September 11 and Human Rights

The excuse of 9/11 has been used not only to curtail human rights in the United States--which some here are challenging--but also around the world. The human rights system is in trouble when the US government pulls out of global agreements like the ABM treaty, aggressively works to undermine new instruments like the International Criminal Court and says it is not bound by international commitments made by previous administrations, such as the Beijing Women's Conference Platform--parts of which its delegation renounced at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in March 2002. All international treaties and human rights conventions depend on the assumption that a country is bound by previous agreements and cannot simply jettison them with every change of administration. This erosion of respect for human rights also appears in the US media, where some mainstream journalists have defended, as a necessary part of the war on terrorism, the Bush Administration's defiance of international norms regarding political prisoners, and even suggested that the (selective) use of torture may be justified. These are the kinds of arguments put forward by governments that torture and abuse rights and are contrary to the most accepted tenets of human rights.

Indeed, the erosion of the US commitment to human rights helps legitimize the abuses of governments that have never fully accepted or claimed these standards. For while the US government has often been hypocritical in its human rights policies, open disregard for international standards goes a step further and thus strengthens fundamentalist governments and forces that seek to deny human rights in general, and the rights of women in particular.

Ironically, even as public discourse demonizes Islamic fundamentalists, the unholy alliance of the Vatican, Islamic fundamentalists and right-wing US forces is still working together when it comes to trying to defeat women's human rights. Feminists encountered this alliance in full force at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994) and at the World Conference on Women at Beijing (1995), as well as during the five-year reviews of those events in 1999 and 2000. One need only look at the allies of the Bush Administration at the UN children's summit in May 2002--such as the Holy See, Sudan, Libya, Iraq and other gulf states--to understand that this alliance is still functioning globally. We need to closely track the connections among various antifeminist "fundamentalist" forces, not only at the UN but in other arenas as well, such as in the making of world health policies, or even in the passage of anti-women's rights national legislation in countries where outside forces have played a key role.

A high-profile example of how the Bush Administration is seeking to weaken the UN's role in protecting human rights was its effort to insure that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, would not get a second term. She was among the first to frame her response to 9/11 from the perspective of international law, by suggesting that these acts of terrorism be prosecuted internationally as crimes against humanity rather than used as a call to war, but she was quickly sidelined. Because of this, along with her efforts to make the World Conference Against Racism a success in spite of the US contempt for it, the Bush Administration adamantly opposed her reappointment. This opposition dovetailed with that of a number of other governments unhappy with her attention to their human rights abuses. Robinson is only one of the UN officials the Bush Administration has targeted in its efforts to purge the institution of its critics and anyone else promoting policies not to its liking.

The Bush Administration's policies post-9/11 have provided cover for other governments, such as China, Pakistan, Russia and Egypt, to jettison even a rhetorical commitment to certain human rights in the name of fighting terrorism or providing for national security, or for some countries even in Europe it has been an opportunity simply to label issues like racism and violence against women as lower-priority concerns. This has a particular impact on women because it reverses the broadening of the human rights paradigm, which had begun to encompass issues like violence against women and to focus more on socioeconomic rights in the 1980s and '90s.

Women's rights advocates are still seen as the new kids on the human rights block. Feminists only recently won the recognition of women's rights as human rights, and that is now jeopardized even before those rights have been fully accepted and mechanisms for their protection institutionalized. The need to articulate a feminist approach to global security that insures human rights and human security, and recognizes their interrelationship, is therefore more urgent than ever.

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