Mark Weisbrot - THE GUARDIAN03/11/2009
The U.S. State Department's annual human rights report got an unusual amount of criticism this year. This time the center-left coalition government of Chile was notable in joining other countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and China - who have had more rocky relations with Washington - in questioning the "moral authority" of the U.S. government's judging other countries' human rights practices.
In the past, Washington was able to position itself as an important judge of human rights practices despite being complicit or directly participating in some of the worst, large-scale human rights atrocities of the post-World War II era - in Vietnam, Indonesia, Central America, and other places. This makes no sense from a strictly logical point of view, but it could persist primarily because the United States was judged not on how it treated persons outside its borders but within them. Internally, the United States has had a relatively well-developed system of the rule of law, trial by jury, an independent judiciary and other constitutional guarantees (although these did not extend to African-Americans in most of the Southern United States prior to the 1960s civil rights reforms). Washington was able to contrast these conditions with those of its main adversary during the Cold War - the Soviet Union. The powerful influence of the United States over the international media helped ensure that this was the primary framework under which human rights were presented to most of the world.
U.S.-based human rights organizations will undoubtedly see the erosion of Washington's credibility on these issues as a loss - and understandably so, since the United States is still a powerful country, and they hope to use this power to pressure other countries on human rights issues. But they too should be careful to avoid the kind of politicization that has earned notoriety for the State Department's annual report - which clearly discriminates between allies and "adversary" countries in its evaluations.
The case of the recent Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela illustrates the dangers of this spillover of the politicization of human rights from the U.S. government to Washington-based non-governmental organizations (NGO's). More than 100 scholars and academics wrote a letter complaining about the report, arguing that it did not meet "minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility." For example, the report alleges that the Venezuelan government discriminates against political opponents in the provision of government services; but as evidence for this charge it provides only one alleged incident involving one person, in programs that serve many millions of Venezuelans. Human Rights Watch responded with a defense of its report, but the exchange of letters indicates that HRW would have been better off acknowledging the report's errors and prejudice, and taking corrective measures.
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