Opening Remarks at the Dahrendorf Symposium 2016
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12436 |
| Author | Kenneth Roth |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
Opening Remarks at the Dahrendorf
Symposium 2016
Kenneth Roth
Human Rights Watch
These are extraordinarily challenging times. We are seeing
the rise of the far right in the West, with leaders such as
Orb
an or Kaczy
nski in Hungary and in Poland, a narrow miss
in Austria, politicians like Trump or Marine Le Pen, who
easily could win in their respective countries.
This phenomenon is very much bred by different types of
insecurity. Economic insecurity, with much of the working
class left with the feeling that they are being left behind,
that their lives are not improving or indeed are getting
worse economically; physical insecurity, with people fearing
that going out with friends to a restaurant or attending a
concert could lead to them being shot; and cultural insecu-
rity, where people trying to respond to the big cultural shifts
represented by large-scale migration, perhaps mythically
think back to a moment when our nation states were more
ethnically homogeneous.
But it is not just in the West that we are seeing this rejec-
tion of rights and liberalism. There is the emergence of
strongmen, an odd term because it often is a product of
weakness that leads people like Erdo
gan in Turkey, Putin in
Russia, al-Sisi in Egypt, or even going a bit further afield Xi
Jinping in China to resort to these authoritarian methods.
We are seeing a disregard for rights standards even in the
way that wars are fought these days, epitomised by Assad’s
decision to fight in Syria not simply by targeting combatants
in the way laid down under the Geneva Conventions, but
rather by deliberately targeting civilians who happen to live
in opposition-held areas. We see the emergence of groups
like Daesh (IS) that are openly, proudly flouting the most
basic standards of Western democracy, of Western rights, of
liberalism.
Now bad as this sounds, I think it is important to stress
that these trends, though real, are not inevitable. And their
success, if you want to use that term, depends very much
on our response to them. They thrive when the response is
weak, when there is little resistance. And sadly, that has rep-
resented much of the Western response to these trends.
We see this in the new European Union states with the
virtually non-response to Orb
an’s openly articulated illiberal
democracy. There has been a slightly greater response with
respect to the developments in Poland. The rule of law
mechanism has been invoked. But a poor precedent was set
with Hungary of little if any response. You contrast this, for
example, with the active ostracisation that Haider encoun-
tered at the turn of the century when he joined the Austrian
government.
You see a similarly weak response in what might be
referred to as the heart of Europe. There is, frankly, a ten-
dency on the part of mainstream political parties to mimic
rather than to oppose much of the agenda of the far right.
I was just in France earlier this week, where the suppos-
edly temporary emergency in response to the terrorist
attacks in November has now been extended for the third
time, even though the government has yet to make any
showing of why the police cannot just go to a judge for an
order before they knock down somebody’s door or impose
control orders on a person.
You see this in the new infatuation with American style
mass surveillance, even though with every terrorist incident
we hear over and over again how the suspects were known
to the police, but the police do not have the capacity to fol-
low up. Yet the police want this avalanche of additional
data thrown at them from mass surveillance.
We see in the response to the migrant and refugee crisis,
with rising xenophobia, rising Islamophobia, far few people
playing the leadership role that we have seen here in
Angela Merkel or, for example, Justin Trudeau in Canada.
Speaking about the refugee deal that the EU has struck
with Turkey, it is a mixed bag. There are good elements to
it because, frankly, one solution to the refugee problem that
would be consistent with the rights of asylum seekers would
be to invest big time in the country as a first refuge. This
could be Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, with investments that
make it possible for refugees to envision a life there, to see
their kids going to school, to have a job, to build a house,
to get medical care.
And so the proposed spending of 6 billion euro in Turkey
is good. It is a way of helping to meet these needs of refu-
gees. There is an urgent need for something comparable in
Lebanon, where 25 per cent of the population is Syrian refu-
gees.
Where the refugee deal goes completely wrong is in its
lip service paid to the right of people who reach Greece,
and therefore the European Union, to seek asylum in the
European Union. The deal was premised on the doctrine
that, if you pass through a safe third country on the way,
you should have applied for asylum there. And then the fic-
tion is put forth that Turkey is a safe place to forcibly return
asylum seekers.
A Greek appellate tribunal has put the kibosh on this
idea. But I suspect it is going to return to the agenda. It is a
fiction because Turkey has ratified the Refugee Convention
Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12436 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 4 . June 2017 71
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