Human Rights and Root Causes
| Published date | 01 January 2011 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Author | Susan Marks |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00836.x |
Human Rights and Root Causes
Susan Marks
n
The human rights movement has traditionally focused on documenting abuses, rather than
attempting to explain them. In recent years, however, the question of the‘root causes’ of viola-
tions has emerged as a key issue in human rights work.The present article examines this new (or
newly insistent) discourse of root causes. While valuable, it is shown to have signi¢cant limita-
tions. It foreshortensthe investigationof causes; it treats e¡ects as though they were causes;a ndit
identi¢es causes only to put them aside.With these points in mind, the article counterposes an
alternative approach in which the orie nting concept is not root causes, but ‘planned misery’.
Most histories of the international protection of human rights begin in the
mid-20th century, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
various treaties, institutions and procedures that then followed. Some histories
begin earlier, sometimes centuries earlier, highlighting the emergence of the
idea of universal and inalienable rights. But few begin later. For the political
analyst Naomi Klein, however, the really important starting-point for the inter-
national protection of human rights is in fact more recent, and it corresponds to
the time when what we now recognise as the human rights movement began to
take shape.
1
As she tells the story, an especially formative context was the e¡ort during the
1970s to stop torture and disappearance in Chile and Argentina. Ruled by mili-
tary juntas engaged in violent repression on a massive scale,these countries served
as a ‘laboratory for a relatively new activist model: the grassroots human rights
movement’.
2
The characteristic of this emergent movement that most interests
Klein is its commitment to neutrality and impartiality. That commitment arose
in well-known circumstances, which saw the enmeshment of human rights in
ColdWar divisions and rivalries.West and East loudly trumpeted abuses by the
other, at the same time dismissing allegations about shortcomings of their own.
This was not just a matter of inter-governmental mud-slinging. In 1967 it was
revealed that the Geneva-based non-governmental organisation, the International
Commission of Jurists, received its initial funding fromthe CIA.
3
Against that background, the idea took root that the new activist model which
was toprovide the front l ineof i nternationalhuman rights protection couldenjoy
credibility only if it remained strictly neutral, impartial and non-political. The
International Commission of Jurists itself reorganised, while Amnesty Inter-
national famously constituted itself in a manner that precluded funding from
n
Professor of International Law, London School of Economics.
1N. Kl ein, TheShock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2007) esp 118^128.
2ibid118.
3See H.Tolley,The Internat ional Commission ofJurists: Global Advocates for Human Rights (Philadelphia:
Universityof PennsylvaniaPress, 1994).
r2011The Author.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2011) 74(1) 57^78
governments and political parties, and made the organisation accountable solely
to its worldwide membership.
4
When it came to the abuses being committed in
the Southern Cone, this helped the victims and their allies insofar as it facilitated
the investigation and denunciation of what was happening. But it also had an
important limitation. The determinationto steer clear of all political engagement
meant that international human rights work was restricted to documenting vio-
lations, and did not extend to considering why those violations were occurring.
For Klein, Amnesty International’s 1976 report on Argentina illustrates
why this is a problem.
5
After settingout the evidenceof state-sponsored violence,
the reportconsiders the government’s claims that the‘dirty war’ was necessary to
maintain order and counteract the threat posed by left-wing guerrillas. The
report’s conclusion is that these claims cannot be accepted; therepressive measures
were grossly disproportionate to any threat posed. But if the measures were
unjusti¢able, presumably they were nonetheless explicable. Onwhat basis? Klein
observes that the report makes no mention of the fact that at the same time
as it was engaging in systematic torture and disappearance, the junta was in the
process of restructuring the country’s economy along radically neo-liberal lines.
The report contains long lists of decrees that violated civil liberties, but makes
no reference to the laws that led wages to be lowered and prices increased, no
reference to the abrupt abrogation of social protection and redistributive
schemes,or to the deepening poverty ofordinaryArgentinians that was the result
of these measures.
Had the economic dimensions of the regime beentaken even minimally into
account, Klein contends that ‘it would have been clear why such extraordinary
repression was necessary, just as it would have explained why so many of
Amnesty’s prisoners of conscience were peaceful trade unionists and social work-
ers’.
6
In this connection, she points up another limitation of the report. The con-
£ict is presented as one between the military and left-wing subversives.There is
no mention of the US o⁄cials a ndot hers who encouraged, supported and guided
the junta’s policies, nor any mention of the transnational corporations and local
landowners who stood to gain from them. Yet, again, Klein maintains that
‘[w]ithoutan examination of the larger plan to impose‘‘pure’’ capitalismon Latin
America, and the powerful interests behind that project, the acts of sadism docu-
mented in the report made no sense at all’. They were‘just random, free-£oating
bad events, drifting in the political ether, to be condemned by all people of con-
science but impossible to understand’.
7
Much of Klein’s analysis in the book from which these passages are taken is
devoted to showing the in£uence of Chicago School economists on economic
trends since the 1970s, and her account begins in the Southern Cone of Latin
America. If during that decade the region was a laboratory for a new activist
model, she recalls that it was also a laboratory for a new economic model,the ‘free
4See S. Hopgood,Keepersof the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2006).
5See Report of an Amnesty International Mission toArgentina, 6^15 N ov em ber 19 76 (London: Amnesty
International Publications,1977).
6n 1above 119^120.
7ibid12 0.
Human Rights and Root Causes
58 r2011The Author.The Modern LawReview r2011The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2011) 74(1) 57^78
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