When you served as High Commissioner, you disregarded political and diplomatic posturing and were unafraid to express your opinions of a country’s human rights violations. Your directness elicited certain aggressive responses. For example, the President of the Philippines called you “an idiot,” North Korea called you a “plot breading scandal mongrel,” and the Chinese called you disrespectful.
The Russians said I was mad. Mentally unhinged. They said I was messianic. It speaks to the power of human rights. It works its way into the legitimacy or questioning of the legitimacy of a government. It’s in that space between the people and the government. It’s so immensely influential if you get it right. It’s amazing that it hardly ever figures in business, literature, or the social sciences. You can spend most of your life and not really be aware of what it means. Until, suddenly, one day you go to use a banking card and you see your bank accounts have been zeroed or you experience a denial of service because of your ethnicity or religion or you’re not this or that. Suddenly, you begin to realize how weak and vulnerable you are. That’s when it dawns upon you. The example I use most is breathing. You breathe 22,000 breaths a day, and you don’t think about it for one second. You would only think about it if someone was trying to strangle you, and then you knew if you couldn’t breathe in the next three minutes you’re done. Human rights are very much like that – you just take them for granted.
In 2017 you made a statement saying, “after reflection, I have decided not to seek a second four-year term. To do so, in the current geopolitical context, might involve bending a knee in supplication; muting a statement of advocacy; lessening the independence and integrity of my voice — which is your voice.” Could you give a little context on this statement and mention in what specific ways do you feel that you or the U.N. had to “bend a knee in supplication?”
The High Commissioner is nominated by the Secretary-General and then elected by the General Assembly. Once there is a selected applicant, there’s this informal procedure where the applicant must get the approval of the Permanent Five members. There’s nothing to say that this must be done, but it’s sort of established. I knew that I would, after three and a half years, have no support from the Permanent Five. I think most of the General Assembly, if not all of it, would probably reject me. I actually believe that if you do this job right, you should not be reelected because you are pushing back against these countries, and you are being vocal about how they treat their own people. If I had sought reelection, I would have envisaged one of the permanent members, maybe all of them, saying to me turn down your voice and we will reelect you. That’s why I refused to go on and bend a knee because I wasn’t going to entertain a quid pro quo.
The irony is that there is no country with a pristine human rights record. Every country can do better, and there is no model country. Every country I went to, I would meet the human rights activists, and they would tell me what was happening inside it. You might find in some European countries, for instance, that have protections and laws for everybody, but when it comes to facts, those protections don’t exist. Go talk to the migrant communities or communities of color, and almost every one of them will say they do experience racism on a day-to-day basis. Every country can do better, and they just don’t like it of course when someone points out there is work to be done.
So, you mentioned that the U.N. promises sovereign equality to all its members, yet it is hard to ignore that some countries have more power than others. How do you believe that the UN challenges or preserves the power of such countries, for example, the Permanent Five?
Clearly, the power of the permanent five is felt very keenly in New York at the UN headquarters, where the Security Council is. That’s where there is a veto, as we saw the Russians do yesterday with Ukraine, so the influence is very much present in New York. In Geneva, it’s not as keenly felt because you have the Human Rights Council and there’s no veto there. You have much deeper integration of civil society, and there’s a peer review system called the Universal Periodic Review, where every two or three months fourteen countries are reviewed by their peers. It’s not perfect. We have a lot of problems when it comes to implementation, but it’s the only system of its kind, and no one has pulled out of it. Countries don’t dare pull out because no country wants to say that it has hurt its own people. It is immensely powerful like that.
You said the model in Geneva was more successful. Do you think that it is a model that the Security Council and other parts of the UN should also adopt?
I belong to a group called the S5. Many years ago, in 2005, we were five small countries that felt we would attack the use of the veto. We called ourselves the S5 to differentiate ourselves from the Permanent Five. The position was very simple: when there are credible and ongoing reports of inner atrocity crimes being committed, the permanent members would voluntarily desist from using the veto. It would be unconscionable not to take action because one country decided to didn’t want to when so many people are suffering.
Most conflicts that we have are human rights violations that turn into conflict. If you want to prevent the conflict, the thing is to deal with the human rights violations that exist in the country. That requires a little bit of confrontation, and the UN doesn’t like confrontation. That’s why the human rights machinery and system are so different from the rest of the UN.
It’s so easy for someone to criticize the conduct of another country. We can sit here and talk about the actions of the Congo and the horrific violence that women in the eastern part of the Congo experience. But, if we were in the Congo, as Congolese, and we were critical we could easily be thrown in jail and thrown into horrible conditions. Would we do it then? It’s always easy to criticize the other. It’s the hardest thing to criticize your own community. When you think about human progress or social progress, every advance in society comes from a minority that says “enough.” Enough. It may have been part of the tradition or part of a business plan, but we’re not going to go along with this anymore. It starts with just a handful of people.
Where do you see hope that we can make the world a better and more equal and peaceful place?
I mean it’s the human side. One of the things I worry about is that there’s so much emphasis on data and a robotic, mechanical-like world. I worry about the educational system churning out these incredibly gifted experts, technical experts, but people without a conscience. I keep saying to each class that I teach that we don’t really need brilliant people. We have so many brilliant people. We don’t have enough courageous, brilliant people.
Yesterday, I was talking to this medical scientist, and I said that last year we were celebrating Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was this amazing nuclear scientist working for the Soviet Union, who decided to speak out. He used his status, his elevated status, to speak about the repression of the Soviet Union. You look around the world today and scientists are held in high esteem, so why don’t they speak up? Why is it always journalists and nonprofits, and why don’t the scientists say anything? I think what concerns me is that our education, if it’s not tied to something else, can be almost next to useless. Yes, you can be a great technical expert and can find your way into the job market, but there has to be something else in life.
So it’s the human side of people. What do you see people do on an everyday basis that gives you hope, and the realization that we’re fundamentally good people. We like to help, and we like to be kind. We can become scared and frightened, and when we come scared and frightened, things switch off, and then we are capable of cruelty. I think then we have to be extremely careful.
One of my predecessors, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was recently killed in Baghdad in 2003. He said fear is a very bad advisor. You cannot run your own life based on fear. I think he was absolutely right. Even with the brutal attack on Ukraine, the pandemic, and climate change. You feel that we are overcoming the pandemic and we can overcome climate change, so, yes, I have hope.