Individual Rights and Amnesty International

In early April I blogged about an important distinctions in the area of individual rights, such equal rights vs. egalitarianism. Since then, several items have piled up that I've been meaning to blog about, so I thought I'll do a couple of postings here today.

First there was the March 24-30th issue of The Economist, which had both an editorial and an article on the issue of rights. The brief editorial online has the title of "Human Rights, Dangerously Blurred", while in print it has the title "Stand Up For Your Rights", and then the subhead "The Old Stuffy Ones, that is: newer ones are distractions". Both titles make clear the point they are making, a distinction between traditional political rights (free speech, free election, due process of law) and so-called economic and social "rights" (food, jobs, housing, medical care). After introducing the issue of broadening "rights", they note that Amnesty International in particular has "decided to follow intellectual fashion and dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category of what people now call social and economic rights." The editorial then continues:

Rights being good things, you might suppose that the more of them you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech, free elections and due process of law? What use is a vote if you are starving? Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too? No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them.

Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities. But no useful purpose is served by calling them "rights". When a government locks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". It is hard enough to determine whether such a right has been infringed, let alone who should provide a remedy, or how. Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers' money is a political question best settled at the ballot box. So is how much to spend on what kind of health care. And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time: even the Soviet Union's much-boasted full employment was based on the principle "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. The rulers of Cuba and China habitually depict campaigns concentrating on individual freedoms as a conspiracy by the rich northern hemisphere to do down poor countries. It is mightily convenient, if you deprive your citizens of political liberties, to portray these as a bourgeois luxury.

And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities is called politics. That is why the rights that make open politics possible--free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment--are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all.

Many do-gooding outfits suffer from having too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to be the other way round, appealing to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrating on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. No longer. By trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the woollier cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again.

Then the article (also available online here) on pg. 67-68 of that issue, titled "Many Rights, Some Wrong" (and online titled "Amnesty International's New Mission") goes into more specifics about Amnesty International's "stretching of its brand" as they say. After providing a quick review of AI's website, noting uneven and disproportionate handling of various issues (being tougher on the West, and in particular America, than on the huge rights-violaters elsewhere), the article raises the big issue:

Another of Amnesty's 12 campaigns is on "Poverty and Human Rights" which asserts: "Everyone, everywhere has the right to live with dignity. That means that no one should be denied their rights to adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, and to education and health care." A similar theme is struck by the "Economic Globalisation and Human Rights" campaign--reflecting Amnesty's enthusiastic support for the World Social Forum, a movement which holds annual anti-capitalism shindigs. Sometimes there seems to be a desire to be even-handed between pariahs and paragons: Amnesty recently surprised observers of the ex-communist world by producing a critique of the language law in Estonia--a country usually seen as the best example of good government in the region.

The big question in all this is priorities. Cases do exist where violations of political rights and of economic ones are hard to separate; one such case is Zimbabwe, whose government has engaged in politicised food distribution and slum clearance at the same time as judicial repression.

But the new Amnesty is surely open to the charges both that it is campaigning on too many fronts, and that the latest focus comes at the cost of the old one.

Amnesty's website is, insiders acknowledge, a campaigning tool; it does not fully reflect the depth of the organisation's expertise, or its internal priorities. Ms Khan admits a tension in the organisation's "business mix" between high profile and less immediately rewarding work.But she insists that there is no drift towards America-bashing for the sake of popularity, and that the emphasis on economic, social and cultural rights does not reflect a preference for any particular system of government.

The article continuse on, and notes that other similar organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have drifted into economic and social "rights" far less than AI has. It then concludes with:

Some wonder if Ms Khan has been too keen to impress constituencies in what NGO-niks call the "global south": code for developing countries, where opinion--at least among the elite--supposedly favours economic development over a "northern" concern for individual rights. She vigorously contests that. But an organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters' scrutiny.

Unfortunately, as good as these articles were, they don't actually cut to the essence of the issues involved. The key point to make, and make clearly and explicitly, is that the so-called "rights" of the social and economic variety -- such as the "right" to housing, food, medical care, and so on -- are not actual, valid rights at all. It is a matter of definition and moral philosophy, and these Economist articles don't go far enough to set the record straight here. These economic and social "rights" impose upon others and violate the rights of others (through redistribution of wealth, through the forced provision of services, and so on) in a way that the so-called "traditional political rights" -- such as freedom of speech, due process of law, and so on -- do not at all. These rights that individuals have as restrictions on government, whereas the "new" rights impose duties on everyone to provide actual goods and services for everyone else -- apparently on the assumption that such goods and services are just out there, magically produced by someone, and that some people are being deprived of them while others are not. This is a complete misunderstanding of value production, individual rights, and more.

And because the Economist writers don't present this case strongly enough, they open themselves up to responses like those in the April 7th-13th issues "Letters" section. Here we have the chair of the International Executive Committee of AI, Lilian Gonclaves, responding that yes, AI has "broadened our remit in 2001 to make our work for individuals more effective." Examples she then gives are: "For the man in Zimbabwe who has been forcibly evicted, the right to housing is no less real than the right to be free from police brutality. To the woman raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the claim for medical care is no less a priority than the demand for justice."

But notice the standards she uses here: whether an assumed right feels more or less real to someone, whether someone "claims a right to something", or whether someone "demands" something. These are not the valid basis of what are and are not individual rights! Victims or poor individuals simply wanting or needing something does not mean they have a right to it. She then goes on to cite many examples of AI fighting for legitimate rights in various evil dictatorships around the world, and that is all well and good. But it in no way answers the questions raised, albeit imperfectly, by the Economist article and editorial.

I'll also note that a second letter in this issue, from Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, also misses the point that I wish the Economist had made more clearly. She states that "It is now recognized that you cannot enjoy one set of rights [political] without the other [economic/social] and it was this vision that inspired the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948." While a valid point to make against the claim that this change in emphasis is extremely recent, this again makes clear what the Economist should have come out and said explicitly: that those supposed economic and social rights, including many enshrined by the UN in 1948, are not actually valid individual rights at all. That UN document is severely philosophically flawed.