*The Human Rights Crisis Is About Domination, Not Perception*
*By Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini*
29 June, 2015
*Countercurrents.org*
*W*hen Israel is criticized about its rights-abusive policies in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, the refrain most often heard among local politicians
is that the government’s *hasbara* <
http://www.hasbarafellowships.org/>—the
Israeli propaganda machine—is inadequate. The problem, in other words, is
not what Israel actually does to the Palestinians, but rather the inability
to get its positive message across to the international community. This is
usually referred to as *“rebranding Israel”*
<
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/foreign-ministry-pr-firm-rebrand-israel-as-land-of-achievements-1.255073>.
The underlying assumption here is that the merchandise is fine, and only
the packaging needs to be replaced.
Rachel Krys’ *recent argument*
<
https://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/rachel-krys/in-uk-public-discourse-undermines-support-for-human-rights>
about
the crisis of human rights is based on a similar logic, even though she is
writing about a different issue. She tells us that most people in the UK do
not support human rights, while arguing that this is happening because
human rights are presented in a way that is disconnected from people’s
everyday lives. She claims that if the public would hear less “negative
discourse” about human rights and more “stories about old people
challenging bad treatment, invasive decisions or the intrusion into their
private and family life”, support for human rights would be much wider.
Once again the problem with human rights has to do with perceptions, and
the solution, here as well, is hasbara.
The relationship between representation and reality is, however, much more
complex. It has to do with human rights themselves: the way they have been
institutionalized, the political projects to which they lend themselves,
their intricate connections to the state, and the alternative discourses of
justice they omit and repress.
We do not assume, as many human rights practitioners and scholars do, that
more human rights necessarily lead to more emancipation. Indeed, the
assumption that people would believe in human rights if only they better
understood human rights work is misguided. Human rights can, and often do,
enhance domination. This issue becomes particularly urgent when NGOs that
purport to criticize abuse align themselves with the very powers they
investigate and criticize.
Consider a *2013 report* <
http://www.hrw.org/de/node/119909/section/3> on
drone attacks in which Human Rights Watch (HRW) examines six unacknowledged
US military attacks against alleged Al-Qaeda members in Yemen. Eighty-two
people, of whom at least 57 civilians, were killed in these attacks. Yet
this is a mere sample of the 81 attacks carried out in Yemen, and it does
not include the hundreds of targeted killings in Pakistan and Somalia.
HRW argues that two of the six attacks were in clear violation of
international humanitarian law because they only struck civilians, or they
used indiscriminate weapons. HRW also states that:
“The other four cases may have violated the laws of war because the
individual attacked was not a lawful military target or the attack caused
disproportionate civilian harm, determinations that require further
investigation. In several of these cases the US military also did not take
all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians, as the laws of war
require."
The underlying logic of these statements is subtle, but very disturbing
since it exposes how adherence to international law can advance domination.
For HRW it is unclear whether the remaining four cases violated the law,
but if it turns out that the military had used discriminate weapons, taken
all the “necessary precautions”, and finally killed civilians while
targeting militants, then the "deliberate killing by a government" in
another country halfway across the globe does not in fact constitute a
violation. Phrases like “all necessary precautions” are exactly where human
rights advocates begin aligning themselves with military power.
Following the dictates of international humanitarian law, HRW goes on to
discuss whether the "terrorist suspects" are in fact "valid military
targets", whether the situation in Yemen can be characterized as passing
the "threshold of armed conflict" as well as whether the assassinations
adhere to US policies of targeted killing. And, although it acknowledges
the lawfulness of some of the attacks, it criticizes the US government for
not offering compensation to families whose members were killed as civilian
bystanders. Hence, as this report demonstrates, when human rights are
subservient to international legal discourse, the best they can do is to
call for a reduction of civilian casualties, the provision of economic
compensation for victims, and guarantees that future targeted killings
comply with the law.
Indeed, such reports underscore what happens to human rights once they have
been hijacked by the law and become a prism for debating the legality or
illegality of violence—namely, they cease to raise questions about the
morality and legitimacy of the law itself. This becomes even more striking
when reading the HRW report not only for what it says, but also for what it
fails to say. For example, the report cites Faisal Bin Ali Jaber, a
relative of a cleric and policeman wrongfully killed during a drone attack,
as saying: “We are caught between a drone on one side and Al-Qaeda on the
other.” And, yet, HRW fails to acknowledge that for Ali Jaber the drone
attacks are tantamount to Al Qaeda's acts of terrorism. This oversight is
also a consequence of the reduction of human rights to the formal dictates
of international law, an approach that HRW has doggedly adopted.
Regardless of the *thousands of civilians killed*
<
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones-graphs/>
during
the drone wars, and the terrorizing effect these wars have had on entire
populations, insofar as drones are armed with discriminate weapons and do
not intend to kill civilians, the US drone wars are not—in HRW's view—a
terrorist act. In this way, the law permitting the dominant to kill is
preserved and even reinforced by those who struggle for human rights. It is
precisely when human rights denunciations are articulated in a way that
complies with the sovereign's right to kill that human rights become a
discourse that rationalizes killing—what we call, counter-intuitively, “the
human right to kill”.
Finally, it is crucial to ask whether the HRW's drone report really
represents the population in Yemen. Put differently, the problem of
representation does not only or primarily have to do with how human rights
are portrayed in the media, but rather involves the fact that human rights
NGOs operate as if they had a natural mandate from the wretched of the
earth. In reality, however, human rights NGOs prevent human rights from
becoming a popular language deployed by the people for their
own—popular—mobilization. In this sense, human rights can never become a
tool of the masses, but only of those experts who claim to represent the
wronged population.
The crisis of human rights, in other words, is not really one of
perceptions. It is much more profound.
*Neve Gordon* is the author of *Israel's Occupation*
<
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520255319> as well as *The Human
Right to Dominate*
<
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/academic/law/international/public/humanitarian/9780199365005.do>
(with
Nicola Perugini, Oxford University Press 2015)
https://twitter.com/nevegordon
*Nicola Perugini *is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and
Middle East Studies at Brown University and the author of *The Human Right
to Dominate *
<
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/academic/law/international/public/humanitarian/9780199365005.do>(with
Neve Gordon, Oxford University Press 2015) *
https://twitter.com/PeruginiNic
<
https://twitter.com/PeruginiNic>*
--
Million
Received on Thu Jul 02 2015 - 02:06:22 EDT