Sifting through Politics in Human Rights – Women’s Rights

Postcard image - Chilean Mapuche men and women with foreign missionaries

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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See the final PART THREE of this series by WNN

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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 Monterrey 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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