Reversing the Rivers: A Memoir of History, Hope, and Human Rights

By William F. Schulz

From 1994 to 2006, William F. Schulz headed Amnesty International USA. During this time, he and the organization confronted some of the greatest challenges to human rights, including genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan; controversies over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the use of torture by the United States after 9/11; as well as growing concern about inequities in the American justice system, from police misconduct to the death penalty. Drawing upon his encounters with tyrants, the inspiration of brave human rights heroes, and collaborations with celebrities ranging from Patrick Stewart to Salma Hayek, Schulz uses poignant narrative and amusing anecdotes to discuss the day-to-day realities of struggling with life-and-death human rights crises. In the process he ducks an assassination threat in Liberia; brings tears to the eyes of the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland; and bests America’s self-described “toughest sheriff” on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect.

Full of reflection as well as action, Reversing the Rivers provides Schulz with the opportunity to address profound philosophical questions, such as “What is the nature of evil?”; “How do we foster the ‘better angels of our nature’?” “When may we use force to stop people from using force?” “Is the prohibition on torture as simple as it seems?” and “What’s wrong with an eye for an eye?” Most important, in an eloquent concluding chapter, he answers the quandary most frequently posed to him during his years at Amnesty, “Given all the horrors in the world you see day after day, how do you retain any hope at all in humanity?”

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824049

William F. Schulz

William F. Schulz, an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, served as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA from 1994-2006 after having been President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. He subsequently became a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, taught at New York University and Meadville Lombard Theological School, and was President of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Currently, Dr. Schulz is a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the recipient of eight honorary degrees and the author or editor of seven books on human rights. He and his wife live overlooking the ocean on the north shore of Massachusetts.

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Cover: Reversing the Rivers, A Memoir of History, Hope, and Human Rights by William F. Schulz

ALSO BY WILLIAM F. SCHULZ

The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (with Sushma Raman)

What Torture Taught Me and Other Reflections on Justice and Theology

The Future of Human Rights: US Policy for a New Era, editor

The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, editor

Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights

Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism

In Our Own Best Interests: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All

Finding Time and Other Delicacies

Transforming Words: Six Essays on Preaching, contributing editor

REVERSING THE RIVERS

A Memoir of History, Hope, and Human Rights

William F. Schulz

Logo: PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Bert B. Lockwood, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2403-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2404-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For Beth,

No better companion

for the journey

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.

—Adapted from the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 2:15–16

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. Welcome to Genocide

Chapter 2. Prisoners of Conscience: The Dynamics of Rescue

Chapter 3. Holding the Whole World in Our Hands

Chapter 4. Into the Maelstrom: Liberia, Northern Ireland, and Darfur, Sudan

Chapter 5. My Country ’Tis of Thee: US Domestic Human Rights Violations

Chapter 6. 9/11 and the Mainstreaming of Torture

Chapter 7. Star Power

Chapter 8. The Inside Scoop

Chapter 9. Despite Cruelty

Photographs

Common Questions About Human Rights

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Even at close to eighty, Lauren Bacall turned heads as she swept into the dinner party at an opulent Upper East Side apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She certainly turned mine, though after almost a decade as executive director of Amnesty International USA, I was accustomed to meeting celebrities.

"Aren’t you that dear little human rights man? Bacall asked when we were introduced, that oh-so-familiar voice tremulous and commanding all at the same time. Why, yes, Ms. Bacall, I said, I guess I am, stunned that she could identify me. (I realized later that since the dinner followed a benefit movie premiere for human rights causes, odds were pretty good anyone she would have met there might be a dear little human rights" person.)

After a few moments of chitchat, we went our separate ways, and then everyone was called into the dining room to sample the impressive buffet. We all took our plates to various corners of the large living room, and I was just about to tuck into the tomato salad when Betty, as her friends called her, reappeared. May I sit with you? she asked. Oh, Ms. Bacall, I said, I’d be delighted, imagining a chance to pitch Amnesty to her or, failing that, to have a long conversation about the making of Key Largo. Betty Bacall’s next words set me straight, however. Oh, don’t flatter yourself, dear, she said. The truth is I don’t know another fucking soul here. And then, apparently recognizing someone she did know across the room, she took off in a flash.

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From 1994 to 2006 I was Amnesty International USA’s dear little human rights man—the executive director of the American section of the storied human rights organization. When young people have asked me over the years how they too can secure such an august position, I have always told them, Be sure to know someone extremely stubborn on the search committee. That’s how I got a job for which I was largely unqualified.

It’s not that I knew nothing about human rights, but I didn’t know a lot. I did know about how to run a good-sized nonprofit organization, having been the chief operating officer and then for eight years the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), but I was trained as a minister, not a human rights specialist.

As it happened, one of the UUA’s top donors was a highly successful entrepreneur who was serving on the Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) search committee for a new executive director and was determined that I would be the organization’s next leader. He asked me to submit my name, and every time the rest of the committee quite understandably removed me from consideration, he would convince them to keep me in for one more round. Finally, probably to get him off their backs, the committee agreed that I would be one of three final interviewees for the job.

As I was waiting to go into the interview, the previous candidate emerged—a highly acclaimed human rights activist for whom I had the greatest respect. My heart sank, and after the interview I called my wife, Beth Graham, and told her I wouldn’t be going to Amnesty. They have a much stronger and more obvious pick, I said.

But I should never have underestimated the persuasiveness of my champion on the committee. When I was asked to be the final candidate and accepted, I began a long, complicated journey with Amnesty that lasted for twelve years.

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Amnesty International (AI) was founded in London in 1961 as the inspiration of a British barrister named Peter Benenson who, sitting in the Tube one morning, read of two Portuguese citizens who had been arrested simply for having made a critical remark about their government while they were dining together in Lisbon.¹ Portugal was then under the control of the right-wing dictator António Salazar.

Finding such repression infuriating, Benenson gathered a group of his influential friends and pitched them the idea of making written appeals on behalf of what came to be called prisoners of conscience. On May 28, 1961, Benenson published an article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners on the front page of the London Observer newspaper that announced a one-year campaign of letter-writing to governments asking amnesty for anyone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.²

The response to this appeal was staggering. Within a year, local groups of what would eventually be named Amnesty International sprang up in close to a dozen countries, with additional individual supporters located everywhere from Argentina to the Congo. It became obvious that a formal organization was called for.³

From the beginning, the way that organization was structured made for tensions that would plague it well into the time I became involved. On the one hand, Amnesty’s policies and decisions, such as who would be designated a prisoner of conscience, were set by the central organization in London.⁴ On the other hand, the genius of the organization was that it was mobilizing thousands of people at the grassroots level around the world and hence was highly dispersed and fragmented. It always struck me that this choice of structure reflected the mores of British colonialism—a central imperium (London) struggling to make the outlying settlements (everybody else) behave.⁵ This is hardly surprising given that the founders of Amnesty were almost all Brits, but it guaranteed no end of conflict since the age of hegemony was fast coming to a close.

Other characteristics of the Amnesty I knew were also born out of those early days. A determination to be perceived as politically neutral accounted for the requirement that each local group work on three prisoner cases, one each from the East, the West and the Afro-Asian countries, so that no one could accuse Amnesty of taking sides in the Cold War then raging.⁶ Eventually this evolved into a prohibition on groups working on human rights cases or issues in their home countries in order not to be seen as having any domestic political agendas. Until it was relaxed during my years at AIUSA, this so-called Work on Own Country restriction diminished the appeal of the organization to groups whose rights were being systematically denied in their own countries.

Whatever its faults, Amnesty was the first international human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO) to take as its purpose enforcement of elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a document that, after all, had only been adopted by the United Nations thirteen years before AI’s founding.⁷ Until Amnesty came along, those whose rights were being violated were dependent on the vagaries of their national authorities (who were often doing the violating themselves) or the far-off bureaucracy of the United Nations, which had plenty of other things on its plate.

Moreover, the vision that propelled Amnesty was an inspiring one: independent researchers with no preconceived political interests would find out who was doing what bad thing to whom (Just the facts, ma’am). Armed with that irrefutable information, average people from all corners of the globe would form volunteer groups to shine the light of truth on misbehaving governments and shame them into releasing innocent people, stopping their torture, or rescinding orders of execution.⁸ You didn’t need to be a soldier, a lawyer, a doctor, or an expert of any kind to save other people’s lives, and you could do that by something as simple as writing a letter from the comfort of your own community. It was a brilliant concept, and it earned Amnesty International the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Unfortunately, rarely is anything quite as simple as it seems.

---

My tenure at Amnesty International USA encompassed a period of enormous challenge for the human rights movement. Just a month after I took over as executive director, in March 1994, the genocide in Rwanda began, eventually killing approximately eight hundred thousand people. The next year the massacre at Srebrenica killed seven thousand Bosniak men and boys, and the first years of the twenty-first century witnessed the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. China was emerging as both a major economic power and, in terms of the number of people victimized, the worst human rights criminal in the world. And in the United States the aftermath of 9/11 prompted a series of human rights violations—including the torture at Abu Ghraib, mistreatment of Muslims, and the unlawful imprisonment of hundreds at Guantánamo Bay that still plague the country today. At the same time, the International Criminal Court was launched; the rights of women and LGBTQ+ persons rose considerably higher on the human rights agenda; and the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the execution of juveniles and those with cognitive disabilities. Amnesty and I were involved in all these developments and many more.

My purpose in writing this book, however, is not to recount the history of Amnesty International or the American human rights movement.⁹ It is not to offer a scholarly analysis of that movement’s strengths and flaws, many as both of those may be. This is a memoir grounded in my idiosyncratic perspective but written with the hope that readers may extract some lessons for the current generation from key human rights issues we grappled with in the 1990s and early 2000s. I want to reflect on the profound philosophical questions human rights violations present from the standpoint of one who confronted them every day: What is the nature of evil? How do we foster the better angels of our nature? When may we use force to stop people from using force? Is the prohibition on torture as simple as it seems? What’s wrong with an eye for an eye? I want to describe some of the people I met in my human rights journey, both heroes and villains, celebrities and common folk, and finally I want to try to answer the quandary most frequently posed to me during my years at Amnesty: Given all the horrors in the world you see day after day, how do you retain any hope at all in humanity? Along the way we’ll duck an assassination, be puzzled by a pickpocket, get to know Ted Kennedy as a man more than an icon, and tangle with a salmon mousse.

The idiosyncratic perspective from which I write is that of a white, middle-class American male. I have tried hard during my years working for human rights to be aware of the limitations that identity imposes on me, though I know I have often not succeeded. More important, I recognize the critique of the human rights enterprise itself and Amnesty in particular as products of a colonialist mentality, intent on imposing its values on others in the name of universality. This dynamic is especially acute when it comes to the traditional model of white Westerners rescuing those in the developing world from the malicious clutches of their governments or cultures, as I explore especially in Chapter 2, Prisoners of Conscience.

The predominance of white males in the leadership of the American human rights movement, as distinguished from the civil or women’s rights movements, during my years at Amnesty USA was striking. Only Gay MacDougall at Global Rights, Felice Gaer at the Blaustein Institute of the American Jewish Committee, and Kerry Kennedy of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights broke that mold among the organizations that met together regularly to coordinate strategy. Fortunately, that profile has changed not only in the United States but around the world. Amnesty USA consistently fought to expand the organization’s leadership to include people indigenous to the Southern hemisphere. To the extent to which I have failed to adequately correct for my own racial or gender biases, I can only hope that others may use me as a foil or counter-example for a new generation.

The Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote to her poet husband Osip before he died in a Siberian gulag, You know, there is a tendency to accuse you of not reversing the rivers, of not changing the course of the stars, of not breaking up the moon into honey cake and feeding us the pieces. In other words people always wanted the impossible from you and were angry when you did the possible.¹⁰ Human rights work often seemed impossible, like trying to reverse the rivers, but then every once in a while a victory would be achieved, a honey cake savored, and a small piece of history at least temporarily redeemed.

I read somewhere that the three most popular topics for books in the United States are sex, dogs, and Abraham Lincoln, so for a while I considered trying to write a book about the sex lives of Abraham Lincoln’s dogs. But the data on that topic is scarce, and I’ve settled for writing about the twelve years I spent at AIUSA. They were exhilarating, heartbreaking, frustrating, and triumphant. Also exhausting. I was away from home 60 to 80 percent of the time (I have an incredibly patient wife). I was ready to leave when my third four-year term was up, but I wouldn’t have missed those twelve years for anything.

CHAPTER 1

Welcome to Genocide

I had a privileged childhood. My family was not wealthy—my father was a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and my mother a homemaker—but I was well-loved, food was plentiful, and, valuing education as my parents did, I was sent to the best school in Pittsburgh, a private, all-boys’ school named Shady Side Academy, for the entirety of my precollegiate schooling. Our family had its dysfunction, to be sure, but there was nothing Dickensian about my growing up—no alcoholism in my parents, no early opioid addiction for me.

Perhaps because of my father’s profession and political views—he regarded Dwight Eisenhower as an overrated general and a worse president; voted only once for a Republican, stopping afterward in a church to be absolved of his sin; and quizzed me at the dinner table on which Supreme Court justices were a disgrace to the Court (it was a pretty safe bet the right answer was the conservative ones)—I came to political consciousness at an early age.

Though we lived in a largely monochromatic, white American cocoon, that consciousness included an awareness that the United States was far from the only country in the world and that white people were far from the only race. The former insight derived from grandparents who had regularly hosted international students, including Rabindrinath Tagore, at the University of Illinois, where my parents grew up, and a favorite uncle from Denmark who talked regularly of his home country and the world beyond North American shores. The awareness of race came from experiences closer to home.

In 1956, when I was six, I accompanied my parents on a road trip from Pittsburgh to Florida that required us to drive through the segregated South. Our first stop was Washington, DC, where my mother took me to the Custis-Lee Mansion, now called Arlington House, the home of General Robert E. Lee, perched across the Potomac from the city on a hill near Arlington National Cemetery. The house itself was grander than any I had seen before, but when we emerged from it, we came upon the quarters of the enslaved people, hovels that were dusty and cramped. Did people actually live in these? I asked. Oh, yes, my mother said, and gave me a quick lesson about slavery. It was only the beginning of my education on that trip.

The next day we crossed into North Carolina and stopped somewhere for lunch. At six years old I was very proud of being able to go to the restroom by myself without my parents’ immediate supervision, and so I headed into the room marked Colored. By the reaction of the other patrons—gasps, shrieks, cries of No, boy, no—you would have thought I had pissed on the lunch counter.¹

By the time my parents had retrieved me, I’m sure I was in tears at my faux pas, but they took this as what today we would call a teachable moment—the second of the journey. They explained that we were now in a part of the country where businesses separated people by race. They also made it clear that they didn’t agree with that policy.

All this was dumbfounding to me because when my African American friend Nancy came over to play, she always used our bathroom, and, when we drove her home to Pittsburgh’s Hill District, later made famous by August Wilson’s play cycle, I used the one in her house, all with no dire consequences to anyone that I could see. It made no sense that Nancy would have to use a different place to tinkle than any other child. This strange new world of North Carolina felt very alien to me.

My parents did their best to reassure me, and then my father, perhaps thinking of the Montgomery bus boycotts that had begun six months earlier, said something that in retrospect has resonated throughout my life: Bill, it won’t always be this way. At a very primitive level my commitment to justice-seeking had begun.

---

In a paradoxical way Shady Side Academy reinforced that commitment, though it didn’t really mean to. I was in junior high school in 1960 when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon for the US presidency, and I was just beginning to articulate my political views—or, more accurately, my parents’ political views. In the run-up to that election virtually all the students in the school wore political buttons. It did not take long to figure out that I was one of only two Democrats among them.

Far from shrinking from this distinction, I began to relish it. I realized that I had to master the facts and hone my debating skills or this Republican horde was going to walk all over me. Several teachers encouraged an exchange of political views in the classroom, and, when they needed someone to speak up for liberalism, they didn’t have a lot of options to choose from. Verbal jousting became second nature to me.

More formative than these intellectual contests, however, was my repugnance for some elements of the school’s culture. At the high school level, Shady Side had modeled itself on a traditional British boarding school, even though at least half the students were day students as I was. This meant that hazing of younger or less cool students was commonplace, and I fell squarely into the latter category. Derogatory nicknames and verbal teasing were tough enough, but physical abuse was also built into the ethos of the school.

For many years a quadrangle on campus had been restricted for the use of seniors. Should an underclassman be caught trespassing on it, the entire school, teachers and headmaster included, would gather around the Senior Campus at the end of the school day to hold what was dubbed a tea party. The offender would be stripped of his clothing, with his pants raised up the flagpole, and then he would be chased around the quadrangle by a group of seniors wielding a ghastly combination of paint, urine, and God knows what else with which they would pelt him mercilessly. I found this practice barbaric, and when I became coeditor of the school newspaper, I editorialized against it. Needless to say, this did not endear me to the jocks in my class, but to my astonishment the newly installed headmaster abolished the tradition shortly after the editorial appeared.²

The most exclusive club at Shady Side was a highly secretive group called the Sargon Society, admittance to which was predicated on the accumulation of a sufficient number of points through athletic and extracurricular activities. Most of the members were star athletes, which I most assuredly was not, but my responsibilities on the newspaper, in the drama club, and elsewhere were sufficient to qualify me to be tapped for Sargon in my junior year. For about six weeks Sargon plebes were required by senior members to perform various menial tasks and embarrass themselves by doing such things as dressing and walking backward all day. Finally an initiation ceremony was held late at night in the shower room of the gymnasium where, as with a tea party, the plebes would be pelted with noxious liquids until the attackers’ bloodlust was satisfied.

Such experiences fostered in me a visceral hatred of bullies. This would eventually contribute to the emotional appeal of a job in human rights, which often entailed calling out the worst kind of bullies. I also, however, learned a valuable lesson about the human heart.

After experiencing the debasement of being a plebe, I told myself that when I was a senior member of Sargon, I would not treat the new candidates with the kind of ferocity to which I had been subjected. When the time came, however, I too required them to do such things as load their book bags with bricks or lick the soles of my shoes. In fact, so demanding was I of those at my command that my fellow senior members urged me to lighten up.

What had become of me? I asked myself. That was not who I wanted to be—a ruthless overlord of the less powerful. Though I attended the final initiation ceremony in the gymnasium for the new inductees, I determined not to participate in the tea party element and instead played the role of that admirable character, the passive bystander to cruelty.

Years later, when I was at Amnesty, I met a fascinating psychotherapist named Joan Golston who explained how to make a torturer. The key is to first inflict torture on the trainee. Victimizing someone else then becomes more appealing to the apprentice torturer. By harming that other, apprentices differentiate themselves from their own victimhood, reclaim their power, and, in Golston’s words, are able to disown and keep at bay [their] own symptoms and psychological status as … victim[s] of abuse and terrorization. This is what Golston calls the torturer’s bind.³ On a very modest scale, that is exactly what had happened to me in Sargon: the nerdy kid who had been initiated into the fraternity of the Cool through a process of abuse, which a year later he in turn inflicted on others to assure himself that he was not a victim but a wielder of power. Cruelty lay curled inside my heart, just as it did in the hearts of all those bullies I hated, like a worm in an apple.⁴

In addition to providing an excellent academic education, Shady Side had taught me three things, however unintentionally, that would be very useful to me in my human rights work. It taught me how to debate and defend my position no matter how unpopular. It taught me to despise the mistreatment of the less powerful. And it taught me that none of us have immaculately clean hearts or hands. Or, as a banner in an East Berlin church put it at the time of the fall of the East German government, "I am both Cain and Abel."⁵

I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that what I experienced was in any way comparable to what victims of human rights crimes experience—only that the baser impulses of the human creature, the complexity of moral action, the nature of evil, and the possibilities of redemption were all issues with which I wanted to grapple. Oh, and the reality of death. That, too. Little wonder, then, that when I decided on a profession, it was the ministry that got the nod.

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After four years at Oberlin College, I headed to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I undertook an MA in philosophy and with which Meadville Lombard Theological School, the Unitarian Universalist seminary from which I received my doctorate, was affiliated.

A brief stint in the parish ministry was followed by fifteen years at the denominational headquarters, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the last eight as president. Over my years at the Association, I was deeply involved in social justice issues—from marching for racial justice, reproductive choice, and LGBTQ+ rights to being arrested at a Nevada nuclear test site. But I did not think of myself as primarily a human rights activist.

On the other hand, the ministry was not a bad background to bring to human rights work, though not for the ironic reason Henry Kissinger had cited in a 1975 conversation with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foreign minister. I read the briefing paper for this meeting, Kissinger told Patricio Carvajal, and it was nothing but human rights. The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.⁶ My experience with clergy was that they were a lot tougher and harder-headed than Kissinger gave them credit for, but human rights had become, in the words of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a secular religion, the closest thing we had to a common worldwide faith. I was eager to serve that honorable cause.⁷ Nothing I had done before, however, had prepared me for the horrors I was to learn about at Amnesty.

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The first human rights case that received significant public exposure shortly after my March 1994 appointment at Amnesty USA was a relatively modest one. A nineteen-year-old American named Michael Fay, who was living in Singapore with his mother and stepfather, was convicted of vandalizing cars and stealing traffic signs. He was sentenced to a fine, four months in prison, and six strokes on his bare buttocks with a half-inch-thick rattan cane. Amnesty immediately condemned the caning as cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, a violation of the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

Singapore was notorious for its rigid, repressive, and puritanical laws. Though ostensibly a democracy, it regularly harassed political opponents of the government and intimidated the press. Cosmopolitan magazine and Madonna were banned as being too racy; people were fined for failing to flush public toilets or discarding chewing gum on the streets; and whenever a slightly provocative scene occurred at a performance of the Singapore Repertory Theater, a red light would go on alerting the audience members to close their eyes until a bell signaled the all-clear. Caning, which was administered by martial arts practitioners and, as the government acknowledged, was designed to split the skin and leave permanent scars, was fully consistent with the ethos of the state.⁸

Because Fay was an American, the corporal punishment element in his sentence drew wide media interest in the United States, and I was called on to condemn it. I appeared in dozens of media interviews and soon learned two things that in one form or another I would run into repeatedly over my years in the human rights movement: first, that a majority of Americans had no problem with physical punishment if the victim was seen in a discreditable enough light—in this case, someone they perceived as a spoiled brat—and, second, that many people were seduced by cultural relativism, by the idea that Singapore had a right to do whatever it wanted consistent with its own values even if those values were at odds with our own.⁹ Because these reactions are so commonplace and go to the very heart of the human rights enterprise, they are worth a moment’s reflection.

The genius of human rights is that they are universal; they apply to everyone, everywhere. Before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was ratified by the United Nations in 1948, there had been plenty of other lists of human rights propagated around the world, from Hammurabi’s Code in 1771 BCE to the American Bill of Rights in 1789 CE. The problem was that Hammurabi’s Code applied only to Babylonians. If you were unfortunate enough to be an Assyrian, the Babylonians’ archenemy, you were out of luck. The American Bill of Rights is great for Americans, but it did nothing to protect the rights of European Jews, Roma, or gay people in the Holocaust. The UDHR was the first attempt by the world community to establish a standard of rights, a shared moral vocabulary, that applied to every person in the world. As such, it is considered customary international law, and every nation that joins the United Nations implicitly agrees to abide by it.

And what is that standard of rights based on? It is based on the best current thinking of the international community—as articulated not just in the Universal Declaration but in all the subsequent human rights treaties and conventions that have been ratified and gone into effect—as to what a good society will look like. At one time in human history, it was considered perfectly acceptable by just about everybody to pour molten lava over the heads of your enemies or pull out the fingernails of your prisoners. Castrate your adversaries? No problem. All smart societies do that. Today a government or military that sanctioned such practices would risk widespread condemnation. It’s not that such things or worse ones don’t still happen. Of course they do, as we have seen all too tragically in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But they are no longer considered within the bounds of acceptable behavior. They violate the norms of a civilized society, as witnessed by the widespread condemnation of Russia’s behavior.

Naturally it’s possible to disagree about what constitutes a violation of those norms. George W. Bush, as we shall see, constantly claimed that the United States did not use torture, but that is because he refused to define waterboarding as torture. All laws and standards require interpretation, which is why we have international human rights courts, UN human rights mechanisms like the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and international human rights NGOs like Amnesty to interpret those laws and standards. The one entity whose interpretation does not govern, however, if it flies in the face of rulings by these international bodies, is the individual state. The fact that Singapore may have no problem with caning (or the United States no problem with capital punishment) does not make those practices any less violations of human rights because human rights are based on international norms and law, not domestic ones. That is how human rights advocates get to say that those norms are the same for everyone, everywhere, including for obnoxious people, disreputable people, and even those we regard as really, really bad people.

So Americans who had no problem with the caning of Michael Fay because they thought him a smart-aleck kid who reminded them of their obnoxious nephew or those who succumbed to cultural relativism and wanted to just let Singapore be Singapore didn’t understand what human rights were all about. It’s probably true that most such people didn’t give a rat’s ass about human rights in the first place and were content to indulge in schadenfreude when it came to Michael (the little bastard is getting what he deserves), but that didn’t make Michael’s punishment any less objectionable.

Eventually, after Bill Clinton appealed to the Singaporean government, the caning was reduced from six strokes to four. Michael then returned to the United States where he denied having vandalized cars but admitted to stealing traffic signs. His confession to vandalism, he said, had been coerced. Though he told Larry King that he hoped to work with Amnesty to prevent the kind of abuse he had undergone, we never heard from him, which was probably just as well.¹⁰ Over the next few years he got into a number of minor scrapes with the law, but then—as someone once said, reversing Leo Durocher’s famous quip, Last guys don’t finish nice—abuse is not a way to cultivate virtue. Michael Fay is probably a very good guy, but fortunately, rights are not reserved for the virtuous.

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If the damage done to Michael Fay was relatively mild, other cases I encountered in my first few weeks at Amnesty were anything but. I was horrified to read in one report, for example, that the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were tying their prisoners to dead corpses and leaving the two companions to rot together in the searing sun. The human imagination’s capacity to conjure up methods of harming other human beings appeared to have no limit.

That quickly became apparent in early April 1994, when word began filtering out of the Central African country of Rwanda that following the April 6 downing of a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, members of the Hutu tribe had begun slaughtering members of the Tutsi tribe.

The facts of the Rwandan genocide and the world’s anemic response to it are well documented.¹¹ The majority Hutus, who made up about 84 percent of the Rwandan population, had historically been dominated by the Tutsis, thanks to arbitrary decisions by the German and Belgian colonial powers.¹² With independence in 1962 came Hutu-controlled governments and outbreaks of sporadic violence between the two tribes, resulting in a flow of Tutsi refugees to neighboring Uganda.