New Review on Human Rights book by former Amnesty Director

William F. Schulz, ed. The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a
New Era. Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights Series. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 288 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8122-4111-2.

Reviewed by Brad Simpson (Assistant Professor of History and
International Affairs, Princeton University)
Published on H-Human-Rights (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root

The As-Yet-Unseen Era of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy

On his first day as president of the United States, Barack Obama
signed three executive orders and issued a presidential directive
ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility;
suspending trials for terrorist suspects under the widely criticized
military commissions system; and bringing all U.S. interrogations of
detainees in line with the U.S. Army Field Manual, which bars the use
of torture, threats, coercion, and physical abuse. Human rights
groups hailed the decisions, which implicitly acknowledged the
extraordinary damage that the Bush administration’s policies in the so-
called war on terror have inflicted on U.S. interests and the cause of
human rights more generally.

Yet, as William F. Schulz's edited collection The Future of Human
Rights suggests, merely rolling back the last eight years of abusive
practices and policies will not confer global leadership on human
rights issues on the United States. Rather, the Obama administration
must fundamentally reconceptualize the role of human rights in U.S.
foreign policy in ways that no administration, Democratic or
Republican, has yet sought to do since the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was signed in 1948.

The fourteen essays in this volume are organized topically, written by
human rights practitioners, legal scholars, and former Clinton
administration policymakers. Each traces the major policy and legal
issues surrounding a particular human rights area or process--
detention and interrogation practices; economic sanctions;
humanitarian intervention; democracy promotion; economic, social, and
cultural rights; religious freedom; immigrant and refugee rights;
women’s rights; labor rights; etc. Each also critiques past policies
and provides the Obama administration and other policymakers with a
lengthy “to do” list for moving forward, generally involving an end to
current abuses, the embrace of international standards and
cooperation, and further institutionalization of human rights
practices. This is a book geared toward policymakers and
nongovernmental organization (NGOs) activists and not historians, and
will most likely find a home in courses on contemporary human rights,
international law, and international relations. While treating the
1990s as if it represented the distant and seemingly sunny past, the
book nevertheless raises important questions about the recent history
of human rights that bear further investigation.

Schulz, former director of Amnesty International USA and a fellow at
the Center for American Progress, provides an overview in which he
argues that American neoconservatives since the 1990s have advocated a
particular brand of human rights exceptionalism rooted in a "natural
law theory of rights," rejection of international standards and
institutions, and belief that the United States alone can create the
international conditions for security and justice (p. 8). Yet
historians of human rights, such as Paul Gordon Lauren (The Evolution
of International Human Rights: Visions Seen [2003]), Liz Borgwardt (A
New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights[2005]), and
others, have noted that similar conceptions animated early opposition
to U.S. ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as
well as virtually every subsequent covenant and convention. The more
glaring departure from past human rights practices, as John Shattuck
and Elisa Massamino point out in their chapters on national security
and counterterrorism, lie in Washington's explicit embrace of torture
and rejection of international humanitarian law, lines that U.S.
administrations during the Cold War were reluctant to cross for fear
of endangering U.S. soldiers captured by Soviet or other Communist
armies.

The essays here are unfailingly presentist, providing detailed
explorations of contemporary human rights policy areas where the
United States has rejected international standards or failed to
provide global leadership. It is perhaps unfair to critique a policy-
oriented book for not being written for an audience of historians, but
two points are in order. A longer term perspective would illustrate
the deeply rooted skepticism of and opposition to a fuller embrace of
human rights, stretching back over decades, among a broad crosscurrent
of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Though most of the
authors hearken back to the 1990s as a relative golden age of human
rights, they also note that the Clinton administration proved
similarly resistant to demands by NGOs and the international community
that the United States accept the coequal status of the UN Convention
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; ratify the Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); incorporate labor
rights into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other
trade pacts; or press corporations operating abroad to respect and
improve worker rights.

The new administration is unlikely to tack back further in the
direction of human rights than its Democratic predecessor, and has
already embraced some of the Bush administration's more objectionable
policies as the Pentagon, Justice Department, and other agencies
defend their expanded power and institutional prerogatives. More
useful from this perspective is the chapter by Eric Schwartz, a former
National Security Council (NSC) staff person under President Bill
Clinton, who traces the NSC's evolving structure for decision making
regarding human rights and democracy, and suggests ways that the Obama
administration could further institutionalize and even incentivize
human rights advocacy within executive branch agencies, such as the
State Department and the US Agency for International Development.
Personnel, however, also matter. Recent reports that Michael Posner,
head of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human
Rights), is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's choice for assistant
secretary of state for Democracy and Human Rights and Labor offer one
hopeful sign amid abundant evidence of continuity.

Second, a broader perspective would more fully describe the role that
social movements, religious organizations, students, foundations,
human rights NGOs, and others, working with Congress and occasionally
sympathetic executive branch officials have played (and could play in
the future) in pressing previous administrations to shift their
positions on particular human rights practices. Recent Supreme Court
and federal court rulings, for example, allowing U.S. corporations,
such as Exxon-Mobil, Chiquita, and Mobil, to be sued under the Alien
Tort Claims Act for human rights abuses committed abroad represent the
culmination of decades of consumer, labor, and human rights activism
that have created new norms now being acknowledged by judicial bodies
and, reluctantly, sometimes by the executive branch. Similar dynamics
underlie expanded domestic and international advocacy on behalf of
women's rights, religious freedom, genocide prevention, and other
human rights issues in recent decades.

The volume's focus on human rights practices and processes obscures
one glaring omission--any detailed discussion of the relationship
between U.S. military power and assistance and human rights abuses.
January 20, 2008, marked Obama's inauguration not just as the first
African American president of the United States but also as the
world’s leading arms dealer (the United States completed thirty-two
billion dollars in foreign military sales agreements in 2007);
military trainer (with much of this aid flowing to conflict zones in
Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia where human
rights abuses are rampant); and military landlord, overseeing a
network of more than 700 military bases in over 130 countries. The
first wave of NGO and congressional human rights activists in the
1970s, focusing on torture by and U.S. military assistance to human
rights abusing regimes, viewed progress on this front as indispensably
linked to a wide array of other human rights challenges--including
many discussed above. The history of recent human rights activism and
successes, and opposition to them by both conservatives and liberals
still wedded to the idea of American exceptionalism, suggests that the
Obama administration and forces deeply entrenched in Congress,
executive branch agencies, the business community, and the Pentagon
will resist many of the eminently sensible prescriptive suggestions
offered by the authors of this collection; and that the rest of the
world will have good reason to doubt the sincerity of the U.S.
commitment to international human rights standards and practices.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it
through the list discussion logs at:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Brad Simpson. Review of Schulz, William F., ed., The Future
of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era.. H-Human-Rights, H-Net
Reviews. March, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23545