Are Human Rights "Real"? (with Dr Sharath Srinivasan)

[Music] Hi, and welcome to the first episode of Declarations. The Human Rights Podcast run out of the center of governance and human rights, CGHR for short, here at the University of Cambridge. With every episode, we'll be exploring contemporary debates about politics and human rights with people who study them and people who fight for them, both here in the UK and around the world. My name is Scott Novak and I'll be your host on today's show. I'm a graduate student here in Cambridge studying international relations and politics. On this first episode of Declarations, we had a lively discussion with CGHR Director Dr. Sharath Shrinavassan and the rest of our panel about what human rights are, how the idea of human rights can be used as a justification for violence, and in what sense human rights are real. I was joined in our recording studio by some fellow CGHR members Matt, Talia, Eva, and Max. Hello everyone, welcome to the first episode of Declarations. Hi guys, my name is Matt Mamoudi. It's great to be kicking off this project with you today. I'm currently doing an Emphelan Development Studies, a Decentre of Development Studies, and my focus is on xenophobia and migration. I'm also currently working on a human rights supporting platform called The Whistle. Hi, I'm Talia Zibetz. I'm also on the politics masters here at Cambridge, and I'm researching human rights in times of emergency. Hi, I'm Eva Mell, I'm very happy to be here. I'm on the International Law Program, specializing the human rights and civil liberties. Hi, I'm Max. I'm doing my masters in politics here. I've worked in places like the State Department, and I'm doing my dissertation on the internet and the state. Great, thank you all for being here. This is our full student panel at the CGHR Declarations podcast. We won't all be on every show, so sometimes it'll be just one or two of us interviewing our guests. But for our first show, we are all here today. Speaking of guests, our guest on today's show is Dr. Sharath Shrinivasan, Director of the Center of Governance and Human Rights here at Cambridge. Sharath is also a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies, where he specializes in politics and change in Sub-Saharan Africa. And we are delighted to have him with us today. Thank you so much for joining us. It's great to be here, Scott. Thanks a lot. So our topic for today is "Conceptions of Human Rights." So human rights is a term that is used a lot in politics, but what does it actually mean? And what do we make of conflicting definitions over what is and is not a human right? So I guess I'll start off with you, Sharath, and then open it up to the rest of the panel. As an academic whose work focuses on human rights, what do you think human rights are and why should the average citizen care about them? It's a great question to start with, Scott. I mean, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what I think human rights are. It's what do you think human rights are? What do lawyers at the United Nations think human rights are? What do corporations who feel that they need to navigate the realm of human rights when they operate in distant countries? What do they think human rights are? What do activists on the street in Cairo, entire square think human rights are? What we know about human rights is that it takes legal forms, declarations, you end treaties, the like. But it also is a language of mobilisation, of contentious politics, of people making claims. And that language really is very diverse and the human rights that are in treaties are contested, they change, they evolve. What's interesting about human rights is how it has risen to prominence as a language of claim-making and of configuring relations between those who hold power, those who are subject to power, those who are contesting power, and how that's evolved and grown as a language of our times. I think that's what human rights are and why should the average citizen care about it? Because I think human rights is a very important way through which we understand increasingly the complex relationships, the political relationships in our world. It's a language through which we can understand those relationships, contest them, resist directions that the world is taking and support others who we feel need our support in their cause. It's a language that allows us to do this and if we might not always agree with what human rights are, but that language is quite precious in a sense because it's common to us all. Certainly. So what you're saying is that there are a space, human rights are a space for claim-making. However, we know that a variety of actors can use this space for different things. So in what sense can human rights be co-opted by actors that may not actually have the best of intentions, for example? So what I'm thinking of is in 2003, there was in justifying the invasion of Iraq, President George Bush, used this concept of human rights. As partly as a justification for invading, the country is saying we have to show Iraqi women what liberation is, we have to show them what liberal democracy is. And so it wasn't this nice, very beautiful human rights language, but what actually happened on the ground there was arguably very not in line with our notions of what human rights actually are. So how do we, is there any way to control who uses this very powerful emotional language of what human rights are? It doesn't make sense. Yeah, it does make sense. And I think it is because it's a language that's a bit free-floating that can take many different shapes and forms that can be used and abused. It's always in contention. And yes, it will be co-opted and it will be in some senses abused compared to what we think the right human rights are, whoever we are and whatever right is. But that's actually makes it part of the game in town. So you could say, for example, that the US invasion of Iraq, obviously with British support and very much in the name of human rights here as well. Yes, it was a co-option and an abuse of that terminology. But it also became the language through which the critique of that invasion was made. So a lot of people thought at the time during the war on terror that in the sense human rights was dead, the bastions of human rights were themselves now human rights abusers in the name of security. But what also became revealed quite quickly was that the language returned as a kind of tempering device, a language of resistance against those tendencies, that then led to new reformulations. It doesn't say that the abuse of power goes away entirely, but the abuse of power has to reconfigure itself because of a language of dissent, because of a language of accountability. I think one of the most important questions that essential to this debate is, for one thing, are people fundamentally good? I don't think that's necessarily true, but that's something that is very important in human rights discourse. We often are wondering, how do we define good and does that define how people are? But I don't think necessarily people are good, but I do believe that people are fundamentally social. So one of the things that I'm trying to think about is how, like I said, Scott, President Bush, when he cast human rights as this struggle of good versus evil, in which terrorists hate human rights and the United States loves them, even as we're bombing people with flying robots. There's this sense in which we argue that good states value human rights, bad states or non-states don't, because ultimately states are the people who can enforce rights claims, if you see what I mean. So what I mean is the difference between good and the difference between social is really, really central for human rights, because it's about, like Shrath is saying, how we relate to each other, and not how we necessarily moralize about who's good and who's bad. I think a lot of our listeners might be surprised to hear this discussion of human rights solely in terms of a lingua franca and the politics of contention and how we interact with others, because, and I'm either, I'm sure you can speak to this coming from a legal background, but to me initially, when I think of human rights, I think of a legal claim, like the right for association, the right for free speech, and I think there is a sense, especially as you were talking about max in the context of states, which human rights are legal rights, and maybe they do have some importance as legal rights? Yeah, absolutely. My main issue is what do we define as human rights? And I would say that for human rights discourse is essentially a Eurocentric conception, and our human rights simply an excuse to demonise other cultures. And I'd type the example of, for example, female genital mutilation, and that is considered in the West as a gross violation of women's rights and self-determination. But of course, we don't want to succumb to the perception that we are of a white savior crusading into other lands trying to project our idea of what human rights are onto other communities. So don't you think sometimes either that the biggest sort of self-flagulating concern of those who are worried that human rights is Western imperialism is that that concern is itself Eurocentric. It's a concern about the people we don't like who are powerful as amongst our own society. But if you go to other parts of the lands of the world and people are articulating not necessarily in the same register, but words that are about human rights and claims because it's a mobilising capability, because it allows them to build solidarities that are transnational, etc. We end up sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we don't allow for that kind of agency to claim human rights as their own in their own sort of worlds. And that goes back to that social thing, which is who's allowed to be social and who's allowed to have a language that's about rights, that's about claims, that's about morality in this world. And if we're going to open that space up, how do we do it at the same time as guarding against that kind of imperialism that we know only too well? To build on that, Charles, that whatever brought up off, so brings up the question of who speaks for a culture, so to speak. So just like human rights is a space of contestation for lots of different ideas and conceptions about what human rights are. Culture, I would argue, is a similar space where there are certain stereotypes and generalizations that one may be able to make about certain cultures, but there's always people within the culture itself contesting whatever notion that others or the dominant people in that culture have about that culture. So there are people in sub-Saharan, there are sub-Saharan Africans who are speaking out against female genital mutilation or if you want a more neutral term, I know some people don't like the term general immutilation, general cutting, depending on what side of the debate you're on. But there are LGBT Africans who speak out against this notion that, oh, your like the idea of LGBT rights is a Western idea that's being imposed on African countries while ignoring the LGBT Africans that actually exist within that culture. So it brings up a lot of these, like, you know, not that we want to get into cultural relativity, but what is the standard then for, since we have voices on all sides of these cultures saying, oh, this is Eurocentric, no, it's not. Is there a standard that we can form in order to determine like who is right and who is wrong and what standards of human rights are the quote unquote correct ones? I think the problem is that nowadays, the standard that we've decided is the state. We've decided that since rights generally are a claim which you enforce against others through the mechanisms of political power at the state level, it means that there isn't really anywhere else where you can form rights. It's if you have a state, the state is the one who decides what rights you have and don't have. I'm reminded of Enoc Powell, the former prime minister of famous for his river as a blood speech. He had a really interesting example, which was Robinson Crusoe, the famous book where this European guy gets stuck on an island and he's completely alone for most of the book. So for Enoc Powell, he explicitly says, Robinson Crusoe has no rights, no human rights, no other kinds of rights because he's apart from society. Human rights can only exist according to Enoc Powell when they exist in the context of a society. And for him, that's in the British sense, there is often this very conservative idea that society is synonymous with the state. So there is no state on the deserted island. And I think that plays a lot into more recent political developments in Britain. I mean, thatcher, for instance, famously argued that there's no such thing as society, only individuals and families. And individuals and families only exist in the context of the British state. Did you want to speak to that, Talia? Well, it reminds me in British politics, even more recently, Theresa May at the Tory Party conference said that if you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. So I really think we are seeing this re-nationalization of politics and a re-nationalization of rights. And this belief that you need a state and you need a nation to protect your rights. And if you're a citizen of the world or if you're stateless, then perhaps your rights aren't going to be protected. And of course, Hannah Rents said, "You have to have the first and only writers really a right to have rights, the stateless and refugees and all of these people don't really qualify as being truly human because what matters for a human right is whether it's going to be enforced by a state." But I think that's all very true. But at the same time, I think if you look at, for example, a corporation working in a particular country of the global south. Now, obviously, it's concerned about its legal liability and the risk that would attach to it if it was prosecuted for some violation of human rights by employing child labor or either conducting labor in unsafe sort of conditions, et cetera. But at the same time, it's deeply concerned that a mobilization around the language of human rights might just enter into the media sphere, might affect its brand, might affect the way in which its credibility or reputation is considered by people who it cares about. And that might have nothing to do with the state. It just might be purely occurring at the level of language, of discussion, of debate, of contention. And I think in that sense, we have to allow for a bit of space for human rights to be doing things that are not rights and obligations in that very traditional sense, but a powerful living, the less. - So I think we're approaching a point in the conversation where we're addressing in what sense are human rights real. So what Max and Talia have highlighted is that they seem to be real only if the state allows them. So that's a very pragmatic conception of human rights. But it seems to me that rights oftentimes exist in a space that is not just in the legalistic pragmatic sense, but in a moral sense where even if your rights are being violated or not enforced, I still think that I have a very Kantian perspective in this regard. You still have that right to life, for example, or to water or whatever it is that are essentials for human survival. You still have that right, even if you're dying from lack of thirst. So I don't, I would disagree with the notion that even if the state didn't exist, that we wouldn't have these inherent rights. And I think that may be to what you're speaking to a little bit as well, that we can speak to, that we can have discussions outside of the realm of the state when holding corporations accountable, for example, and shaming corporations into following taking certain actions. Because we do have that moral authority when we are, or we're embracing that moral authority when we talk about human rights. And so although it's not a legal action that's moving these corporations, it is that moral sense that does move action and has been successful before. And would you like to jump in on this? I think I'm going to play to devil's advocate a little bit and ask does it really matter what human rights are in this case? Because if it's used as a language, as Sharath is saying, then you can certainly accomplish a very great deal of things with it. In the context of the UK and Theresa May, as you mentioned, Talia, the rights in the UK are being equated more or less to social provisions. If you have a country in which there is a perception that social provisions are only for those who have citizenship, you're sort of left with a setting in which those who are citizens feel as though their rights are being eroded by those who are coming into the country, in which kids' rights are literally just the provisions by the state. In other cases, the language of rights might be used to accomplish-- well, it might be used to mitigate between some of the conflict that are happening within the elite, which is really interesting, for example, in the context of Malaysia. In the context of Malaysia, you'll have various different interests, such as corporate interests, calling for greater corporate freedoms. But you also have human rights groups. But what they have in common is that they both contest the status quo from the state. And so they can use the language of rights, which eventually-- in the case of Malaysia, brought about the Suhaqam, which is their National Human Rights Institute. And that's an overall good thing. But it wasn't based on any particular claims of my ex-wines that rights aren't being held and you're violating these rights. But the rhetoric of human rights emerges in the institution. I think that's a really profound point. And I think part of that is the fact that whether we're talking about courts or the halls of power, there's an overwhelming focus on political and civil rights. Because in a certain sense, there are a lot easier to guarantee than other kinds of rights. So if you're talking about, say, political participation or protest or being able to hold democratic elections or give asylum to people, or we're talking about civil rights, like human integrity from torture, free movement, speech, religion, or having a fair trial, these are things that, to a certain extent, they're difficult. These-- but the state can pretty much be assured to be able to guarantee those. But at the same time, there are certain paradoxes here. Like, for instance, the state is very invested in ensuring freedom of speech. But then, at the same time, there are millions and millions of people who, essentially, says, have nothing to say. These are people that we don't want to hear from, or who, because of economic or social reasons, we can't hear from. So another paradox, as well, is economics. So we kind of ignore, I think, a lot of economic rights, like the right to knowledge, the right to having meaningful work is something that could be conceptualized conceivably in a human rights sense. And like I said, with the Robinson Crusoe example, there is a sort of right to being social, because human beings, I think, are fundamentally social. And yet, economics plays a big part in human rights, because, in a certain sense, the language of capitalism has become embedded in human rights discourse. Human rights aren't this very abstract thing that we all want to uphold ourselves morally. There is sort of currency. There are a unit of exchange, a way to measure our value, something that we spend or hold or increase. But then, Max, would you think that, in saying that there's a right to knowledge, there's a right to be social, is there a risk of rights inflation that then diminishes the value of human rights? Possibly, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if we have too many human rights. So we decide that we have too many. I see what you mean, though. Well, to jump in on that point, though, so with addressing the conflict between, or the seeming conflict between civil and political rights, and economic rights, and the question, if there is too many rights, and we're characterizing it as a right, which is supposed to mean something to us, how far are we willing to go to enforce that right? I think that's a huge question that the world is, I think, will always be in the process of addressing today. Did you want to jump in on that point? Yeah, I mean, for example, I'm pretty sure of it the right to paid leave is enshrined in the international covenant of social, cultural, and economic rights. But for how many people around the world is that even a reality? and would you? and Veda country would it be justification to invade a country with the right to protect doctrine? I think to follow Matt Sleed and play Devil's Advocate again, I think in that sense you can say that there's the rights inflation and that there are these human rights that are in some ways more important than other human rights and that are more fundamental. And there is always a trade-off between the kinds of rights that people are going to be able to fight for. I think a great example is the civil rights movement in America. For many people it's seen as a trade-off of economic rights and material emancipation for the civil and political and legal equal rights and it's seen as a choice that the movement had to make to fight for one or the other. Although I would jump in there and say that again that with that particular movement people remember it for its civil rights. But Martin Luther King for example spoke very strongly both about not only civil rights but also economic rights. He was in many ways a socialist and that part many Americans are not taught in their history books for sure. I think you're definitely right. The his famous I have a dream speech was at the March on Washington which was actually the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. So that social aspect was there but the fact that it's not remembered and there wasn't enough political capital to achieve material emancipation and legal equality does speak to this fact that I think you have an opportunity cost when you look at the rights that you value and you look at the rights that you fight for. So I think this is this important question about rights inflation and what counts as a right and what doesn't kind of the right is is crucial to this but I do think Max has a point there about the sort of language of capitalism the kind of language of the currency of rights and we worry about inflation because we have to worry about distribution and the allocation of resources and goods. But I go back to the point that we absolutely must protect some crucial core rights in very legalistic ways because they pretty much rely on a state that has the capacity to enforce or a state that if it wanted to has the capacity to coerce to protect citizens one way or the other there is the protect or or to be protected from the state. That's crucially important but to allow then all of our discussion and understanding of rights to be only limited to these sorts of manifestations seems to me to miss two really important aspects. One is that we always are looking for a language that allows us to think about human flourishing and well-being and human progress rights has allowed us through talking about paid leave and things like that to discuss that within a framework of aspiration that is important. I think the second element is that perhaps the most important quality for me at least about rights or any language like this is a kind of a quality of non-domination and domination can take coercive forms and it can take exclusionary forms but domination can also take social cultural and economic forms. So if I think of rights as a way through which to think about power relations being configured or reconfigured away from domination. Now that can often take different shapes and different forms in different societies in different times but you need that sort of flexibility around the language for it to do that work and yes that waters it down makes it a bit more diffuse but still in a sense retains an important quality to it. I wonder from what you're saying if you think you could compare human rights to something like feminism and a lot of people would define it just a framework through which to see the world and through which to study things. Yeah I mean I think for as academics and researchers where I'm always very happy to absorb a new framework and see the world and study things in new light and I think there's a bit of that going on but I would like to think that it's possibly something more that it has to always be recovered, reappropriated, redefined, resisted when human rights is becoming too status quo, too much the language of what Matt was talking about was human rights as privileges, privileges of those who are co-nationals, people who've been here already, people who deserve to get some social service over the state. When human rights starts to ossify around privileges for us and not them, then that language needs to be reappropriated and I think that's one of the challenges it's in flux, it's in contention as a language through which other forms of politics can take place. Great, well that was an excellent discussion. I'd like well Sharath is here, I'd like to ask you can you give us some examples of projects that you've been involved with or that the centre of governance and human rights has been involved with that illustrate some of these concepts of human rights that we've all been talking about just now. Yeah I guess a couple of the tough on my head, I mean Matt mentioned the work with the whistle that element persons have been leading which we're really happy to be supporting and associated with which I think is fantastic using technology and thinking about opportunities to strengthen the you know the chance for witnesses, human rights violations or reporters to protect their communications around these kinds of events. Matt can speak a lot more about that but we've done quite a lot of work over the years especially with the UN Special Reporter on Extradudicial, Summary and Arbitri Executions. So helping him with research, students have been involved in different projects on different sub-themes around his mandate and one of the most important ones I think was on the safety of journalists where it was really recognising that some of the rights that are violated around the right to life are of particular individuals or particular sectors of society that themselves are protecting or defending democratic space, not always virtuously or perfectly and journalists come in all shades and kinds but if you don't protect the right for people to speak to you know to put information into the public domain on the performance of other actors of society then fundamentally that space is being eroded and in a sense that that opportunity for rights to be discussed is being compromised. So we did quite a lot of research on that and I think that was you know a very valuable contribution to a broader awareness that was going on that the protection of journalists and the safety of journalists is crucial in our times. Another area completely different but going back to I think the core of the way that we conceptualise human rights or I do anyway is the work we've done around digital technologies and political change in Sub-Saharan Africa which led to the founding of Africa's voices foundation like a charity that is basically research oriented using new technologies to hear from the hardest to hear voices in Sub-Saharan African societies and having their voice amplified towards decision making that affects their lives. Now if you take seriously this idea that human rights isn't just a legalistic concept but it's also about the language of contentious politics then being able to amplify the language of those that are less heard becomes a crucial part of that power relation towards less domination as such. Great well thank you so much for sharing those examples with us I think they're a great illustration of some of the ideas and debates that we've been talking about. Unfortunately we are about out of time for this episode but thank you all everyone on our panel for joining us and thank you Shorath for being our guest on our first episode. We appreciate having you here with us. Great it's been wonderful to be here I'm looking forward to the coming episodes and looking forward to further discussions on all of these great topics. Now to our audience what do you think? How do you view human rights? We'd love to hear any thoughts and feedback you have about this episode so please tweet us at DeclarationsPod on Twitter and like us on Facebook at facebook.com/declarationspodcast if you'd like to contact us or send us ideas about future episodes. Enjoy us next episode where we'll be talking about human rights in the digital age. Thank you for tuning in to Declarations. [Music]