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Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
Promoting Human Rights
James D. Ross
Abstract
All wars—and the current war on terrorism is no exception—provide serious tests for the rule of law. The demands of armed conflict, with its instantaneous decisions of life and death, do not lend themselves easily to legal constraint. It is thus not surprising that the United States, which has been outspoken historically on matters of human rights, would become less attentive to those concerns after coming under deadly attack. For Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other human rights organizations, the primary concern since September 11 has been to demonstrate that upholding fundamental rights, whether on the battlefields of Afghanistan or in the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, is not only consistent with fighting international terrorism, but is, in essence, what the war is all about. The unwillingness of the Bush administration to embrace this idea bodes ill for the protection of rights as the war on terrorism reaches across the globe.
In many respects HRW’s approach to September 11 and its aftermath merely draws on previous work. The civil war in Afghanistan and rights abuses by the Taliban had long been a focus. After September 11, however, new urgency was given to investigating violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by the various armed forces in Afghanistan and the treatment of refugees in Pakistan and Iran. HRW’s examination of the U.S.–led air campaign in Afghanistan built on previous studies done following the Gulf War and Kosovo. The post–September 11 climate has also given new prominence to human rights issues in the United States, such as hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims and the arbitrary detention of noncivilians under immigration laws.
Despite the continuity with past human rights monitoring, HRW has nevertheless had to do major rethinking, redeploying, and reprioritizing of its work. As a result, HRW has come face to face with a number of issues—some new, others long dormant in the nooks and crannies of international law—that are likely to define the human rights debate for governments and nongovernmental organizations, both in the United States and internationally, for some time to come. One thing is certain: as the war on terrorism expands globally, the boundaries of rights protection will be tested and retested.
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