Human Rights and Human Responsibilities: Overlapping Concerns

by Thomas Axworthy

A transcript of remarks at the symposium on "Human Rights and Human Responsibility" held April 1, 2005, at Santa Clara University

I've been asked by Professor Kirk Hanson to try and summarize some of the discussions and issues we've heard today. I would therefore like to make three or four points on areas where I think there is some disagreement, but largely I will be addressing areas of overlapping concern.

Let me start by saying that the first sentence of the preamble on the InterAction Council's document on responsibilities states that it is time to talk about responsibilities. What we have heard today only emphasizes the wisdom of those statesmen who wanted to try to use their eminence to bring attention to an issue that was under the radar of the media, many NGOs, and certainly most world leaders — the important domain of responsibility. This concept was once so central to our philosophical and ethical discourse, but the leaders of that time made the point that it had been slipping—not in its importance, but in its visibility—and it was time to right that balance.

If the InterAction Council was right in the mid-1990s, how prescient they are and were when we look at the notion of responsibility today. Recent headlines speak of corporate leaders who have lied to their boards, auditors who have assisted in that lying, leaders who have deliberately or inadvertently misled their public on crucial decisions about whether to choose peace or go to war. Great organs of journalism such as the New York Times have had reporters totally fabricate stories, and there are church leaders who stand accused of sexual crimes. The list goes on and on, in area after area—men and women in high places abusing their position, their privileges. And it's not just related to the political sphere or the international sphere. Today we could have also had a panel on corporate leadership, on religious leadership, on media leadership, where all the issues we've been talking of with regards to the terms of terrorism of the state we could have replicated in domain after domain. It is fair to say we are facing a crisis of responsibility in field after field. The interlocking set of institutions to police behavior and, more importantly, the internal clock of morality that we should possess has been turned back. The subject of how responsibility adheres to rights is an absolutely crucial one.

Historically we've spent a lot of time talking about the origins of rights—John Locke, the17th century and so on. In fact, ethical discourse goes back a thousand years before our discussions of rights. When we look at when democracy was first invented in 5th century Athens, the Athenians had a variety of discussions about the obligations of citizenship but not about rights. Socrates did not have rights when he was murdered by his fellow citizens. The essence of Confucian philosophy is how to have internal discipline so that we could discipline our emotions and have right behaviors beginning with ourselves, extending to our families, to our responsibilities to a broader society and eventually to our leadership. The Buddha talked about the necessity for internal transformation in order to discipline our human emotions. And why is that?

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his book Children of Light and the Children of the Darkness argued that we all know as human beings that we can transcend toward love and sharing, but we have an almost equal determination to have our egos dominate our personalities, to have ambition control all else. Much of human life is a contending battle between those forces of light and forces of darkness. Therefore, our ethical and spiritual leaders have taught right from the start about implicating a personal sense of discipline and moral value to control the demons within. And we still continually need to control our demons within if we look at the New York Times, the Enrons and all the rest.

The emphasis here is on the internal discipline — the obligations to carry out a set of ethical norms beginning with ourselves as human beings — before looking at checks and balances and accountability and the rule of law. The first defense of civilization is the internal morality of each and every one of us. That is why when our great ethical thinkers and religious leaders began to develop their systems, they began with that sense of personal efficacy that we all should hold, and they were right; that's where it all starts.

With our discussion about rights we have to all understand that our societies would disappear if most of us didn't pay our taxes. Societies would disappear if most of us did not fulfill our contracts. Societies would disappear if no one voted. Society depends on trust and internal personal devotion to carrying out a set of obligations, and then when that internal morality fails we use the law to enforce it. But we could not do that in every case. Our societies all depend on that sense of personal responsibility for them to survive at all. Therefore, if we have a diminution in responsibility and particularly one among our leaders, as Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser talked about, that is a terrible sign and one which is worthy of the priority the InterAction Council has put on this subject.

The second main point that we have had several speakers allude to is that this has always been an issue since Jeremiah and Confuscious and the Buddha up until today, in the first part of the 21st century. We've had speakers emphasizing why that concern is so critical today and that's because of a broad set of concerns around the responsibility to protect.

Prime Minister Fraser talked about the responsibility to protect societies in an age of terrorism. Think back for a moment on the terrible picture that he painted of our Western societies so afraid of the forces of terrorism that we are even conniving at torture—torture, which was almost the first human abnormality that society wanted to outlaw. Yet we have voluntarily become torturers in our age. Think about what the prime minister said — what does it imply about the world we live in that we do not have outrage across the world against those who practice torture? Instead, we have debates, but it hasn't been a central concern. What has happened to us in our fear is that we have had such derogation from a traditional adherence that if there was one thing we believed, it was that one should not torture. But we've begun to slip away from that, as the prime minister pointed out.

In this tremendous debate about the responsibility of our leaders to protect us from outrages for our personal and physical security, the responsibility of how that protection function should be carried out has been lost. The internal clock of our leaders, the internal clock of the military, the internal clock of the torturers themselves has been turned off.

And it's not just the Iraq War or Guantanamo Bay. In my own country, Canada, a Canadian of Syrian background, Mr. Qatar, suspected of terrorism was, with the connivance of our secret service along with the American authorities, instead of being sent back to Canada to be tried in a court of law on his suspected terrorism, there was a wink and a nudge and he was sent back to Syria to be tortured. Both our countries were implicated. Not wanting to do the torture themselves, they were only too happy to have the Syrians do it. What kind of countries and what kind of peoples are we that we would begin to connive in that kind of activity?

In our post-September 11 world, when we think how far we have derogated from our traditional adherence on things such as not having torture, just think back historically for a moment. If we go back to another age of worries about terrorism, immediately after World War I where in Canada fears of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Winnipeg General Strike, led to a host of illegal activities by our RCMP based on the fear of Bolshevik revolutionaries. Look how silly they now look years later, but they didn't look silly at the time. Think of the Palmer raids, Boston police, and the administration of Woodrow Wilson and the fears that the US would be undergoing a Red Revolution and the terrible abuses that occurred then, but to general acclaim with very little debate. And then look how silly and sick they look years later. Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians suspected of being terrorists from within—we all know what a shameful episode that was in this state and in the province of British Columbia. So, from time to time, bodies, peoples, democracies, go through fits, democratic distempers and that's when you really need that moral clock, responsibility, for people to say 'stop this.' And then behind that moral sense you then need courts and judges and Supreme Courts to prevent that distemper from spreading if it begins to occur.

The prime minister put down an enormous challenge to us about whether we have been going off the deep end. We also, in some ways, have made the world worse by our tendency to intervene with words and our tendency not to intervene with resources in any meaningful way. When one goes to Sarajevo and Bosnia today, one is filled with attacks about the UN because hopes were raised so high that force might protect the Bosnian Muslims from the outrages of the Croats and Serbs. Yet because the world did not want to put in sufficient resources and the Security Council did not want to give that force a robust ability to enhance, because there was not really a commitment to do anything about Bosnia but there was a fear to forthrightly tell our peoples that we would not do anything, everyone connived in a sham—a sham peacekeeping force that couldn't really protect and a whole series of sham resolutions that tumbled one upon the other. The result was that the people who saw that sham the quickest learned the UN was not really there to protect the people; they were there to protect the reputations of Bill Clinton and various others but not to protect the Bosnians themselves. And so we do a worse job when we say we have a responsibility to protect and we say to our citizens we are being responsible when we know we're not. Even more people will be killed because of that.

The UN is under constant attack in large part because the leaders have made a series of obligations to the UN in the Charter, but they do not have the responsibility to fulfill them. Much of the problem with our international machinery is not the laws; it's the political will to carry them out. That means that our leaders, by in large, are not fulfilling the responsibilities which they have agreed to and which our countries have signed treaties on. Ultimately much of the failure of the international machinery is another example of the failure of responsibility.

So, the IAC, men and women of power, have spent time now to reflect on what they would do differently using their experience, not just to have an academic exercise, but what would be useful to help diplomats and leaders today. The leaders from the recent past have said what is missing is a charter about responsibility. Of all the things they could have done (they've done a variety of very useful things on nuclear non-proliferation and small arms at their meeting here at Santa Clara) one of the major items of their reflection of what is required in the world architecture was not a new treaty, but a new moral force or a charter of responsibility. That was a very important ethical denouement that the IAC took.

The point was raised about enforcement. Having a code which talks about ethical behavior and which puts a premium on truth—this is not law, this is not enforceable. This is moral norms, but it's the norms of responsibility so that the internal clocks of our leaders can be turned on again. The charter won't guarantee it, but it will help. It is a modest contribution, but it is a real one. When one thinks about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it didn't begin as law; it began as a set of principles, and it turned into law. The charter on responsibility begins with a series of principles - principles as parents, principles as leaders, principles as citizens. We all need to be reminded of those principles.

And that's what the IAC is calling for. This is why the worry among some in the human rights community about the charter of responsibility I find difficult to understand. It is reminding peoples of their internal responsibilities and the obligations they have undertaken. That is what responsibility is about: What do I undertake to fulfill? That itself is a basic orientation that is then reflected in a variety of other ethical norms. It means you are serious about your word. That is what the IAC calling for—people to be serious about their obligations, the undertakings they have done. There is nothing, in my view, antithetical with human rights about this proposal, which is be serious about the human rights treaties you sign instead of words that would take away from human rights. If you do not intend to undertake your obligations, the pieces of paper on human rights are worthless. The precondition to human rights is to have a sense of responsibility to carry out your undertakings. The two are absolutely complementary and one is a precondition of the other.

My last point is this: Why this particular undertaking of responsibility at this time? Historical researchers can show that in the original Declaration of Human Rights, there were representatives of the then-Republic of China who where active in it and the work of John Humphrey went to legal norms around the country. But since that time, the Universal Declaration has been under attack by those who follow Asian values and other kinds of values on the basis that this is a Western device.

The InterAction Council, at this time and place, with their necessity to restore some sense of responsibility and to bring some attention to having a code of responsibility, began by inviting people from a variety of faiths, who all have their own ethical codes and their own sense of responsibility codes. What the IAC has done is not new. There are codes of responsibility for the media, codes of responsibility everywhere. But they took the convening function of taking people from a variety of faiths and said what is in common that we can all agree to. So in a time when we talk about clash of civilizations, when religions are so antithetical, when we need to look at connectors, think of this initiative at this time that it sought to find the commonality about a variety of faith traditions. Have we ever needed it more?

I conclude that there is nothing antithetical about responsibilities and rights; that a sense of obligation to carry out one's word is essential to human rights attainment; that we have had a slippage in the ethics of personal responsibility in area after area.

The Council is proposing that some public attention be brought to this problem in the most dramatic way possible, not just in a series of academic conferences, but in a new convening of the United Nations to bring the bully pulpit of the UN declaration to this issue of responsibility, which needs more publicity and more heightening. In doing so, the InterAction Council brought together people from all faiths to look not at what divides us but what unites us. What unites us is that we all know in our heart of hearts that we should be responsible citizens, and that is an ethic worth preserving and worth promoting. Thank you very much.