Dignity for All: Building a Culture of Human Rights
October 2008
Banner photo: © Carr Clifton
A Means to an End
Brad Adams has been executive director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division since 2002. Previously he worked as the senior lawyer for the Cambodia field office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and legal adviser to the Cambodian parliament's human rights committee.
SGI Quarterly: How would you explain human rights to someone who's never heard of them?
Brad Adams: It's as simple as saying, "You can't do certain things to me without violating a law, and you can't tell me what to think." The history of the world has been full of feudalism and dictatorship with powerful people telling powerless people what they can and can't do. The concepts of human rights are a way of saying that there are limits on this.
SGIQ: Do you think human beings have an innate sense of human rights that is universal?
BA: Yes. I have no doubt about that. Unfortunately temptations like power and money lead people to argue that only some people have rights, or that groups are more important than individuals, which is something we only hear from the powerful, not the weak and poor. People used to talk about "Asian values" being in opposition to human rights principles, but what Asian wants to be tortured by some police officer or soldier? Nobody thinks that's acceptable. What Asian wants to have their land taken away by some rich guy with a gun? These things really are universal.
I'm not trying to say that everybody grows up in the same environment and culture, but I am saying that many basic things are the same everywhere. I think that really there is no debate now about what basic rights are. The challenges for human rights now are largely about holding the people in power accountable, and this is where human rights and politics overlap. In the long run real improvement on rights does require political change or political development.
SGIQ: Do you think in order to push for political change there has to be an educated public that is demanding that change?
Les 7 Pétrifiés statue by Swiss sculptor Carl Bucher outside the Library of the European Court of Human Rights
[Curtis Rogers]
BA: Sometimes change comes from the bottom up, such as the ousting of President Marcos in the Philippines in 1986 or the ending of the monarchy in Nepal this year. Sometimes change comes from the top down. If you look at Europe and the abolition of the death penalty, actually the political elite made the change. It's not always driven by the public, but it's much better if the public is on board and educated and believing in it, otherwise you can have a new government come in and just reverse things.
I think human rights education is at its best in civics lessons in primary and secondary education. Educating adults--with all the problems they are facing in their daily lives--about human rights is complicated. Take the death penalty. We're taught from day one in all cultures that killing is wrong. If that's your bedrock principle and you learn that when you are young, it would be very easy for you to get past all the other arguments in favor of state-sanctioned killing, which is what the death penalty is. But if you don't have that bedrock principle, then you can convince yourself that it is OK.
Films are one very good way of raising awareness, as by seeing what happened to someone else, people will say, "Now I see why it's important for the army to be under control, or for there to be international laws against torture." People are touched emotionally, and some of them may take action as a result. The media also has a big role to play.
SGIQ: Do you think the situation is improving globally?
BA: The trend is uneven, but in its historical scope it is very positive. Most countries are at least accepting that in principle they must be more rule-based. The Internet and media are putting everybody under much more scrutiny.
We've been doing a huge amount of work on the Olympics, and a lot of people who come to China for the first time in a long time are quite surprised. Even in a one-party state, the government has to spend a lot of time explaining to the people what they're doing and why they are doing it. And there is a huge amount of demand from the public in China for basic freedoms. People are constantly challenging the authorities. Of course, many still end up in prison or are beaten up by state security, so we have to be vigilant and demand an end to these practices, wherever they occur.
SGIQ: What motivated you to work in this field?
BA: I was initially a legal aid lawyer in California, trying to provide access to the justice system to poor people, homeless people, to get their basic economic rights, because at the time that seemed to be the most pressing human rights problem in the U.S. For me, it's about allowing everyone to pursue happiness. It's not about enforcing rights for their own sake. Rights are a means to a happy end. We're just trying to create the conditions for people to get what they can and want out of life and not be blocked by dictators or other powerful forces. This is one reason we focus so much on freedom of speech, since it is a necessary precondition for this. But if we're just trying to get these rights as some kind of legalistic thing, it doesn't necessarily improve people's lives.
