| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
John Shattuck Interview (1997): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
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Concern about civil liberties became a key issue during this period. The presidency was being used to turn against the citizens, really.
Well it was. It was a transforming event, I think. In fact the impeachment proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee involved a more central exposition of civil liberties than anything else that ever has happened in our country in the last 50 years, except perhaps the Army - McCarthy hearings, but only toward the end did the civil liberties issues come out of those. Here you had an administration which had done, in many fields, a very good job. I mean, the foreign policy of the Nixon administration was quite popular, even though the Vietnam War continued and there were many people opposed to it. Some domestic aspects of the administration were seen positively; certainly the voters had voted Nixon in. But all of a sudden it became clear what was happening to American citizens at the hands of their government, and a huge outpouring developed around these cases and issues that I was involved in: the wire-tapping and the shut-down of protest, the enemies lists and all these kinds of things. So it was almost like a great national seminar on the importance of civil liberties, and I think it was, while painful, an extremely important event for American democracy.
Both the civil rights movement and the concern with civil liberties that you're talking about in turn led to a whole new debate about entitlement: what kind of economic rights and other kinds of rights people were entitled to. In retrospect, what are your thoughts about how those two revolutions took this new turn?
Well, I think the issue of entitlement -- I mean it almost seems like an anachronism to discuss that now, 20 years later -- the idea that large groups of citizens are entitled to some basic support from their government in their necessities of life. On the other hand, from my perspective as an international human rights official now, this is what's embedded in one of the two basic covenants we have in the international field: the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, where people are entitled to basic necessities of life. Or let's put it this way: their governments are obligated to ensure, to the extent that they can, that people are able to receive basic necessities of life. You know, 20 years later I think we have lost sight of this aspect of human rights in our country. That's not to say that there isn't a healthy debate going on. There is. But I think that when you look at some of the legislative developments, the way in which we're treating immigrants, the attacks on welfare activities, all make that debate over entitlement that took place much earlier look like it happened in Never-Never Land.
Do you think that as Americans we're not sensitive enough as we move into the human rights area to the extent to which these basic rights of existence -- the right to food, the right to shelter -- have not been secured in many parts of the world?
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what these rights mean. The basic misunderstanding is that somehow the international community of nations is under an obligation to provide massive forms of redistribution of resources and wealth from those who have them to those who don't have them. That actually was not what was contemplated by the Covenant on Economic and Social Rights. What is contemplated, however, and I don't think we pay enough attention to this, is that a government, wherever it is, if it's going to live up to its obligations under the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Convention, must take some steps to ensure that its citizens are being treated economically fairly. It doesn't mean that that government then has to, if it happens to have a lot of resources, redistribute all of those either inside the country or to other countries. But certainly there ought to be a floor. You cannot enjoy other rights, freedom of speech and political rights, if you have absolutely nothing. As the famous saying goes, people should not necessarily have a right just to sleep under the bridges.
How do you respond to people who say, "Well, Americans are too often trying to impose their definition of human rights on very different cultures and very different peoples?"
No one anywhere in the world should be, because of their culture or religion, tortured or killed. I think the universal values of the integrity of the person are very clear. Sure, there are cultural differences around the world. But the fact that I'm Chinese or that I'm Afghan or that I'm Zairian, doesn't mean that I've given up my right not to be tortured or my right not to be killed. Ultimately, human rights are truly universal. They come right out of the religious and cultural background of all parts of the world. The details may differ, but when it comes to these basic questions of the right to survive against those who would kill you or torture you, it's hard to say that there's any difference from one part of the world to another.
Is our notion of human rights changing as the Cold War ends and we move into this new, very messy world? If so, how?
Yes, I think it's changing in two ways. First, I think we're learning that violations of human rights don't come in the same forms that they used to. They are sometimes -- in fact, if anything -- more massive, and we need to build institutions to try to address that. And we're doing that. I think that's one of the achievements of this post - Cold War world. We have a new position of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. We have new war crimes tribunals to deal with genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. So I think we're understanding, slowly but surely, that human rights are not just a question of advocacy and political warfare as they were during the Cold War, but in fact they involve the need for new institutions to be built to address these terrible conflicts. The other aspect of human rights that is changing is that they need to be seen in a much broader context of some of the global issues that affect us today, including the major environmental problems, the major population problems, the major problems of structural adjustment of economies that are becoming market economies. So human rights are not an isolated subject. They are part of a very rapidly changing globalization of the world that we see. Global, that is to say, the breakdown of borders and the growth of new economic systems and the population explosion and all that goes along with that. Human rights issues are part of that.
I hear you saying that during the Cold War human rights were seen by governments like the United States as an instrument of an ideological struggle. But in the new era, human rights are a central goal in and of themselves, related to the other goals. Is that a fair assessment?
Yes. I think during the Cold War, where you sat depended on where you stood on human rights. If you were a foreign policy specialist in the U.S. government you probably had a particular concern about the human rights violations of people under conditions of Soviet domination. If you were, by the same token, a Soviet or a Cuban government leader you probably had a whole different concept. You wanted to wage political warfare over economic issues and point the spotlight on ideological differences. Today that's gone. In fact the good news, in a world that's certainly desperate for good news, is that human rights are increasingly seen to be truly universal -- this is something everyone should care about and we ought to be able to agree on what they mean, and then we ought to do something about it. And that's why I think the emphasis on institution-building is so important. The fact that we've been able to get through the UN Security Council some resolutions to deal with human rights abuses that never would have been possible during the Cold War is good news. Certainly the deployment in Haiti, the deployment in Bosnia, the efforts that have been made in Rwanda, the work in Cambodia, these are all post - Cold War developments. We never could have had that kind of agreement over these issues at an earlier period, because it would have been vetoed by one or the other superpower.
So human rights in this new era becomes like the environment, a kind of a universal good, and less so an instrument as in the older period.
Well, yes, but it also remains very controversial, more than the environment, I think, because human rights are ultimately about political developments and political events; and governments, almost by definition, are resistant to the pressures that are brought to bear on them to try to improve the human rights situation in their countries. Because that means those governments are going to be called to task and they may even have to reform themselves fundamentally in order to deal with these human rights abuses.
Next page: The Debate in Washington
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