Pushback on human rights: defenders speak out

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SwissInfo podcasts.
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This is Inside Geneva.
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I'm your host, Imogen Folkes, and this is a production from SwissInfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
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In today's programme.
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Certainly we're seeing a challenge to universal human rights standards, with pushback against long-recognized women's rights, sexual and reproductive health rights as examples, exacerbated by widespread impunity for atrocity crimes, such as we see in Israel-Palestine, such as we see in Russia-Ukraine, such as we see in Sudan.
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This narrative that immigration is good because they're all coming here to work.
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I've looked at the figures.
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Of the last couple of million that came, only a fifth are working.
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I'll tell you what, that is shameful.
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Places that are a disaster, right?
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Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.
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The overwhelming majority of people in countries have a shared interest in freedom, justice, equality, and fairness.
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We don't like being bullied.
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We don't like being subject to discrimination.
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And the international human rights framework is a bulwark against that.
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It recognizes our shared humanity.
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This Universal Declaration of Human Rights may well become the international magna carta of all men everywhere.
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More rights for you doesn't mean less rights for me, it's not pie.
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We need to work again on this idea of solidarity, on this idea that my freedom and your freedom are connected.
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That what's good for me is good for you.
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That we coexist, and that coexistence also requires some give and take.
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And my name is Bujapadel, and I work as the Deputy Executive Director at ISHR, and I oversee our work on programmes and advocacy.
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The International Service for Human Rights may not be on everyone's radar.
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Many of us might think first of the giants like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, but ISHR is a body I've been watching and reporting on in Geneva for years because of its tireless support for human rights defenders.
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People trying to protect and promote their rights under repressive regimes or during brutal conflict.
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ISHR supports those people and works to give them a voice internationally, including here in Geneva.
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Phil Lynch told me more.
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ISHR is really a bridge between frontline national-level human rights defenders and the international human rights system.
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We provide solidarity and support to defenders to turn to the international system for justice and protection that's denied at the national level.
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Whether that's defenders working on democracy in China, whether that's defenders pushing for accountability for atrocity crimes in Sudan, or whether it's defenders working on issues like women's rights in Afghanistan.
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So where are you both from then?
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Let's start with you, Puja.
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How did you get into this work?
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I mean, what what motivated you?
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What did you want to be when you were growing up?
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So I grew up in Bangkok in Thailand, um, but we're Indian.
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My parents were migrants from India in Bangkok.
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They arrived in the 70s.
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So my childhood was in Bangkok in the 80s and the 90s.
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So actually, funnily enough, um, when I was younger, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.
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Um one of my earliest memories is of um a military coup in Thailand uh in 1991, followed by a crackdown on protests in 1992.
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And uh and of course, um a lot of the news and a lot of the information was coming through um state television and state news, and I just had this memory of my father always trying to tune the radio into the BBC World Service.
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And uh we I think that was probably my first experience of things like curfews and rationing food.
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What about you, Phil?
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I'm from Australia originally.
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I was brought up in a family for whom the the values of integrity, compassion, empathy, equality were really important.
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Uh I studied law at university and through university volunteered with local community legal centres and with Amnesty International.
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And uh had a view of the law both as a tool of oppression and control, but also the ways in which the law could be used as a tool for uh empowerment, particularly for uh groups and communities subject to discrimination and marginalization.
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Following the completion of my law degree, I started practicing with a commercial law firm and um quickly transitioned from that law firm to working with a specialist homeless person's legal service.
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So you trained, you could have been a commercial lawyer, comfortable salary, long holidays, nice house.
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For both of you, I guess, what did mum and dad say when you said, Well, actually, I'm going into this field, which is not especially rewarded and and and can actually be risky.
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I've always been privileged to have enormous support from my my parents and privileged also to work in a field where my passion and vocation align.
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You know, my parents have been supportive of purposeful work.
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Uh, working with the the homeless person's legal clinic, I was able to uh provide both legal services to people who were experiencing or at risk of homelessness, uh, as well as work on some of the bigger structural and systemic issues that underpin issues of inequality, poverty, and discrimination.
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And what about you, Pooja?
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Well, I mean, I come from a very typical Indian home.
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So, you know, it was already a failure when I wasn't a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.
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But at the same time, I have to say that um it was really lucky to have parents who believed more than anything in the importance of the opportunity to be able to find your own way in life, of the opportunity to carve out your own path.
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And they were really trusting of me in that sense.
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Um, and I only really realize that now in hindsight.
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You know, I think that at the time I had to push a lot of boundaries, a lot of I had to stand up for myself a lot, but I realize now actually how much they gave me the opportunity to figure it out.
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Well, you've both been doing this for some years now.
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Do you have each of you a standout experience where you could say to yourself, yeah, I'm definitely doing what I want to do, or alternatively, oh my god, I think I perhaps should have been the commercial lawyer.
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One of the first major human rights cases in which I was involved occurred in uh around August and September of 2001.
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A boatload of 433 asylum seekers from Afghanistan fleeing the oppressive Taliban were making their way to Australia and their boat sunk en route.
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And they were rescued by a Norwegian ship, a Norwegian cargo ship called the Tampa.
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The captain, following the laws of the sea, set course towards Australia to disembark the asylum seekers and enable them to seek asylum.
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And in the shadow of a looming federal election, the then Conservative government uh intercepted the boat uh using Australian special forces, commandeered it, and detained the 433 asylum seekers aboard the Tampa, on the decks of the Tampa, for over two weeks.
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I was one of a number of lawyers who went to the federal court in Australia to seek the liberty of the asylum seekers and seek an order that they be allowed to come to Australia to seek asylum.
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In the first instance, before the federal court, we were successful, and the judgment was delivered on the 11th of September of 2001.
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It was a great victory for human rights.
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Of course, later that day there was a despicable terrorist attack on the United States, which precipitated the war on terror and a complete crackdown on human rights and civil liberties across much of the Western world.
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And the following day, 12th of September, the Australian government appealed the decision.
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They were successful, and the asylum seekers, instead of being brought to Australia, were taken to Nauru, where they were housed in deplorable conditions in what became known as the the so-called Pacific solution, but really for anyone involved was the Pacific problem.
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At first instance, the the victory taught me of the power of the law and its capacity to uh secure people's rights and freedoms.
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The judgment on appeal, uh, where we lost taught me it about the ways in which there were gaps in the law and there was a need for much greater uh legal protection and recognition of human rights, as well as much clearer constraints on the use of executive power.
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Okay, let's come a little bit up to the present day.
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I mean, you're talking about 25 years ago a boat with refugees, asylum seekers, they all get called migrants now.
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Where do you think we've gone in terms of the respect for the rights of people like those Afghans on that boat?
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I mean, I definitely think that there's been a narrative of scapegoating by political parties the world over that seeks to drum up hate and mistrust against very particular communities in order to, I think, distract the larger population from issues that really matter and their lack of good governance with regards to especially a lot of um the economic and social rights afforded to their populations.
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The thing is, though, I think that, and I think a little bit about my daughter who goes to school here in Geneva.
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She goes to a public school here, and some years ago, um, the public schools in Geneva invited a number of Ukrainian children, refugees, uh, into the schools.
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And her best friend is a Ukrainian asylum seeker whose father is still in the Ukraine, you know, and and they're very close.
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And Asha knows everything about um what's going on in Ukraine because her best friend is Ukrainian.
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And despite a lot of the scapegoating, I think people can also understand from their hearts as well.
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Because when the genocide in Palestine started, we were watching a demonstration pass by and she was reading some of the signs that people were holding.
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And she turns and says to me, She goes, So we're gonna have some Palestinian kids in school soon.
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And I was like, Oh, really?
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Why?
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Because, well, when the war happened in Ukraine, uh we had all of these Ukrainian kids.
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And you know, it's a depressing thing to have to explain to a kid that it's not gonna be the same.
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But at the same time, there's something so hopeful in this idea that there could be a generation of kids who believe that this is the adequate response.
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When a war breaks out and people have to flee a war, we open up our schools and we invite the kids to have a chance at life.
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Phil, do you want to come in on that?
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Pooja did mention the Middle East, which I do want to come on to actually as well.
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So the Tampa case that I referred to earlier really demonstrated some of the hope that Poodra has referred to.
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On the one hand, the government was very, very intentional around the incommunicado detention of the asylum seekers.
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They didn't want Australians to know the names, to see the faces, to hear the stories, to hear the hopes and aspirations of anyone who was rescued and aboard the Tampa.
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The case also, I think, was really critical in mobilising a generation of lawyers who have gone on to work in the community legal sector, that have gone on to establish uh pro bono and civil liberties uh legal practices, um, standing up for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, uh, and uh standing against the excessive and uh indiscriminate use of executive power.
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Well, executive power, executive orders rings a few bells in my head at the moment.
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Am I wrong then in my perception that we're seeing a rollback of fundamental rights that some of us thought were all basically agreed and accepted?
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That's a such a difficult question to answer because it's can also be context-specific.
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But it does make me think about, um, for instance, what's happening in India right now, where peaceful protests in Delhi demanding the resignation of education minister due to um failings of the education ministry have been met with uh, you know, violence, tear gas, and uh beatings of students, etc.
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And a lot of the feelings that are coming out of these protests by these students, these young people, are really a sense of, I think, betrayal because the Indian constitution affords it the right to protest, the right to express themselves.
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And much like we've seen in other contexts, young people who feel betrayed, young people who feel that an injustice has been done to them and that they are simply asking for some accountability for the injustice done to them, being punished for that.
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You say the young people might not give up.
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I'm seeing a government repress peaceful protests with an impunity that might not have been so easy just a few years ago.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I agree.
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Certainly we're seeing a challenge to universal human rights standards, both in terms of the normative framework with a pushback against long-recognized uh women's rights, sexual and reproductive health rights as examples, uh exacerbated by widespread impunity for atrocity crimes, uh such as we see in uh Israel-Palestine, such as we see in Russia-Ukraine, such as we see in Sudan.
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And for me, they're two of the greatest challenges to the the international human rights framework are the a normative rollback and widespread impunity for atrocities.
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If we talk specifically about Gaza, this is one which multiple legal scholars, uh, genocide historians have labelled genocide, so is the UN Commission of Inquiry.
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And yet nothing's happening.
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Yes, we have atrocities in many other places, Sudan, what's happening in Ukraine, other places we we scarcely even pay attention to anymore.
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But this one is somehow writ large, and it feels to me as if this is the example where people will say, that's it, nobody really cares, massive double standards, why should we bother?
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It's like an elephant in the room now every time we talk about human rights.
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So the way in which many European states responded to the the Russian aggression and war on Ukraine, I think demonstrated how we could and should respond through opening our doors and homes to refugees and asylum seekers, through investigation and pushing for accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity, through the application of sanctions against perpetrators, through the provision of support to Ukraine and Ukrainian civil society.
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I think in many ways that set the standard for how states should respond to aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
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And the failure to respond in a similar way to the atrocities we see in Gaza does reveal a level of selectivity and double standards in the application of human rights.
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And together with uh impunity for atrocities, together with normative rollback, selectivity in the application of universal human rights standards is a critical threat to universality and a critical threat to human rights.
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I agree with Phil completely, but also wanted to say that ISHR works a lot also on some of the more behind the scenes and invisible work on trying to make these systems responsive to the needs of victims and to the demands of human rights defenders.
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We believe that the measure of their success and the measure of the success of these systems is connected to how accessible they are for human rights defenders, for survivors, and how safe they are for when they are able to access these spaces and how responsive they are to the demands that they put forward as well.
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Yeah, but these systems are being abandoned.
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Like, I mean, the US has left the Human Rights Council, the US Secretary of State has pledged to dismantle the international criminal court.
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I used to think it's because we have more media and I'm to blame for it, we hear more about violations and atrocities.
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But I'm beginning to think we're this is a different kind of trajectory.
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Certainly the international human rights system is at a critical juncture, and there's a real paradox.
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On the one hand, there's arguably never been a greater need for human rights-based multilateralism to address interconnected global challenges like the climate crisis, the regulation of artificial intelligence, the resolution of conflicts such as in Russia, Ukraine, Sudan, Israel, Gaza.
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And never has there been such a demand from human rights defenders, victims, and survivors for justice from the international system.
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I mean, at ISHR, we have a greater call on our services and support than than ever before.
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Because whether you're from Afghanistan or Sudan or Venezuela, the international system provides, in many instances, the only pathway to justice and accountability.
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There's no pathway available at the national level, there's no pathway available at the regional level.
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So those defenders are turning to the international system and to international organizations for solidarity, protection, and accountability.
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On the other hand, there's hugely diminished political and financial investment in the system.
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And one of the challenges for organizations like ISHR is to make the case for increased political and financial investment in the system, and to make the case that the overwhelming majority of states, and certainly the overwhelming majority of peoples, have an interest in respect for human rights and a rules-based international order, and not an interest in a world governed by lawlessness and raw power.
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You want to come in on that, Pooja?
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I mean, do you feel the current climate is demotivational?
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Um, on the contrary, I think it's uh it's an opportunity for us to rise to the challenge, and I think we have to.
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It's an imperative.
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It feels like there's no choice, you know?
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While we feel the impact of recent decisions made by the United States governments the most because of their investment in their system, et cetera, it's important to remember that they're not the only ones that are backtracking on political and financial commitments.
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Secondly, we did have a sense that when all of these cuts to USAID were being made, the cuts that we all faced, part of the question was, well, where's that money gonna go?
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I mean, part of it will maybe go into the pockets of some people, but where's the rest of the money gonna go?
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You know, who are they going to fund instead and what agenda are they gonna fund instead?
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And we kind of have the answer to that.
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There's a recent call for application for up to$3 million to fund European, basically fascist groups to try to dismantle.
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Democracy and rule of law in this part of the world.
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I mean, there has never been a more transparent kind of foreign intervention.
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And so what I want to say is that it's not disheartening because I think that what is about to come is going to be pretty serious.
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And for those states who have been backtracking on political and financial commitments in the name of money, I think they need to project themselves three to five years ahead from now and to imagine where we're going to be.
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Because we're still going to be here.
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We're going to be maybe we're going to be smaller.
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We may have less resources, but we're still going to be here and we're going to have to fight against groups that are going to be extremely well-networked and well-resourced.
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I think the worst is yet to come, but that doesn't scare me.
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It actually motivates me.
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We have actually quite a lot of listeners in the United States, about half of them, and then another big section in Britain.
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People are withdrawing into their own domestic concerns.
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So maybe just sell to those listeners why what you do is important.
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Maybe get them to put themselves in the shoes of somebody who really has been persecuted.
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You know, why is it relevant for somebody in Milwaukee?
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Trevor Burrus The overwhelming majority of people and countries have a shared interest in freedom, justice, equality, and fairness.
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We don't like being bullied.
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We don't like being subject to discrimination.
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And the international human rights framework is a bulwark against that.
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It recognizes our shared humanity.
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It recognises our shared values, shared interests.
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It's also essential in an increasingly connected world that we have a global framework to address common challenges that affect us all, whether that's the climate crisis, whether that's the regulation of AI, whether that's how we deal with issues of migration, our collective interests are served when those challenges are addressed through a universal human rights framework and applying the rule of law.
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I heard a um recently a term that I hadn't heard about before, which is apparently that certain groups are now talking about framing things around uh toxic compassion or toxic empathy.
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Because there are groups in this world who want you to believe that caring about other people is a bad thing.
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I think we need to think about that.
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We need to focus on that and we need to work on that a little bit more.
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You know, I often see um these memes of uh more rights for you doesn't mean less rights for me.
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It's not pie.
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Um, I like that meme.
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We need to work again on this idea of solidarity, on this idea that my freedom and your freedom are connected, that what's good for me is good for you, that we coexist, and that coexistence also requires some give and take.
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That work needs to find space again in everything that we do.
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And those inspiring words from Puja Patel bring us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva.
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My thanks to Phil Puja and everyone at the International Service for Human Rights for their time and their continued support for brave human rights defenders everywhere.
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Coming up in the next few episodes of Inside Geneva, we'll be talking to two aid workers trying to support housing in Gaza, but without the key materials needed for rebuilding.
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Now we're reaching three years, and we have people still living in tents in the same location, which the land was not prepared for.
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Flooding is happening in winter, the rats, the snakes, tents are not protect families from all these hazardous environments.
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So the materials we're asking for are really basic.
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It's just timber, and it has been recently denied.
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When you live in the tents with the kids, with the small babies, and you wake up with the babies without his finger because these threats, 70% of the population living in these tents and suffering from these threats.
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This is the kind of situation.
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And as concepts like gender equality, inclusion, and diversity fall out of favor in some of the world's most powerful countries, we talk to Geneva's very own gender champions about why they are still so important.
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We have unfortunately less women now, for example, in leadership positions across the globe.
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It's happening.
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And this is what the I see that the gender champion is not allowing this just, you know, to go unnoticed.
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And it makes a difference.
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Despite the pushback against gender equality, this matters from a moral point of view, from an economic point of view, from a social point of view, and we are here to stand up, even in difficult times, to say we need to continue to invest in women and girls, and that the world is a better place when we all have this seat, this space for equality.
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Join us on Inside Geneva every other Tuesday.
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In between, catch up on earlier episodes.
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We've got in-depth coverage of how the Red Cross reconnects prisoners of war with their families.
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We ask why human rights groups want to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
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We investigate whether President Trump's Board of Peace for Gaza is a bid to undermine the United Nations, and we explore why immigration has become such a polarizing topic.
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All that and more here on Inside Geneva.
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Let us know what you think by reviewing us or writing to us at insidegeniva at SwissInfo.ch, and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
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For now, thanks for listening.
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I'm Imogen Folks, and this has been a SwissInfo production.