Women News Network

MARIA H. LEWYTZKYJ for Women News Network – WNN
Editor – Katherine Rea

In part two of a ground breaking interview, Monterey Institute of International Studies MA graduate, U.S. born Ukrainian, Maria Lewytzkyj, talks with U.S. foreign policy expert, Jan Knippers Black about her latest book, “The Politics of Human Rights Protection – Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment.” In this interview, Knippers Black offers real advice to global women’s rights / human rights defenders and advocates on key issues covering how to navigate through regional and multi-national ‘politics.’ She offers global advocates knowledge in how to use ‘informed activism’ to help prevent ‘disaster’ on the ground for those who are in crisis need of aid and support. Too often, those who need aid the most are often the same ones who suffer the most from less than optimum government, private and NGO sponsored aid programs.

This is the second part of a three part series which will be highlighted on WNN in the coming days. To see part one of this series, “The Politics of Protection – Moving Human Rights Protection Upstream,” link HERE

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Early 1900s image of Chilean Mapuche mother and child

INTERVIEW: Part 2 with Dr. Jan Knippers Black, author of “The Politics of Human Rights Protection – Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment”

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Maria Lewytzkyi (ML): How do you suggest that the root causes of human rights violations be explored more in the public’s eye? For example, when you see a show or read an article or a study that talks about refugees in Sudan, or pirates in Somalia or other injustices in the news, what do you think that the media is doing wrong in telling the story?

Jan Knippers Black (JKB): One understands the nature of the news business and some of it is hard to get around. It’s hard to get people (in the media) to give a back-story and to give it in a way that makes what is happening now comprehensible. But they should try.

I think there is a tendency to focus primarily on the victims, without asking how did this happen and why did it happen, and without looking in the first place to the perpetrators and not only to the immediate abusers, but to the ones who enabled and promoted that abuse, and the system that promotes it.

For example, sex-trafficking is such a big issue now. Of course, it’s horrifying. So the immediate attention goes to the particular people who we identify as being trafficked along with the immediate traffickers.

But (in getting a story together) there are all kinds of systemic things that make trafficking more likely to happen.

Look at the kind of economic collapse that means public jobs will be lost. Most of those jobs, the ones that are lost every time there is that kind of meltdown that destroys the public sector, are women’s jobs. Women are left desperate. They have to be reaching for whatever looks like an opportunity for them. No wonder they are easily fooled into being trafficked.

You find more trafficking where there are swarms of immigrant workers, so we should make it less necessary for people to travel so far to do their work. That’s a systemic problem. That so much of the work force is on the move now.

Also, the war zones — that’s another part of the demand side of the human-trafficking business. Where you have a lot of troops gathered, there will, of course, be demand for sex services, so you will have people trafficked to meet that demand.

There are systemic features on the supply side and the demand side that we never seem to look at or try to do anything about. That would be true with almost any kind of (rights) issue that you look at. And when you get right down to the bottom of it, rights abuse is always about inequality, because the bullies don’t go after people who are just as big as they are — the ones who can fight back.

Where you have vulnerability on the one hand and impunity on the other, of course you’re going to have rights violations.

ML: What are your thoughts on Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman who wore trousers in public and therefore was convicted of indecency under Islamic law, and the trousers trial in terms of addressing human rights and Islamic law? She had a huge number of supporters.

JKB: There was an awful lot of support.

I think the trick is if you can genuinely educate people, if you can get them to understand — to allow themselves to understand what is going on – then, they really will support human rights. Most people believe that they support human rights, even if they don’t know anything about the particulars. But then, they don’t want to know more about it because it’s painful to know; because it puts an obligation on you to do something about it; to think about it.

Our problem is not that most people don’t care. They do care in principle, but we have to get them to care enough to say something; to stand up.

There was a poll, I think it was earlier this year or late last year, of 16 countries representing two thirds of the world population that said that they thought women should have equal rights and that governments and international organizations should contribute to protecting those rights.

So, it’s not that public opinion runs the other way. It’s that public opinion does not lead people to take stands that are strong enough or open enough to override the power of those who have too much to lose by acknowledging equal rights.Individual (acts of) heroism like Lubna exercised really does make a difference. It doesn’t always, but it does sometimes make a huge difference.

ML: How do those who feel vulnerable, powerless and recognize that injustice happens get their impact assessment reports read by the proper decision makers who are going to make responsible policies?

JKB: Sometimes, it happens because those who feel vulnerable are determined to organize broadly enough to bring demands into the streets, but it’s a really, really an uphill game. Any vulnerable group has to gain allies who are not as vulnerable and build layers of coalitions around them. A group also needs to organize anybody they see as being in the same category of vulnerability.For example, indigenous people need to pull together across all the lines they can.

Amazingly enough, a lot of that is happening! There are international organizations of indigenous peoples. There has been a lot of help from lots of international organizations and non-governmental organizations and it does make a difference. If the problem being addressed is one within a particular state, then a group needs alliances and coalitions within that state too.

It’s really a major undertaking, because governments are accessible (usually only) to the powerful, to big business, to people with money to protect and offer campaign contributions. It’s very hard for other kinds of people to get access.

1903 postcard image shows Chilean Mapuche men and women sitting on the ground with foreign missionaries standing above them in the background.

ML: In your book, you bring up conventions that protect human rights and the importance of conventions being written, but do you see them being used in current locations where human rights crisis exists?

JKB: Those conventions are very valuable. They give us a lever, a handle. But unless there is a category of people, a group, a coalition, a mobilization of activists who are willing to do what it takes to focus international public attention on something there will be no enforcement. In other words, having the conventions there is essential. But it still doesn’t do the job unless you have people who are willing and able to make it work.

ML: You talk about “collective rights” in your book, can you share with me your perspective on civil rights law and the chances laws have made in countries that have the worst human rights abuses?

JKB: One of the problems is that even if we’re able to get people around the world to understand that there’s been a terrible wrong perpetrated against a particular category of people, we somehow don’t get across to enough people what the background is.

(We don’t let them know) how ‘cause and effect’ works to make people vulnerable, giving people impunity. (How it’s important) to recognize when there’s another category of people collectivity whose rights are being abused and who need to see those rights protected.

Most people now understand about the Holocaust and what an awful kind of thing that was and some of the reasons for it. Most people understand something about the (U.S.) civil rights movement and how it overcame the terrible level of discrimination and abuse against blacks in the U.S.

A lot of people in the West understand the nature of abuse of women in the Middle East. It’s easier to understand abuses and protections when it’s somebody else, when it’s in some other country.

If you talked (with people) in Europe about the idea of whether people live or die in this (U.S.) country, depending on how much money they have, and that they can’t get adequate healthcare unless they have adequate money, and (most importantly) that people accept that, they would say it’s shocking.

Americans are immune to this (kind of thought), because it’s the kind of a violation that becomes routine and ceases to be seen as a violation. You can apply this to so many kinds of things. For example: the way land has been taken from the people who tilled it, country by country, all around the world.

When I first started studying Latin American affairs, it was so easy to attribute poverty and inequality to the Spanish conquerors and the great landlords of the 15th and 16th centuries. (This was) without noticing that the business of pushing people off of their land has been accelerated.

It wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse. It continued to get worse all over the world. There are still pressures like that on the indigenous people everywhere.

I’ve been working on the case of the Mapuche in Chile and taking students down to see first-hand how this works. It’s no longer the great plantations — the old fashion kind. It’s not the sugar or cotton plantations of an earlier day. It’s plantations of pine and eucalyptus, and other commercial logging operations depriving the indigenous people of their land.

This is the kind of thing you were talking about. How collective rights, as well individual rights, continue to be violated all over the radar, because people aren’t able to take what they understand about such violations, at one time and in one place, and transfer it.

ML: So, what about writing more civil rights laws in those areas to protect rights?

JKB: (Yes), we need tighter laws (everywhere), but that’s not the main problem in itself. The security trump card can now be played all over the world since the U.S. has introduced the war on terror and the idea that there should be laws that are applicable in a case when terror violations have been alleged.

This overrides other kinds of laws that might protect people. There were anti-terror laws that came in under Pinochet. That kind of thing, the insistence that countries should have anti-terrorist laws, was pushed by the Bush administration all over the world after 9/11. Laws like that are (now) being used to override other laws that were there to protect vulnerable people.

ML: How do we reverse that?

JKB: I think somehow it has to start with education. But that also means organization and coalition building and popular movements. How do you get them going? They also have to be in conjunction with communication media campaigns to bring political pressures. Then, whatever you can get going on the ground, you have to be able to funnel to decision makers. To get that kind of chain going is also very difficult. There is nothing easy about this.

Rights are not bestowed, they have to be won and they have to be protected. Otherwise, they will be lost again.

ML: Writing on the topic of individual versus collective rights, you wrote “Perhaps a recombination of supposed first and third world positions would better serve to protect the rights of the majority worldwide.”  Can you elaborate?

JKB: “The discourse,” and the use of ideas of collective rights for the discourse, has so often been dominated by the male leadership of countries where gender rights are so unequal. Then the discourse becomes a cover for abusing women. They say, “We don’t believe in individual rights, we believe in collective rights, and that includes our right to abuse women!” But what about the women’s rights? This is a sham!

What I mean is that the use of the idea of individual rights in the West has become absurd to the point of giving a priority to profit. Corporate personhood means that they can steal like swine in the name of corporations, because the corporations get away with pretending that they are individuals.

It is not really a priority given in the West to give individual rights; it’s a priority to the rights of the people who have the most money. There all kinds of ways written into the law to protect that.

ML: Can you give a current example?

JKB: We have a (U.S.) pharmaceutical industry that is able to pour so much money into the Congress that they were able to get a law that says that even though they can sell the drugs more cheaply to other countries, we cannot buy them back from other countries. They can make a law that makes it impossible for a government agency to make a deal with Canadian pharmaceutical importers and exporters to sell them back to us cheap. It’s absurd, the kinds of supposed rights that corporations get under that myth that we call individual rights.

ML: What countries currently have the worst human rights violations?

It depends. There are so many different kinds of violations. If you are looking at abuses in terms of categories of people, like women, well, maybe Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to say. There are a number of countries that abuse women systematically and straightforwardly as a matter of law, as in Saudi Arabia.

There are other countries where that kind of abuse may not be sanctioned by law, but it happens anyway.

Even in a very modern and sophisticated country, and in many ways a democratic country like Turkey, abuses occur like honor killings of young women, because women are in the company of men they are not related to.

There are terrible abuses like that in so many different places.

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During the reign of Chile’s notorious dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption, Canadian labour union reps, along with reps from Oxfam, found out that women were a strong force leading the fight for democracy inside the country.

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For more information on the topic of politics in human rights – women’s rights:

• “Feminist Activism and Women’s Rights Mobilization in the Chilean Circulo de Estudios de la Mujer: Beyond Maternalist Mobilization,” University of Arizona – Department of History with the Center for the Education of Women, March 2009
• “Women’s Forum Statement – Recommendations for Action on Development Effectiveness in Accra and Beyond,” Association for Women in Development (AWID), September 1, 2008
• “The Global Women’s Rights Movement – Power Politics Around the United Nations and World Social Forum,” United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), September 26, 2006

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WNN Foreign Policy writer, Maria Lewytzkyj, earned her MA in International Policy with expertise in US foreign policy with Russia.  She is also an expert in human rights, global conflict and victim redress, along with multilateral negotiations.

Jan Knippers Black (JKB) is a respected doctoral Professor of International Studies currently teaching at the Graduate School of International Policy Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies. Professor Black’s international experience includes Senior Associate Membership at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University; Fulbright, Mellon and other grants and Fellowships in South America, the Caribbean, and India; on-site or short-term teaching and honorary faculty positions in several Latin American countries, and extensive overseas lecturing and research. She was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chile and a faculty member with the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester-at-Sea program.

This interview has been edited by WNN editorial news intern, Katherine Rea.

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