The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom

By Aaron Rhodes

The idea of human rights began as a call for individual freedom from tyranny, yet today it is exploited to rationalize oppression and promote collectivism. How did this happen? Aaron Rhodes, recognized as “one of the leading human rights activists in the world” by the University of Chicago, reveals how an emancipatory ideal became so debased.

Rhodes identifies the fundamental flaw in the Universal Declaration of Human of Rights, the basis for many international treaties and institutions. It mixes freedom rights rooted in natural law—authentic human rights—with “economic and social rights,” or claims to material support from governments, which are intrinsically political. As a result, the idea of human rights has lost its essential meaning and moral power.

The principles of natural rights, first articulated in antiquity, were compromised in a process of accommodation with the Soviet Union after World War II, and under the influence of progressivism in Western democracies. Geopolitical and ideological forces ripped the concept of human rights from its foundations, opening it up to abuse. Dissidents behind the Iron Curtain saw clearly the difference between freedom rights and state-granted entitlements, but the collapse of the USSR allowed demands for an expanding array of economic and social rights to gain legitimacy without the totalitarian stigma.

The international community and civil society groups now see human rights as being defined by legislation, not by transcendent principles. Freedoms are traded off for the promise of economic benefits, and the notion of collective rights is used to justify restrictions on basic liberties.

We all have a stake in human rights, and few serious observers would deny that the concept has lost clarity. But no one before has provided such a comprehensive analysis of the problem as Rhodes does here, joining philosophy and history with insights from his own extensive work in the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Apr 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781594039805

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© 2018 by Aaron Rhodes

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First American edition published in 2018 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Rhodes, Aaron Anthony, 1949– author.

Title: The debasement of human rights: how politics sabotage the ideal of freedom / by Aaron Rhodes.

Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2018. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017045279 (print) | LCCN 2017052447 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781594039805 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human rights—Philosophy. | Natural law.

Classification: LCC JC571 (ebook) | LCC JC571 .R489 2018 (print) |

DDC 323.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045279

Interior page design and composition: BooksByBruce.com

Contents

Acknowledgments and Dedication

INTRODUCTIONA Threat to Freedom

PART 1

What Happened to Human Rights

CHAPTER 1The Achilles’ Heel of International Human Rights

CHAPTER 2The Concept of Human Rights during the Cold War

CHAPTER 3Birth of the Post–Cold War Human Rights Dogma

PART 2

The Consequences for Liberty

CHAPTER 4Toward Human Rights without Freedom

CHAPTER 5The Loss of America’s Human Rights Exceptionalism

CHAPTER 6A Convergence against Liberty

CONCLUSIONOn the Future of International Human Rights

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments and Dedication

I am grateful to all those who have been encouraging and helpful in the process of publishing this book, especially to Adam Bellow, Tom Palmer, Anne Pierce, Lorna Rhodes (my sister), and of course Roger Kimball and his colleagues at Encounter Books. I wish to express particular thanks to Carol Staswick for her fine work in editing the book.

Part of the work on this book was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to the Freedom Rights Project, which allowed me to work with three colleagues, Jacob Mchangama, Paulina Neuding and Guglielmo Verdirame, on the conceptual problems of human rights. I owe much to each of them. The book also benefited from research done by Marine Testut during her time as an intern. The Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars provided a research fellowship in 2013 for study of the Soviet dissident human rights movement in the Kennan Collection.

My colleagues in religious freedom advocacy, Willy Fautré, Kamal Fahmi, Dominic Zoehrer and Peter Zoehrer, have given important moral support for my efforts.

My wife, Anna Sunder-Plassmann, herself a human rights activist, supported our family during most of my work on the book, and I am deeply grateful for that and for her wise counsel. I dedicate this book to Anna, to our daughters Leah and Rivkah, and to my sons Daniel and Nathan.

INTRODUCTION

A Threat to Freedom

The international community’s concept of human rights lacks intellectual and moral integrity. It is corrupted by political ideas. A debased and contradictory understanding of human rights has allowed the concept to be exploited by authoritarian states to justify their denial of liberties and to denigrate free societies, and has encouraged ideologues to pursue political agendas under the cover of human rights. While the struggle to protect individual freedom is increasingly marginalized, the idea of human rights has been so loosely applied and so distorted that it is now used to justify restrictions on basic individual freedoms and to advocate the global regulation of an immense range of social and economic activity. The concept of human rights is now rarely informed by the ideas and principles that originally gave it meaning. It has become so much associated with ideological agendas and frivolous demands that few take it seriously anymore. The idea of human rights has been emptied of the moral force that once inspired people around the world seeking freedom and democracy.

The result is profoundly deleterious to the way we think about human rights and apply the concept through international law and institutions. To have any hope of addressing the problem, we must identify the source: the falsehood at the heart of the international community’s definition of human rights. It is a definition that mingles protections of basic individual freedoms with guaranteed state entitlements. It mixes natural rights with those established by positive law. It blurs the line between what is and is not a human right; it degrades the idea of natural rights, thus eroding the moral foundation upon which the entire edifice of human rights rests.

In this book, I show why economic and social human rights, so named under international law, are not universal human rights. Economic and social rights such as the right to social security and the right to an adequate standard of living are not simply different kinds of human rights; they are demonstrably not human rights at all, for they are based on different principles. They are rights granted by states, reflecting political values that are not intrinsic to human beings; they are collective, not individual rights; they embody political values and goals, and do not accord with the essential nonpolitical and nonpartisan character of authentic, universal human rights. They derive from particular political interests and passions, while authentic human rights are based on our common human nature and on reason, the basis of their universality.

In past decades, some have criticized the assertion that economic and social rights are universal human rights to be respected and applied in the same way as fundamental natural rights. Scholars and jurists have shown their weaknesses as human rights—that they are vague and cannot be enforced, and do not deliver what they promise. Conservatives have disparaged economic and social rights as left-wing political utopianism. But serious critiques of economic and social rights are not widely appreciated in the current atmosphere of human rights inflation, while the international community and human rights organizations have succumbed to political and intellectual bullying on the subject. In recent years, acceptance of economic and social rights as human rights has become the norm and an unquestioned dogma, thanks largely to leftist ideological pressure and the heavy-handed influence of United Nations officials. The international human rights system is rapidly developing with a focus on extending these rights.

What is not generally recognized is how this focus has compromised the capacity of the international human rights system, and of civil society, to protect individual liberty. The issue thus needs to be reopened forcefully, to expose the problems of economic and social rights in theory and in practice. The issue needs to be addressed in both practical and philosophical terms, showing what has happened to human rights, and why it has happened.

In what follows, I examine the mingling of human rights with politics at the heart of the international system. The concept of human rights was opened up to ideological interpretations, and the field has been invaded by actors with political agendas. The international human rights system is losing its credibility under the influence of economic and social rights, leading to destructive doubts about the very idea of universal, internationally codified human rights as a standard for governments and a North Star for people everywhere in search of security, peace and freedom. The human rights package has become too big, too contradictory, too political. Any meaningful clarification of international human rights discourse hinges on removing or marginalizing the extraneous notions that have confused and debased our concept of human rights, and refocusing on protecting individual political freedom. This in turn requires a renewed understanding of the moral and intellectual foundations of human rights.

The need for this renewal is acute, because the cultivation and preservation of the human soul demand free societies. Particularly in the modern world, states and ideologies have shown their power to dehumanize through propaganda; to invade and manipulate the spheres of individual privacy and civil society; to censor and control the flow of information; to abuse the dignity of the individual with high-tech police-state tactics and biomedical technology; and to drain individuals of moral responsibility and accountability with intrusive and paternalistic bureaucracies that limit freedom and choice, and sap our initiative and creativity. Today, the very idea of freedom is challenged by fascistic, nationalistic regimes and by political Islam, but perhaps even more insidiously by the complacency and moral lassitude, and indeed the illiberalism of many members of liberal democracies themselves. Yet the people of free societies cannot defend the concept of human rights in its corrupted and weakened form without also bowing to those who seek to limit individual freedom; indeed, the concept is being used as a weapon against freedom. The modern world needs authentic human rights more than ever, but has largely forgotten their meaning.

As a human rights advocate, I am convinced that clarifying the way we understand and apply human rights is essential to the future of freedom. I ask you, the readers, to open yourself to my arguments even if you start by opposing them. I have come to my conclusions about the nature of human rights through many years of working in the trenches, in both advocacy and investigation. You will already have detected a political prejudice on the side of classical liberalism—a belief that the purpose of governments should be to protect individual rights and freedoms, and to foster civil society. My experiences in dealing with the ravages of communism and authoritarianism have convinced me of the superiority of governments that restrain themselves and defer to individual freedom and civil society. I own up to my own prejudices, but my purpose here is not to make a political argument against socialism or welfare states. I am in favor of government services to assist citizens in need; I am in favor of communities pooling their resources to guarantee minimum standards of living and health, if they so decide. But these are political questions that should be settled in democratic processes. Human rights serve to protect a fair political process, but they should not serve political goals. The consequences are woeful when they are misused in that way.

Eastern Europeans

I began my direct engagement in international human rights after a period of work in Eastern Europe in the years following the end of the Communist regimes. In the late 1980s, as an administrator at Boston University, I had tried to assist the late Polish philosopher and intellectual entrepreneur Krzysztof Michalski in his efforts on behalf of intellectuals in the captive nations of Eastern Europe. In 1991, Michalski invited me to his Vienna-based Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) to run a European Union–funded project to help reform universities and research institutions in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Both before and after the events of 1989, the Institute brought together many of the leading intellectuals of Eastern Europe to help them get up to speed in their disciplines by meeting and working with Western colleagues in a propaganda-free environment, and to promote an inclusive Europe. The project on university reform was overseen by a committee headed by Lord Dahrendorf.

Attached to an inchoate liberalism and with an intuitive hatred of communism, I encountered, in my work around the region, the detritus of real state socialism. My Eastern European colleagues were among the most intelligent and hard-headed people I had ever known—tenacious, principled, disciplined and shrewd. They had survived the forty-five-year nightmare of Soviet-dominated communism—after the murder of millions of their fellow citizens and the plunder of their societies by Nazi Germany—and had come out with their souls intact. They also recognized in themselves what one of them called the childish irresponsibility of marginalized intellectuals in totalitarian societies, with the melancholy luxury of narrowed possibilities. The Communist state had framed their lives with rigid rules and coercive enforcement, restricting their choices while providing prefabricated solutions to the existential dilemmas of freedom. Now they faced rising prices and the collapse of the social welfare apparatus, as well as the ruthless opportunism of former Communist apparatchiks. They strove to suppress their nostalgia for the slow pace and economic security of the past, as they coped with the burdens of supporting themselves and their families in the turmoil of the transition years.

In his New Year’s address after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Václav Havel told his countrymen in Czechoslovakia that they lived in a contaminated moral environment. My Eastern European friends had experienced and analyzed what happens when unconstrained state power marches under the banner of economic and social rights. The Second World War had killed millions and ruined the infrastructure of their societies, but communism had devastated their moral infrastructure. Institutions, including universities, were virtually all controlled by cynical opportunists who had made their way through the ranks of the Communist Party; all of the deans at the Law Faculty of Charles University, for example, had been Communists. The universities were littered with meaningless institutions that existed on virtually nothing, like fungi; they were already almost dead, but it was nearly impossible to kill them.

Everywhere one looked was decay and environmental degradation. A sickening brown air pollution covered cities with a nasty, sour smell. Consumer goods were flimsy and ugly. Horrid 1970s-type attempts at modern design in the form of brutalist, modern socialist architecture would appear among dirty, rundown buildings still bearing bullet scars from the war. Some Communist architecture, including Stalin-era state structures, can have aesthetic qualities, but most of what was built in Eastern Europe during the Cold War suggests an aggressive assault on the senses, on classical form and harmony, on the very idea of beauty. It was a demonstration of power over the sensorium, leading to cynicism and nihilism. A Slovak friend who had been imprisoned for his religious beliefs said the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia had killed beauty, emotions, and creativity. Millions lived in high-rise tenements that looked virtually the same from Hanoi to Havana.

Whatever the law did not explicitly permit was assumed to be illegal. The creaky, Napoleonic continental legal systems of the region had easily accommodated totalitarian rule, and continued to put the state first after its retreat. Societies were managed by state ministries imposing inflexible bureaucratic rules. The corridors of these institutions were tomb-quiet, with tall, padded doors behind which officials sat in largely empty rooms, frigid in wintertime. It all seemed like a Kafka novel.

The social mood was dark and subdued. Eastern Europeans still speak of a feeling of meaninglessness and hopelessness under communism, of sad faces everywhere, of people walking with their heads down. This mood persists among many today. Popular music was melancholy and fatalistic. Neighborhoods were quiet and empty; people seemed to move slowly, cautiously, as if to avoid calling attention to themselves. Few seemed to care about their health. There was a modesty and deference about them; the overbearing state seemed to have squeezed the ego and life out of people, dried them out. Constant surveillance, either by state apparatuses or by other citizens snooping on the state’s behalf, weighed heavily on the human personality, sometimes distorting it permanently. It destroyed the ability to speak directly, perhaps even to think without paranoid and twisted mental maneuvers. Questions were not answered directly, and letters often not answered at all, as the eventual destination of the written reply was unknown, and it could become evidence for a future accuser.

Decades of communism robbed people of their panache, of any healthy self-confidence. They felt that coercion had ruined them. Perhaps worse, they felt weak because they had not been faced with the moral challenges of a free society, and inferior because they had not been afforded the opportunity to succeed or to fail. Only the former apparatchiks seemed to have any optimism, many of them having morphed from corrupt Communist bureaucrats to managers of American and European development projects, or privatizing entrepreneurs. But among most who had adhered to principles, who refused to lie and cheat, a mood of depression and exhaustion had settled like fog as they took stock of the mentality problems that were the legacy of communism, an impediment to reform and the building of a normal society.

Pondering this mood of sclerotic caution and regret, I contrasted it with my own coming of age in America in the 1960s. I recalled the exuberance of the demonstrations for civil rights and against the Vietnam War that I had joined as a teenager; the passionate jazz and popular hard-rock music; the feeling of personal power in America, the power of positive ideas and hope, of defiance, iconoclasm, and moral rage freely expressed. As a college student I was eventually put off by the excesses and the utopianism of the protest era. What remained with me was something more deeply rooted in the American tradition: a feeling that individual citizens had the power and the right to question and confront authorities—not only law enforcement and governmental officials, but intellectual and moral authorities as well. It was a sense that the individual had moral standing, a feeling of personal freedom and dignity. I became aware of my refusal to defer as something I had taken from the political character of my society. Rebellion, and an awareness of the contrast between freedom and tyranny, was in our DNA. America seemed to keep up a permanent revolution for freedom.

The people in the post-Communist societies needed to be liberated both politically and psychologically. Respect for human rights, as I understood it experientially, would allow those people to enjoy freedom—not just the absence of coercion, but freedom as a shared sense of the value of the individual person. It would bring creativity into rigid bureaucratic institutions, and give more people a chance to fulfill their potential. Freedom and human rights would allow the people of Eastern Europe finally to take control of their own lives, their destinies, and their societies.

Whereas I had been able to enjoy freedom and human rights without having to define them, my Eastern European colleagues at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna had been denied human rights but were able to define what they lacked. The situation reminded me of Plato’s paradoxical observation, in the Symposium, that lovers love what they lack. I had enjoyed respect for my human rights, but they loved human rights, and they understood that the courage of independent thinking was essential. The Eastern European experts on the higher education committee made fun of political correctness in the West, comparing it to the suffocating ideological pressures of communism. The late Hungarian sociologist Elemér Hankiss, who at the time was trying to remove propaganda from the Hungarian state television network, joked that they had had plenty of PC in the CP (Communist Party).

Freedom enables us to learn moral lessons. My freedom, even as a child, had sometimes forced me to confront my own weaknesses and failures. Freedom could be bright and hopeful, or dark with uncertainty and fear. How I dealt with a multitude of choices and possibilities had revealed good things and also flaws in my character. Freedom permits individuals and societies to know the painful truth about themselves, and perhaps to change. Like a free personality, American society reflected both the moral virtues and the faults of its citizens, and it allowed a fair fight between the good and the bad. My Eastern European colleagues had suffered fear, restriction and deprivation, but what they resented most about the nondemocratic, collectivist political system was how limits on freedom either prevented individuals from realizing their potential or inflated their possibilities. The state had manipulated the natural ecology of virtue based on individual merit and moral choice, and the framework of political values imposed from above had deformed the development of personal character.

In my mind, the opposite of the arrogant and corrupt collectivism that had ruined Russia and her captive nations was a society based on human rights. The transcendent principles of human rights would be like the Law for the Israelites as they gazed across the River Jordan at the Promised Land. It was not a promise of utopia, but a set of rules to guide individuals and societies toward success in moral terms, through free choice and deliberate action. Human rights would put the destiny of oppressed people in their own hands.

The Helsinki Human Rights Community

In 1993, I became the executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF), and I have since worked closely alongside human rights advocates from throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in North Africa and the Middle East, and in a few other countries like Cuba, Japan, Iran, Pakistan and the Republic of Korea. The IHF, founded in 1982 on a model envisioned by the Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, had won international acclaim for its work in supporting Helsinki committees and political prisoners behind the Iron Curtain, indirectly hastening its fall. On my first visit to the office in Vienna’s 8th District, I met the IHF’s three employees in a rundown, ninety-square-meter apartment leased by a former Czech dissident. In the following years, the IHF was able to build itself out with the project support of the European Union and other donors, and eventually grew to encompass NGOs from over forty countries. In 2007, it fell victim to a financial crime and was forced into bankruptcy after twenty-five years of existence. During my fourteen-year tenure, we dealt, inter alia, with the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo; with two wars in Chechnya; with the rise of Vladimir Putin’s repressive Russia; with the harsh dictatorship in Belarus; and with the struggles of local activists to monitor and promote human rights in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The IHF was a bubble of clarity in the intensifying chaos of human rights politics sweeping the world in the early 1990s. As a diverse, international community of stubborn activists with a mandate to harmonize their approaches and projects, it was certainly not without its problems. Composed of local civil society organizations, and governed by them, the IHF was often pushed from independent human rights work toward partisan political engagement. A number of its associated human rights groups were really fronts for political parties using human rights to advance their objective of deposing or protecting those in power. Principled human rights defenders were forced into political postures by deteriorating conditions in their countries. Others represented particular ethnic interests and were not, in fact, committed to universal human rights. While the older groups in the IHF were clearly driven by principles, some newer ones were more political and attached themselves to human rights to gain legitimacy and funding.

The older human rights communities in Russia and Eastern Europe were largely composed of people who had made huge sacrifices for human rights, and were still doing so; self-interested dilettantes would never join them. Those Soviet-era human rights organizations were socially marginalized, often seen as irritants in the new democracies that did not expect scrutiny about human rights after the end of totalitarian rule. The activists in the dissident human rights organizations had obviously withstood strong pressures for publicly criticizing their governments and their contemporaries, and for defending victims. These people had little to lose except their principles—their most cherished possession, which they would not relinquish. Many faced physical danger. In the course of my work in human rights, six of my acquaintances, colleagues and friends have been murdered because of their human rights and political engagement, including one, a Chechen, gunned down on the street in Vienna.

What made the Helsinki Federation a unique family of human rights activists was its almost complete absence of doctrinal human rights dispute. Around the same period, formations like Amnesty International were ridden with internal, ideological arguments about expanding their mandates to focus more on economic and social rights, which had been given a strong boost by the international community and were also promoted by a number of powerful philanthropies like the Ford Foundation. The IHF members were of a diverse range of political persuasions. There were former Communists and young neo-Marxists who sought to preserve what they felt were the humanistic ideals of socialism. We had hard-core classical liberals who thought governments were inherently obstacles to individual rights and civil society. We had European conservatives and leftists. One member was an anarchist. They were from vastly divergent class and economic backgrounds, including some millionaires along with many living in pathetic poverty.

All the same, I cannot recall a single debate about politics in the sense of questions about social justice, taxation, wealth redistribution, or the like; people kept their political views separate from their work in human rights. The reason the Helsinki Federation did not suffer polarizing ideological debates is because its members focused almost exclusively on civil and political rights—on matters of principle, not politics. There was no rule or policy against taking up economic or social issues, but no one was interested in doing so, and there were no debates about them. Most of the members of the IHF did not monitor or advocate for compliance with economic and social rights standards, although some took up such issues on occasion in order to gain the favor of constituents or to impress donors, including some U.S.-based foundations. But most of the colleagues, having lived under communism, considered economic and social rights to be an ideological fraud that had been used by the Communists to justify and obscure repression. It was remarkable, in view of the fact that people in post-Communist societies had seen their social benefits dramatically reduced; they were deprived of economic and social rights they had previously enjoyed, and impoverished by the social costs of the transition to democracy. But the IHF colleagues nevertheless saw the realization of individual, civil, political rights as the key challenge in their societies, and focused on issues like censorship, unfair elections, arbitrary arrests, unfair trials, interference in religious organizations and other civil society structures, and legal discrimination against members of minority groups. For the same reason that we avoided partisan, ideological issues, we found unity in our consensus about the centrality and the indispensability of civil and political rights.

We understood tacitly that discussion about the allocation of resources, and about group rights, was political; that politics and human rights were different, and should not be mixed. Economic and social rights were different from civil and political rights in form and in substance. Not only did they reflect partisan positions, but they did not function in the same way as freedom rights. Human rights defenders should focus on the problem of freedom, not become social workers attending to the boundless needs of citizens. Unlike civil and political rights, economic and social rights took time to implement, and required bureaucracies and regulations. They were subject to a huge range of conditions, and to relative definitions and compromise. But human rights, according to their defenders in the IHF, could not be compromised. There were no excuses for violating them.

Real human rights problems could be remedied in straightforward actions, by changing repressive policies. Torture could be ended swiftly by government decrees and by well-publicized litigation and prosecution. Censorship could end in a very short time if governments and courts would stop censoring and intimidating citizens and stop prosecuting thought crimes. While organizing a free and fair election was a complex process, the main challenge was simple: keep politics out of it. The most important human rights issues were matters of urgency. Addressing them was not about finding compromises and gradually implementing long-term solutions, but about the clear-cut application of principle, by a government or a court, with measurable outcomes.

Human rights purism was respected at the IHF. One of the most intellectually astute members of the organization calmly explained during a meeting that there was no such thing as women’s rights. This was understood as a statement of principle consistent with the idea of human rights applying equally to all human beings. I don’t recall anyone recoiling in horror; everyone trusted the speaker’s commitment to individual rights, including those of females. The IHF gave special attention to the members of vulnerable groups whose rights were often trampled, and thus drew attention to how the human rights of women needed to be protected in particular ways. The distinctions upheld by the human rights activists in the IHF showed that the most important human rights are the simplest to understand and to enforce, and those rights are relevant to all people everywhere.

The acceptance of rational rules that protect everyone’s basic rights was understood to be the foundation of freedom in society, and the vision of freedom gave hope and life to human rights work. Freedom would allow citizens to build fair and just societies, if they had the strength and will to do so; it was the first and most important prerequisite. Freedom was possible, but it was not utopia. In accepting the legitimacy of civil society, one had to take the bad along with the good. Freedom was also not self-sustaining; it needed to be actively maintained. Threats to freedom would have to be continually monitored, and this required an engaged, independent civil society.

Human rights, oriented toward freedom, was not an overly complex or technical issue. The call for human rights, while clearly not religious, evoked the spirit of prophets who cut through the obfuscations of rulers, demanding truth and fidelity to the law. Like monotheism, human rights made each of us subject to the discipline of transcendent rules, and equal before them. Among our clients were people whose political and moral views we abhorred, and we often had to put our own opinions in a box, segregated from our obligation to respect the human rights of all. The members of the human rights community were like orphans who had run away from their national identities and loyalties, and their own sensibilities, and had found a home in human rights. Uli Fischer, a former member of the German federal parliament and a leader in the IHF, said that human rights defenders needed to be more loyal to one another than to their own governments. The basic freedom rights, our moral roadmap, presented a clear and accessible surface, but like the deceptive simplicity of Old Testament stories, they had deep human implications underneath.

Moral Challenges to Human Rights

The moral equality of all human beings, and their capacity for reason and choice, is the basis of the universality of human rights. Nationalism and the pull of ethnic and religious identities and loyalties acted as a centrifugal force against the ethos and unity of the IHF, especially when ethnic war erupted in the Balkans and later when NATO bombed Serbia. The ethnic nationalism driving Serbian aggression and violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and also present among Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovars, was condemned by human rights communities, but the chauvinistic hostility and victimhood that Tito had forcefully held in check raised its ugly head even among them. Cultural relativism has always posed an intractable challenge to campaigns for universal human rights. Ever since international pressure began to be exerted to respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, various regimes have used cultural exceptionalism to argue for special approaches to human rights that exempt them from honoring its principles.

The ethnic nationalism that surfaced in Europe in the early 1990s, and has recently emerged yet again, brooked no notion of individual rights to be respected in a pluralistic civil society. The nation loomed as the ultimate social fact and reality, and individuals had a meaningful existence only as parts of the whole. The unity of the nation had to be seamless and absolute, like that of an organism. History (generally infused with myths), language, customs, traditions, and attachment to clans and