Bill Saunders:
Welcome everybody to our eighth annual Human Rights lecture. This is previous speakers in the program and the lecture series have been Robert George Chen, Guang Chen, members of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, Ambassador Sam Brownback. Father Kevin Flannery from the Gregorian, John Keown from Georgetown, and Carter Snead from Notre Dame, almost all of whom are good friends of our speaker tonight. I do have a couple of things I want to say. Marianne, you may want to sit down for a second. I want to say something first about the IHE. This lecture is the annual human rights lecture in the Master of Human Rights program and the Master of Human Rights program is a project of the IHE. The IHE is one of the Institute on Human Ecology is one of the nation’s leading institutes committed to identifying the conditions conducive to human flourishing from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing scholars from across the university, the country, and the world to think about these questions.
And I want to thank to our IHE staff, to our executive director, Russ Hittinger, who is here, to our managing director, Steven Higgins, to the rest of the team for organizing the event. And thanks to our co-hosts, the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition here at the Law School at Catholic University. We will… I’m going to have a little bit more to say about our speaker, then we will take questions and then there will be a reception. So let me say, for me, this is a great honor to have Professor Glendon here and I can’t be too brief, although I’m going to try to be brief, but I could sum up who she is by saying I think she’s the world’s preeminent human rights lawyer. She is learned hand professor of law Emerita at Harvard Law School and I’m so proud to say a member of the Advisory board for the MA in Human Rights.
I first met Professor Glendon at the Ramsey Colloquium, which is also where I first met Russell Hidinger, that was convened by the great Richard John Newhouse. And I just want to take a brief aside to say Richard Newhouse’s papers are here at Catholic University as is Professor Glendon’s, which is quite an honor for our institution. The first thing I think I did for the Ramsey Colloquium was a statement on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So that was in 1998, but my students will read that next semester because I think it was an excellent statement. Her book on the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a World Made New is the text to read about the subject. And again, my students will study that next semester. And I’m also just happy to recall the Professor Glendon served on the board of the organization that I started to aid people who were suffering genocide and slavery in Sudan again, many years ago.
But she is not only a human rights lawyer, but she is a human rights practitioner. She’s the first woman to lead a Vatican delegation, which was to the Beijing Conference in 1995. And she has a great account about that of what happened at Beijing, which is that you can find at First things. You can also find our Ramsey Colloquium statement from ’98 at First Things. I urge you to read them both. If you want to understand these things in more detail, I urge you to read them both.
She also served as US Ambassador to the Holy Sea and her recent book about serving in the court of three popes is going to be a discussion that we will have as an IHE virtual event in the spring. So watch your emails because I’m really looking forward to that. And it’s a wonderful book. Go out and buy it, read it in advance. You can ask questions during our virtual event. Most recently, she was the chair of the US Commission on Unalienable rights. In fact, the first meetings they had that were public, I took my students to that. And then unfortunately for everybody, COVID came and most of the meetings were no longer public after that. But the commission issued a great report.
It was the Secretary of State asked the commission to advise him on how human rights should be taken into account in US foreign policy. Again, it is a great account, particularly looking at two sources, the American tradition, but also the international tradition. Again, the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will read and study that in my class. Anybody listening to this lecture who happens to be interested in the human rights program, you can go to mahumanrights.com M-A like Master of Arts, mahumanrights.com. We’d be happy to welcome you into the program. So it’s my privilege to introduce really my hero who’s going to speak about saving human rights in the New World Order. Professor, Glendon.
Mary Ann G.:
Well, thank you and thank you Bill for that very kind introduction and thank you all for coming out tonight to hear a talk on a subject that Bill and I discussed a few months ago when he asked me to come down and gave me the honor of giving this annual human rights lecture. He said, “What should you talk about?” And I said, “Well, we both know that an idea that has been important to us for almost all of our academic and professional lives is now in crisis, and maybe this is a good time to think about why that’s so and what could be done about it.” So that’s the topic we settled on for tonight. But I want to start by talking about a little bit about a movie I found recently. Sometimes at the end of a long day, you really want to find something that’s worth watching and this is often a hopeless search.
But on this particular night recently, I was scrolling along and I found a 1947 film by the great director John Ford, you know him from The Quiet Man, the Searcher Stagecoach, and it is a movie you won’t find, I mean very easy to pass over because it’s called, The Fugitive. And there’s another movie that has that name. But this Fugitive, I looked it up and it’s said to be one of John Ford’s favorite film, something that was close to his heart, so I went, oh, I have to watch that one. It is set in Mexico in the late 1920s at a time when the practice of Catholicism was effectively made illegal and persecution of Catholics in general, Catholic priests in particular was so severe that between 1926 and 1934, a short period of time, the number of Catholic priests in Mexico went from 4,500 down to 334. And the film sat at that period is about a priest, a priest on the run.
He’s trying to escape both bounty hunters and government authorities. He’s in plain clothes, he’s no hero in the conventional sense. He’s terrified. All he wants to do is find a safe place. And he’s no saint in Bram Green’s novel on which the movie is based. He’s called a whiskey priest. And in the movie he’s clearly a man who has failed his vocation in many ways, but along the way terrified as he is. He does stop to administer the sacraments to people who approach him even though he knows that a betrayer may lurk among them.
John Ford introduces the movie. He comes on screen and here’s what he says. “The film you’re about to see is a true story. It’s also an old story and it’s being played out today in many parts of the world.” And as you students of Professor Saunders know, all of us know, it’s still being played out today in many parts of the world. That film came out in 1947. One year later, the nations of the world got together in the United Nations and they took a step that they hoped would shift probabilities in a better direction. That was when they approved the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. They proved it.
They liked to say, or human rights people liked to say without a dissenting vote, yes, there was no dissenting vote, there were eight abstentions. It was a very minimal set of principles, but they pledged in the declaration to try to promote those principles. And they agreed that those principles, that small set of principles were standards by which their conduct could be judged. Now, I put this Eleanor Roosevelt’s opening words when she introduced the declaration to the General Assembly. I put them on this slide because she makes an important point there that is almost always forgotten. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a bill or a list. She says it’s important to see what the nature of the document is. It is, this is her exact language. “It is a declaration of principles, of principles about rights.” Now, as you can imagine among political realists at the time, or at least people who thought they were political realists among international lawyers, there was a good deal of skepticism about whether a non-binding set of principles would be anything more than words on paper.
The most famous international lawyer of the day, Hersch Lauterpacht, wrote, quote, “It is not an achievement of great magnitude.” End quote. He predicted that its moral authority would be negligible, but as many new nations entered, the United Nations support grew for this non-binding declaration and its moral authority actually came eventually to be more influential than the enforcement mechanisms of two 1966 covenants that were enacted, that were approved to give it teeth. Those principles, I’m just recounting what you already know, they became rallying points for great grassroots movements that did the impossible. They overturned the seemingly indestructible totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. They helped to bring about the demise of apartheid in South Africa. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say they transformed the moral landscape of international relations by a knowing the principle from the of 1648 that how a nation treated its own citizens was nobody’s business, but that nation’s.
So the dilemma that confronts us now, why is support for an idea that gave hope and freedom to so many people? Why is support for that faltering and can anything be done to reinvigorate it? And those are the questions I’d like to examine from three directions. I’d first like to take stock of what actually are the current challenges? Why is the universal declaration and that whole project in crisis? Then I want to go back a bit and see what can be learned from the history of how similar challenges were dealt with in the past. In particular, I think it’s good to remember that the whole idea of universal rights, that there are principles that could apply to everybody was fragile always, and it was always going to be difficult to sustain. And then I would like to conclude with some thoughts about what, if anything might be done to reinvigorate the project.
So if we look around to assess the current challenges, they’re pretty daunting. For one thing, the post-war institutions like the United Nations, those institutions that we’re supposed to have been the core and the heart of what we used to call the rules-based international order. You don’t hear that phrase very much anymore, except when it’s ordered by wistfully or with irony, those institutions are becoming weaker and less relevant. And then there’s the sense of common humanity that had a moment more than a moment after two horrible world wars. That sense of common humanity seems to be losing traction with regional and ethnic conflicts. Some countries, some very powerful countries, no longer even pay lip service to the idea of universal rights. And even countries with strong national rights traditions like the United States are not as enthusiastic as they once were. They tend to downplay human rights and often in their foreign policy.
A congressional report that was issued earlier this year, states, “US policymakers are growing less optimistic about promoting democracy and human rights.” That’s even though by statute, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. And here at Catholic University, I think we have to say that even the Holy Sea, which once spoke out with a strong moral voice on human rights has often gone silent on gross violations of religious freedom, particularly in China, but also in some other places and even longtime human rights supporters, people who have given much of their lives to the cause of human rights, even among them it is common to say now that the project is in crisis. Now I have to see if I can go to the next slide.
Well, I may need some help. Oh, here, found it. What we have here, Professor Saunders, you mentioned the endorsement, the strong endorsement that First Things magazine gave to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its 50th anniversary. You and I hope to write that endorsement. What is this? The of first things now is against human rights and I think not really. I wrote a response to that where I said, you don’t really mean that. But anyway, he’s against what I would call the abuse of the concept. But you have debasement of human rights. You have a book by the former head of the Helsinki Federation who says that in the book, The Debasement of Human Rights, he says that, “Movement to which he gave much of his life has lost its essential meaning and moral power.” University of London human rights specialist titles this book, the End Times of Human Rights.
Now, whatever the reasons there are for that loss of confidence is certainly not that violations of human rights have declined. And the contrary, recent surveys attest that the worst sorts of violations, torture, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, human trafficking crackdowns on freedom of speech and religion have reached new heights in many parts of the world with Christians and Muslims being the main victims. So how do we explain the current erosion of support? I think to put that in perspective, it’s helpful to keep in mind how difficult it was to get the idea of universal human rights accepted in the first place. Almost everybody today assumes that the main reason the main impulse for an international standard after World War II was driven by the unprecedented death and destruction that occurred in two world Wars. But there’s more to the story to that and the rest of the story is more instructive for understanding the present situation.
So during World War II, allied rhetoric often said that we were fighting for human rights. But when the Allied leaders gathered together after the war to plan for the new organization that they would call the United Nations, the main things on their agenda were, and their main concerns were the security of frontiers. And to establish an organization where disputes could be settled among nations and hopes of avoiding future aggression. Human rights was not on their agenda. And when you think about it, that should not be surprising. After all, two of the so-called big five, France and Britain were presiding over large colonial empires in the United States, segregation was legal in large parts of the United States, and the Soviet Union had its own reasons for avoiding scrutiny of how it was treating its own citizens. But the absence of a common standard posed a dilemma for the allies when they had to figure out what to do with the principal, German and Japanese leaders.
Churchill, his idea was round them up and shoot them. Stalin’s idea was for a show trial where their atrocities could be put on display. He had experience with show trials and the American view was that they should be given a proper trial where they could present their defenses and receive due process. But there was a problem, as you know, the American view prevailed, but where was the standard by which the defendant’s conduct should be judged? There’s a principle of justice and nearly all the world’s legal systems, nullum crimen sine lege, no one should be convicted of a crime unless it was a crime at the time that it was committed defenders of the trial, most of the defenders of the trial took the position that the trials themselves would provide an international standard for the first time of punishment for what would later be called, crimes against humanity.
But many, many prominent jurists at the time warned that that would set a dangerous precedent, that the trials would be retarded as Victor’s Justice dressed up as a court proceeding. The chief justice of the United States, Harlan Fisk Stone said, and I quote, “The trials are a sanctimonious fraud and a high-grade lynching party over there in Nuremberg,” that some of you know was a dig at his colleague Robert Jackson, who had gone over. He took a leave of absence from the court to go over and become a prosecutor at Nuremberg.
The problem bothered people in the UN so much that work was speeded up on what became the Genocide Convention of 1948, which under which the most serious crimes could be prosecuted in the future. And in 1949 there were four Genocide Conventions. But what about a more far-reaching a broad international standard of human rights, the obstacles to that work far more formidable. Besides the relative lack of interest on the part of the allies, there was the concept of national sovereignty that had prevailed since the Treaty of Westphalia and the American Association of Anthropologists. Back then, anthropologists like Ruth Mead and Margaret Benedict, Franz Boas, they taught all of us college students that there were huge differences among the cultures of the world and they didn’t say much about common humanity. So they wrote the UN and they said, “You will never succeed in finding a list of principles that all cultures can agree upon.”
So in view of all that, one might wonder how on earth did it ever happen that the UN Charter begins 1945 with a resounding affirmation of fundamental human rights? And how did it happen that it proclaims the equal rights of men and women in 1945 and the equal rights of large and small nations? Just think how astonishing that would’ve been at the time. Well, how did it happen? After the allies had, the leaders had arranged everything that was important to them. They had what they called a Founding conference at San Francisco and they invited representatives of 50 nations to come to the conference. And many of those delegates were from what used to be called small nations, not small in size or population, but relatively small in influence. And many of those delegates, those men and women that came from near and far had their own ideas about what was important.
The general mood of that group reflected a phenomenon about which [inaudible 00:25:20] had written after World War I. He said that, “Wars on a vast scale so unsettled, so disrupt ideas about how things are that they contribute to a heightened awareness that the way things have always been is not the way they always have to be.” And so these delegates from near and far when they got to San Francisco, they formed a coalition to demand that the allies live up to their war rhetoric, which spoke of a fight for better standards of living in larger freedom. A phrase that is in the UN Charter, in the Universal Declaration, better standards of living in larger freedom. But their efforts got nowhere until they got the support of the one of the big five that was open to their ideas. And that of course was the United States where Franklin Roosevelt just died.
Harry Truman was the new president. The idea of better standards of living and larger freedom was perfectly compatible with the Roosevelt New Deal and with Truman’s Fair Deal ideas. So once the coalition had the backing of the United States, they were able to get several references to human rights in the UN Charter. And those references included the establishment of a human rights commission whose first task was to draft a document that became the 1948 Universal Declaration. Now as I mentioned, although there were no dissents, there were eight abstentions out of I think 57 votes and they were Saudi Arabia, the six-member Soviet Bloc and South Africa. But I think it’s fair to call that vote an impressive political achievement because the mere fact of abstention is some evidence that there are some things that are just so terrible that no one is going to openly say that they approve of them.
And some things are just so good that no one is openly going to admit that they don’t approve of them. So after that vote of approval, the votes kept coming in as the un expanded and the Soviet Union, even the Soviet Union eventually started thinking that the economic principles were all right if they were properly interpreted to mean that the state was in charge of enforcing them. So the principles, as Mrs. Roosevelt said, those non-binding principles, they became rallying points. They became rallying points for activists who pressured governments to live up to their pledges and they trained the very effective thing for a while. They trained the spotlight of publicity on abuses that would’ve remained hidden in former times. So again, the question, how did a document that had such power to influence and inspire for such a time, how did it lose broad support?
And as I see it, the loss had two stages, two initial stages. One was the practice of the United States and the Soviet Union, the two Cold War antagonists. The practice of, now I’ve got to change this here… a-ha, of treating the declaration as having two halves, the political and the social and economic. And the United States championed the one, the Soviet Union championed its own interpretation of the other. Well, that was perhaps inevitable, but it set the stage for something very unfortunate that happened later on today, nearly everybody, including dedicated human rights activists, treat the Universal Declaration as a list of separate articles like an a la carte menu from which you can pick and choose your favorites. And that went a long way toward undermining the declaration’s claim to universality for all of its rights. Now, the second unfortunate development that I want to call attention to is I the way after the great successes in the 1980s, the Human Rights Project, I would say it became a victim of those successes.
In the 1990s, there was a veritable explosion of human rights activity. Well sounds good, but wait. Established rights organizations and their funders began looking for new causes to champion and various special interest groups began seeking to have their agenda items declared as international human rights. So an article in foreign affairs at the time noted, quote, “Much of the human rights community has not only shied away from expressing qualms about rights proliferation, it’s often led the process.” Now I quickly have to say that the framers of the Universal Declaration never expected it to be a closed catalog. They expected that over time with experiences in different countries that knowledge would grow, there would be a certain expansion and refinement of principles. So they did not have the idea of a frozen document. They had an idea of principles stated in a general way that could develop over time, but they had two other principles that would keep that process more or less in the realm of having a claim to universality.
And one was that new principles about rights or new interpretations or new developments would have to show some plausible grounding, something that justified the claim to universality. And the second caveat would be respect for the principle of subsidiarity, which as Paolo Carazza has put this so beautifully, subsidiarity and international law protects, quoting here, protects the freedom and integrity of local cultures without reducing particularism to pure devolution and affirms internationalism without the temptation for a super state or other centralized global authority. So based on those considerations, the framers did include some relatively new ideas about rights. They included some social and economic principles that were part of the New Deal in the United States, and that had been in many European constitutions, Norway, France for example, since the early 18 hundreds. So social and economic principles to be brought to life in different ways. This is Article 22 of the Universal Declaration to be brought to life in different ways depending on the political organization of each state.
The Soviet Union could do it its way, the United States and other way, and depending at the insistence of India and Egypt, hey, we haven’t got enough money to do that right away according with the material resources at the disposition of each state. But it was not long into the 1990s after the human rights idea really shown its moral force that we had the conferences, the UN conferences at Cairo and Beijing where mostly western groups were arguing they were trying to get their agenda item of abortion rights declared an international human right even though it was not widely accepted in other parts of the world and often not, it was still controversial in the countries that were promoting the idea. So you were off to the races with the deconstruction of the Universal Declaration, and I’ll just mention a couple of other sources of disenchantment. One was simply the idea in many parts of the world that the human rights language was being used to impose ideas on them that were not universally shared and really not rooted in their own cultures.
A lot of resentment on that part. And then there was a disenchantment, a certain disenchantment with some international bodies like the Human Rights Council that were charged with responsibilities relating to rights, but were subject to pretty serious complaints of susceptibility to lobbying and political influence, lack of democratic accountability, lack of public scrutiny, and having some of the world’s worst violators among their members. So in some the hard-won authority of the International Human Rights Project always fragile. It’s been impaired from so many directions that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that by trying to do too much, it is often undermined its own credibility and indeed failed to do the good that was possible. Which now brings us to the question of whether the project that did so much good once can be reinvigorated. So one thing is certain the enemies of free societies hope the answer is no, and it would be somewhat reckless to confidently say yes, but I think one could feel confident in suggesting that the chances would be improved if human rights defenders would recall four elements of the wisdom of their very practical-minded predecessors.
First, the number of principles that many different cultures, people of many different nations can accept as a common standard is relatively modest. That’s why the framers intentionally limited it to principles that could be grounded in most of the world’s religious, cultural and philosophical systems. Not Neoism, but most. Second, universality of principles cannot mean uniformity in bringing them to life, subsidiarity. Vienna declaration puts it very well. “The significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind.” But a big qualification of that principle is obviously unlimited pluralism would lead you right into total devolution. So a third element of the wisdom of the framers limits the leeway for variation with the principle that no fundamental right can be completely ignored or completely subordinated to another. That’s the interdependence. The Declaration’s not a list. Its principles are interdependent and that’s made clear by hermeneutical instructions that are embedded in the Declaration.
All you have to do is read it. It’s one page, but it’s not a list. So fourth, the principle of subsidiarity, which is explicit in international law and which emphasizes the primacy of the lowest level of implementation that can do the job reserving international actors for situations where national entities are incapable or unwilling to address the issue. If you put those four simple instructions from their bits of wisdom from the framers together, one certainly can’t claim that they will save the Universal Declaration, but they would help and I think they would help to bring renewed attention to the areas where human rights movements had their greatest successes and where grave violations still continue.
I think a good place to start would be with the rights that are put first in column one of the Universal Declaration and the rights that were made non-derogable by the 1966 Convention on Civil and political rights, so such as protections against torture, cruel and inhuman punishment, retroactive penal measures, the Nuremberg problem forcible transfer population discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, nationality, and non-derogable means that these rights are so important that they can’t be suspended even in times of national emergency. Now I have to admit that with respect to the question with which we started that Professor Saunders thought we ought to ponder whether the project can be saved, I have to admit, the prospects do not look rosy. In fact, if one looks around the world for areas where the strongest support for human rights exists, you won’t find it among the nations at the center of the world stage.
In fact, interestingly, just as in 1945, the strongest interest seems to be among nations and political groups that by themselves do not exert great power or influence. I’d like to mention here, collaboration recently established between the world’s second largest political party organization. It used to be called, Christian Democrats International. It’s now called, Centrist Democrat International, second largest. First largest is Socialist International. The Centrist Democrat International is based mainly in Europe and South America. And the other partner in that collaboration is the world’s largest Muslim political organization. I dare say this is one that most people in the west haven’t heard about, but it has conservatively speaking a hundred million members, mostly based in Southeast Asia and it is dedicated to religious pluralism, condemnation of violence to further religion, condemnation of using religion as a pretext for violence. It’s called, Tanavatu Ulama, it’s based in Indonesia.
These two groups, this huge Muslim group and this centrist international political group got together in 2020 and signed a joint resolution which reads in park, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a set of principles that still can serve as a common standard for all nations.” I find that heartening, I don’t want to exaggerate its importance, but I do think it is plausible to imagine that renewal of the human rights project might come as in 1945, outside the center of the world stage, at least at first. And at any rate, that collaboration is some evidence that resentment of abuse and overextension of human rights is not resentment against the idea of human rights itself. And I think we’re all aware of how many people disappointed in misuse of the human rights concept of kind of come to be bitter about the very idea of the concept.
But these two organizations still think those 1948 principles could be accepted as universal. But as in 1945, I think it’s hard to imagine that gesture could develop into something could succeed in reinvigorating human rights without the cooperation of the major power that has the longest history of championing international human rights. And that, of course is the United States. That is why in 2020 the US State Department Commission on Unalienable rights urged the United States to resume its historic role and the role that it has by statute to champion fundamental international rights. Full disclosure, I chaired that commission, its members included Democrats, republicans and independents like myself, and we were unanimous on everything that’s in the report and urging the development for the United States of a foreign policy that would once again express American ideals as well as American interests. We were of course not naive about the fact that foreign policy requires prudential judgments of all sorts. And we went into some detail about our understanding of that fact.
But we also said that complexity is no excuse for indifference. And we pointed to the fact that the diplomatic toolbox is very large indeed, and there are many tools that can be used according to circumstances. But when our commission presented that report in 2020, there was a journalist there who asked a very blunt question. He said, “What’s going to prevent that report from gathering dust on some state Department forgotten shelf?” Well, it was a fair question.
A few months later, the incoming Secretary of State repudiated the report in a speech that indicated he clearly hadn’t read it. And so far the current administration has not shown any interest in reviving the report. So I have to remain hopeful that someday maybe somebody will investigate that dusty shelf and maybe actually read it and find some good ideas. But right now I have to conclude this talk with some thoughts about in the meantime what the prospects are for the International Human Rights Project. And I think most importantly, with all the disappointments, we should not forget how much that brave project after World War II, how much it accomplished and how it continues to accomplish many good things. Even now, the declaration does remain the most important reference point for cross-cultural discussions of human freedom and dignity. Even now, the spotlight is turned on and exposes many abuses that would’ve been ignored in the past, especially flagrant and repeated abuses.
And even today, most governments go to great lengths to avoid being blacklisted as notorious violators. And nor should we forget that the men and women who framed that project had no illusions about how difficult it would be to sustain. Most of them, after all had lived through two world wars. They had seen human beings at their worst, but they had also seen human beings at their best and they took encouragement from the fact. And I think we can take encouragement too from the fact that while human beings are capable of gross violations of fundamental rights, they’re also capable of imagining that there are rights to violate that we are capable of imagining those rights. We are capable of putting them into declarations and constitutions. We’re capable of orienting our conduct toward them and of making excuses when our conduct falls short. Now I have one more slide here. I hope I can do this.
This sculpture, I have a daughter who’s an art historian who doesn’t think much of this sculpture, but I think it’s very expressive. It happens to be on the plaza outside the UN building in New York, and I think it captures something of the idealism tempered with realism that is needed to keep the project alive. It was a gift from Italy to the United Nations. Some of you might be thinking it’s not very nice to give somebody a gift that’s already broken, but I think actually that was appropriate too. It’s suggestive of the globe, but there’s something wrong with it. Definitely. It might be cracked because it’s defective or it might be like an egg that it has to crack in order for something else to happen. And in fact, there is another brightly shining sphere coming along inside, but that one’s already broken too. Is that perhaps a suggestion of original sin?
Still there is a tremendous sense of motion of dynamism and emergent possibilities, and that’s how it’s been with the Human Rights Project. Yes, it is flawed. Yes, dreadful violations still occur, but it has inspired countless men and women to do something about it. And so far, even in times of break challenges, there continue to be men and women who come forward very courageously, step up to the plate, tell the truth about what’s happening. In the film that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, the priest is eventually betrayed, captured, and he’s hanged in the public square and the file scene shows a little band of men and women terrified. They’re huddled together in a darkened church. The church has been shut down by the government. They hear a knock on the door and they figure it’s all over for them too. They open the door and they see a young man standing there and he says, “I’m the new priest.” Thank you.
Bill:
Thank you, Mary Ann. Tony, should we use this microphone?
Tony:
We’re here for questions.
Bill:
Okay. So do you want to just recognize people in the audience? We’ll have questions now. How long Tony? 10 minutes or something?
Tony:
15 minutes, yeah.
Bill:
Okay.
Mary Ann G.:
Well wait, when don’t you…
Bill:
Okay, I’ll do that. Okay. So anybody have a question that you’d like to ask? Yeah, go ahead. This is Soledad Burleson from the Law School.
Soledad B.:
Thank you, Professor Glendon. It’s great to see you again. Yeah, thank you. So I was thinking if part of what had happened is based on that we didn’t have a common understanding of human dignity, and I see that part of the inflation of human rights had happened because of this idea of human dignity as autonomy instead of an inherent human dignity that everyone shares by the fact of being a human being. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that. It’s like going back to a minimum would require to come to a common understanding of what human dignity is or the foundations of human rights, or we can still continue with not agreeing what the foundations are.
Mary Ann G.:
I love that question, and you may be disappointed in my answer, but here’s what I’d think. The Universal Declaration says that dignity is the foundation of all human rights. I think dignity has been so susceptible to deconstruction. Everybody has a concept of human dignity that would support a version of human rights. I think we really can’t do better than what Jacques Maritain and the other philosophers of multicultural group, many religions and philosophies. Back in 1947, they looked at the question of whether there can be foundations of human rights. I think a lot of doubt has been cast on whether dignity can do the work. And so the conclusion I’m agreeing with the conclusion of Maritain and others, they said they thought this is a hypothesis, but their hypothesis is that foundations for the concept of a small core of fundamental rights could be found in most of the world’s cultural, philosophical, and religious systems.
But they won’t be the same foundations, Maritain said, for practical purposes. That’s all right. So I had another slide that I spared you all. This is my own original artwork here. The other slide that I had was a picture of a table, a platform with a lot of legs. And I think that represents the vision of the UNESCO philosophers. You have a platform that will support the fragile concept of human rights, and it’s got sturdy legs, but not just one.
Bill:
Okay. Excuse me. Next. Anybody else? Okay.
Hannah:
Hi, my name is Hannah. I am a hopeful, a PhD candidate and a professor. Words are my business and I would like to be a good businesswoman. And I was wondering if I could get your thoughts. I heard perhaps some of this thought implicitly in a part of your talk, and I wanted to hear your thoughts further on it. I’ve been here in DC in the political and intellectual milieu for about four years now, and it’s my impression and only an impression, but an informed one in my opinion that the abuse of words and misleading words coming from the milieu, which I love and have chosen as the work of my life, Catholic intellectual life, that the abuse of these words. I mean, to give an example on the slide, this first things article, which the sad thing is people do judge books by their covers.
And so the impression given by the title against human rights is that a Catholic position, a first things position is to be against human rights. And I’m thinking in a stream, in a tradition, I’m thinking Henri de Lubac’s drama of atheist humanism, which is a problem in the world, begins in the church and many of the sins that we see outside the church our first hours. And so what I hear, and so I’m asking for myself in this project of renewing this language of human rights. Our words really matter. Christ is the word of God who reveals that God is love. Our words are measured by the reality that his words create. Did I hear that implied in some of your talk about the use of words, this rights talk, and how can myself and perhaps others here, I’m sure many others here, how is it that we can participate in this renewal of the human rights project with the correct use of words and the impressions they create in people who are looking for it, who are looking for truth?
Mary Ann G.:
You know what I would love to ask you to read an essay by Vaclav Havel, a great wordsmith, human rights activist and poet, Czech president. He wrote an essay a long time ago in the New York review of books called something like, The Tyranny of Words. And here he is, the poets were the first to notice that there was going to be a problem with language in the human rights project, Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, Havel, the playwright in Czechoslovakia, they said things like, “Words can be inspiring and powerful. They also can be lethal errors.” I mean, what it all was pointing to is there’s got to be a philosophical grounding behind the language. The language can’t be separated from the concepts.
I do want to say about against human rights and First Things, that was none of the positions expressed by First Things are Catholic positions only. That is the statement that we worked on was multi-religious. And when the editor first thing speaks in his editorial capacity, he speaks foreign interfaith project. But part of the problem with human rights is that the words by themselves have been pulled up by the roots. And so you have one of the reasons why there’s a problem with dignity as foundational as the good words get snapped up by people without such good motives. And you have dignity in dying as a slogan for helping people to shovel off when they get old and sick.
Bill:
Or forcing them to do it before they’re ready.
Mary Ann G.:
Yeah. Right.
Bill:
Yeah. Okay. Who? Yeah. Good.
Speaker 5:
Ambassador, I wanted to get your take on two problems I see as a human rights practitioner myself. The first is a methodological problem. And I wonder how you in the future, if there is this renewal of human rights, how we would even know the renewal was occurring? Other than just sort of general sentiment of what’s happening in a culture around the world. How would one measure whether or not appreciation for human rights has actually increased? And how would we know it was this sort of right type of human rights as opposed to ones that we’ve seen in the last few decades that are manipulated?
The second is a communication problem, and that is having served as a diplomat yourself, how does one effectively communicate the importance of human rights when your interlocutor across the table could be an abuser himself. It’s not a very effective, when you’re sort of accusing someone across the table of a gross human rights violation. I don’t think that’s a recipe for productive dialogue necessarily. And when you have a laundry list of other agenda items that don’t have to do with human rights, how do you face that communication problem? Thanks.
Mary Ann G.:
Well as to your first question about how would we know if a change had started? I think we only know those things with hindsight, right? I mean, after a period of time, you look back on a period when there’s been big talk about human rights and terrible things happened, 1990s, whatever was going on there wasn’t working. How did those astonishing events take place in the 1980s? I think historians look back and political theorists look back and they try to figure out not an exact science. And as to your second question, well of course that’s the great question for foreign policy for every country, and it’s a question that is particularly acute for the United States because the United States does have so much leverage.
But as you know, when I mentioned that the diplomatic toolbox is very large, there are so many tools in that box from sometimes persuasion works. I got your very question of the hypothetical interlocutor. Lots of times when you’re just going to get a cold hard stare across the table. But the tools in the toolbox are many and subtle. And so I think that the thrust of our 2020 report is diplomats have the tools. They know how to use them, they know how to adjust them to different circumstances. Why aren’t they using them? Why the silence? But whoever figures out the answer to that question should get a big prize. I’m not going to say Nobel, but…
Bill:
Say who else? Anybody else?
Speaker 6:
Hi, Mary Ann. Good to see you again.
Mary Ann G.:
Oh, hi.
Speaker 6:
I wonder if you could just reflect a little on the connection between human rights and democracy, because the trajectory you’re describing of an advancement of human rights from the mid-20th century to the end of the 20th century, and then this decline of human rights in the 21st is the same exact. If we mapped it out on a graph, it would be the same exact trajectory as the expansion of democracy from the end of the second world war, with the end of colonialism, all these new democracies arise, they continue to arise with the end of the Soviet Union. And then this democratic decline that we’re in now, no new democracies since 2011, and for the first time Democratic backsliding in existing established democracies including the United States. So I wonder if you have any reflections on those connections between those two dramatic backsliding?
Mary Ann G.:
Yeah, beautiful question. Thank you. Yeah. There’s a reason why in that short list of interdependent articles, the Universal Declaration has a right to democratic participation in government. And we should, when we talk about human rights, we should always combine it with talking about democracy. Because where do, I’m quoting Eleanor Roosevelt again, “Where do human rights begin?” She says, “They begin in the small places,” and it’s in the small places, subsidiarity where the democratic processes of bargaining, education, persuasion, and voting take place. And that’s where you have the opportunity to win over your fellow citizens with the strength of your argument. And if you don’t win them over, if you lose, you can vote and vote another time.
And this is one of the big factors that has contributed to the decline of faith in human rights is you have higher level decision makers prematurely closing off that process. And there’s good arguments to be made that if the courts thinking about the European Court of Human Rights, but also on occasion our own Supreme Court, if they had the Democratic process work, that maybe adjust and sensible acceptable solution to many of our problems would’ve been worked out at that level. It’s a wonderful question and there’s so much more to say about it. Bless you for asking it.
Bill:
Okay. I think this will be the final question.
Speaker 7:
Hello. I would like to have your thoughts on the use of modern technology, which is providing even more sophisticated and powerful tools to certain organizations, governments, to actually trample on the rights of we, the people. I’m thinking, think what they did to us during COVID. Think what they’re doing right now in Western Europe, UK, where you can be arrested for saying the wrong word on social media, talk control with AI and so forth. Thank you.
Mary Ann G.:
Well, you’ve put your finger on the fact that new challenges are always coming along. Challenges that we couldn’t have imagined in 1948, and I can’t say much more to you than we said in our report, which was to notice this as a new challenge and one that really needs to be taken seriously. And I thank you for raising the question, and I wish I could say more about it.
Bill:
Please join me in thanking Professor Glendon.
Mary Ann G.:
Thank you.
Bill:
I would just say just on the last question, we did have a special bioethics lecture about AI, about, I don’t know, a month ago, which is up on the IHE website. So now join us for reception. Thank you.