resistance to a state or its particular laws/practices, where the state is seen as employing direct violence to ostensibly quell protests over issues that are assumed to fall under the rubric of human rights - are common and again suffer from common prejudices. We often see the argument by the staes in question of the issue of larger politics and ideological-economic rivalries behind such organised resistances/protests. It has a certain validity and a visibility. Direct violence often has, when it becomes visible within the powermatics of media and "mass-ethics" as I would put it. The term "mass-ethics" is a fall-out of elite manipulation of certain emotive issues, whether internal or external. There are some states that need such issues for their continued moral self-justification and moral self-sustenance.
What about indirect violence, consisting of enforcing conditions upon particular humans that lead to the slow draining of his/her resources and finally - a scientific and clean death that has been induced. A slow murder carried out over an extended period of time. Does that fall under the rubric of human rights and their grossest violation in both spirit and letter? Ethnic-violence and ethno-political terrorism, when state-induced, can achieve much more worse results than merely this. Just like scientific poll-rigging, scientific murders are also a part and parcel of life in many third world states, and often assisted by religious forces as diverse as the Roman Catholic Church to other religious affliliates. Worse is, when those initially opposed in principle, to such religious orintations of indirect violence and control, end up inducing worse conditions of manipulation and torture - in their game-of-guilt by then finding a suitable subject for experimentations with an eye of arm-twisting the original transgressor, by becoming the worse transgressors in this case.
It perhaps speaks volumes over people and practices that specialize in such scientific-murders - clinically carried out as far as the available legal system is concerned. A publicly carried out German Gulag that is indirect? Yes.
Now to look into the reasons behind such affront by the state in question (India) and its certain political elites: 1. a private issue as that of marriage 2. the academic specialization by the subject/person/victim in question on a topic as dire (yes, in India it is, for certain political dispensations) as Combating International Terrorism, followed by the publication of a book on the said topic. 3. Where the family in question also happens to be that of a person who, apart from being school teacher, is also a distinguished officer with the reserve wing of the Indian Army, known as the National Cadet Corps. father of the subject/person/victim.
Such scientific-murders carried out upon such people by the political class of India (caste and education being a factor cited) then raise serious issues and serious questions about Human Rights and its observance. Far worse, a near four years of sustained indirect violence - aimed at breaking the dignity and self-respect of that family - over such pressing issues of "national threat" - yes, I would like to question those who watch about their eyes and the glasses and the perspective that defines Human Rights for them. Th old issue of someone snitching about a visit in the unruly classroom, by the school principal, who upon arrival finds the class perfectly behaved and obedient - does not de-legitimize the teacher who was forced to complain to the Principal about an obstinately unruly classroom. Obviously something is seriously wrong. An extended period of such frustration by the teacher resulting in the teacher taking an extended vacation or resigning talks of and about serious indirect violence in a community, against that particular teacher. The possibilities can range from ethnicity to crime-terror nexus to sheer pathological morbidity of the said community. Many "coloured" people in the world where race was or is an issue would have faced such scientific discrimination.
They usually are allowed to migrate. Cold mechanical and scientifically carried out murders usually will not avowedly allow that freedom of migration - so much of wrongs and so much of guilt that has gone down, that an entire mass of people socialized in a shared crime become the eyes and vanguards for the occasional visitor - unaware of the extensive period of such "trysts with Gulag" for both the parties in question.
Human Rights and its observance - under such conditions, yes. Very interesting indeed. Thankfully, one had a father with a distinguished service record and one has a family with impeccable credentials, prior to the the "trysts with Gulag", and one thankfully chose to specialize in Combating International Terrorism in one's pre-doctoral studies in the area of American & West European Studies. Thankfully, one also managed to publish the first of tan intended series of books on the topic of International Terrorism, alongwith a literary collection.
One shudders to think of those many other victims of this scientific-pogrombut bereft of this little respite of a family with impeccable credentials and records - the issues remain as they are and as mentioned, including the period that merely keeps on extending and extending... a damage to the the very idea of the human first, before it damages the idea about and over Human Rights and its watchdogs!
Nationalism and religious terrorism and the realities of a particular family. May be something is terribly wrong with the teacher who had called in the principal - to aperfectly obedient and disciplined classroom. Or something is terribly rotten with a lingustic group as well as a religious group and an entire state. Or something terribly wrong with being a human, perhaps!