Universell-Out

More than seven decades ago, the international community of states, albeit much smaller at that time, defined a set of fundamental human rights to be considered universal, inalienable, and indivisible.^[1] In line with the duty to uphold and defend these core rights and freedoms, its members enshrined these values in a landmark document: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Although the group of drafters included people from all regions of the world and from highly diverse cultural, political, and religious backgrounds, it managed to spell out “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations” that it believed would help achieve lasting peace and security and prevent the atrocities of the Second World War from ever happening again.^[2] The UDHR was adopted in the UN General Assembly with no dissenting votes, and later inspired a plethora of other global and regional human rights norms and treaties, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.^[3]

About 70 years later, the very understanding of human rights as universal aspirations can no longer be taken for granted. In 2022, Freedom House, whose indicators are largely derived from the UDHR, registered the 16th consecutive year of deterioration of political rights and civil liberties around the world.^[4] And its dire findings are shared by other human rights measures and by many experts in the field.^[5] At the same time, the “age of impunity,” as former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has called it, has squarely arrived (Figure 2.1). Even for the most egregious human rights abuses, it often seems impossible to hold perpetrators to account. The war zones of the world are a drastic case in point. Rather than respecting the rights of civilians, combatants in many parts of the world are killing, torturing, or deporting civilians, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, and willfully undermining humanitarian aid.^[6] Russia’s war against the civilian population in Ukraine is not just condoned – it is an actual part of the strategy. The “brutal standard of warfare” it reflects is unfortunately also found in many other places in the world.^[7]

While international human rights are under assault, their universality has also become contested. Powerful autocrats are now depicting the UDHR as “an unrepresentative Western document,”^[8] while their efforts to establish an authoritarian variant of international law – one meant to shield governments that violate fundamental rights and freedoms – are already in full swing.^[9]

But disagreement on human rights norms and mechanisms is also evident inside and among the democratic states of the world. With systemic rivalry set to widen rather than narrow these divides, efforts to revive the spirit of universality that originally inspired the human rights project are facing serious headwinds.

China, supported by Russia, is at the forefront of authoritarian pushback against international human rights norms and the mechanisms built to protect them. Both Beijing and Moscow have long viewed efforts to promote human rights by the US and its European allies as an existential threat to their regimes’ security and stability. Recently, however, Beijing has replaced its defensive stance – focused on shielding its repressive regime from external criticism – with a much more assertive approach aimed at advancing an alternative vision for human rights.^[10] The vision it pursues, Western observers worry, is nothing less than a world safe for autocracy, with a much more limited role for liberal human rights and the global promotion of fundamental values.

Although a Chinese representative had served on the drafting committee of the UDHR, Beijing is now denouncing many fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the declaration as “Western.”^[11] These “so-called universal values,”^[12] as China refers to them, are decried as unrepresentative of the values and needs of other countries in the world, developing ones in particular.^[13] They are also branded as instruments of Western cultural imperialism more generally and “an excuse to keep China down” specifically.^[14]

In line with this reasoning, Beijing, with Russia’s support, has pushed alternative conceptions of human rights. While there are many facets to this undertaking (Figure 2.2), two stand out: the championing of economic, social, and cultural rights over civil and political ones, and the reorientation of international law toward an absolute defense of national sovereignty. In this spirit, China is arguing that a country’s development needs may well legitimize restrictions on civil and political rights, while Russia highlights that traditional values may justify the denial of minority rights.^[15] To reassert the principle of sovereignty against external interference in the name of human rights, both countries cast the West as revisionist aNd themselves as defenders of the status quo.^[16] To win support for these ideas, China regularly hosts conferences such as the South-South Human Rights Forum, which engage developing and emerging countries, particularly African states.^[17]

At the same time, China and Russia have continued their efforts to erode core human rights institutions and mechanisms, chief among them the UN Human Rights Council. By cooperating with the members of the “Like- Minded Group,” a coalition of mostly authoritarian countries, Beijing and Moscow have worked to curb the ability of the human rights system to independently monitor human rights situations and reprimand those who abuse fundamental freedoms. These efforts are far from new. But as China has extended its political and economic clout in the world, and thus its economic and financial leverage over other countries, its ability to mute human rights critics and win support for its own interpretation of human rights has visibly grown.^[18] In 2017, China sponsored its first solo resolution at the UN Human Rights Council, one that insinuates that respect for human rights is contingent on economic development – and it passed by a wide margin.^[19] Moreover, in a recent UN Human Rights Council vote, Western countries failed to mobilize a majority against China, even for the limited aim of discussing the situation of human rights in Xinjiang. The report that would have served as the basis for this discussion – one that suggests that the human rights violations committed against Xinjiang’s Uyghur Muslims may amount to crimes against humanity – almost did not “see the light of day” due to intense Chinese pressure.^[20]

While they are at the forefront of human rights revisionism, China and Russia are not the only autocracies that have ramped up their pushback against this core pillar of the liberal international order. Over the past years, other authoritarian regimes have also become much more active in sponsoring human rights resolutions and thereby reshaping global norms on human rights.^[21]

For many years, liberal democracies, supported by civil society organizations, have tried to resolve the tension between state sovereignty and the protection of individual rights, which is inherent in international law, in favor of the latter. Guided by a vision of much stronger global human rights protection, they have sought to advance an understanding of international law whereby state sovereignty is conditional on respect for human rights. Western democracies and their partners have also sought to build and strengthen the tools needed to protect human rights and hold the world’s human rights offenders accountable –
at least the very worst ones. Most recently, a German court convicted a Syrian war criminal based on the principle of “universal jurisdiction.” This principle allows states to prosecute serious abuses of international law even when the crimes in question were not committed on their territory and neither the victims nor the perpetrators are citizens of that state.^[22]

Nothing would be a better rebuke to autocratic allegations that human rights are “Western” than concerted action by democratic countries from every region of the world. Yet democracies from within and beyond the West have not always seen eye to eye on international human rights – and in light of “hardening bloc politics over human rights,”^[30] these rifts may very well grow in the future.

Over the past few decades, countries that respect human rights have often failed to vote together on human rights resolutions. Alignment between the EU and African democracies has been particularly weak (Figure 2.3). Moreover, despite having fundamentally different democratic and human rights records from one another, emerging powers from the “Global South” have often allied themselves more closely with each other than with the EU on core human rights decisions.^[31] Overall, many non-Western democracies have shown greater concern for sovereignty and non-interference than their Western counterparts, European states in particular. As a result, they have repeatedly proven reluctant to embrace the external promotion of liberal human rights norms and standards.^[32]

China certainly knows how to exploit these dynamics and sentiments in its favor. It is actively courting the “Global South,” African states in particular, with the notion of “human rights suitable for developing countries,” purporting that its own understanding of human rights is much more attuned to these countries’ needs.^[36] And together with Russia, Beijing eagerly caters to anti- Western sentiments and suspicions, pointing to overbearance and double standards in Western human rights practices and portraying the West’s human rights agenda as not actually motivated by a belief in universal values, but as a desperate attempt to prevent its own decline.^[37]

If these trends are allowed to continue, the future international order will have little resemblance to the one that the international community pledged to bring about seven decades ago. Efforts to push back against emboldened autocrats will not succeed if countries with good human rights records cannot restore human rights as a cross-regional project. But how can the notion of universality be revived among the democratic states of the world? How can they win the support of governments that might not necessarily be “ideologically committed to the project of authoritarian international law” but are currently acquiescing to it?^[38]

Some steps are obvious. If Western democracies want to reduce suspicions regarding their human rights policies, they cannot allow themselves to apply double standards when implementing basic human rights. It is also evident that without extensive exchange across regions, cultures, and religions, any effort to revive the old human rights consensus is bound to fail. Other steps, however, are much more controversial. By refocusing on a smaller set of core human rights – “a universal minimum standard,” some suggest – this lost consensus might be reestablished.^[39] But while a narrower focus may help bridge divides that threaten the human rights project – divides that China and others exploit for that very reason – an attempt to water down the liberal human rights agenda in the service of broader global agreement also comes with obvious downsides.

While it is far from clear whether the spirit of universality can be revived, there are also reasons for hope. There is ample evidence that fundamental human rights, such as the desire to live in dignity and free from oppression, have a strong appeal far beyond the traditional West, including inside the world’s most oppressive regimes. In Iran, undeterred by violent repression, people are taking to the streets to demand core rights and freedoms. Millions of people everywhere in the world are regularly “voting with their feet,” leaving their own repressive countries for refuge in liberal states rather than in Russia or China.^[40] And the results of the World Values Survey provide ample evidence that “the ‘West’ is not the sole guardian of liberal values.”^[41] Meanwhile, in all countries surveyed for the Munich Security Index, except for China and India, more people disagree than agree that it would be a good thing if China had more say over the rules that govern international politics (Figure 3.2). Those who seek to portray universally shared human rights standards as incompatible with a more pluralist, multipolar order are currently those who speak with the loudest voice. They can still be proven wrong. But without a clear vision of how to revive the human rights project, the window to do so is closing rapidly.