Human Rights Watch is one of my favorite non-effective-altruist-identified nonprofits. I’ve often referenced their reports when I want an unbiased, objective source about what atrocities are happening in a particular country. So I was eager to read Righting Wrongs, which is a memoir by their former CEO, Kenneth Roth, about his experiences working there.
You might wonder whether Human Rights Watch is doing any good. Observably, many authoritarian dictators exist and innovate endlessly in terms of human cruelty. Is Human Rights Watch managing to accomplish anything other than issuing reports for me to reference in blog posts?
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I want to emphasize that shame often directly attacks the material interests of human rights abusers. If the United States or the European Union is unhappy with you, that doesn’t just result being iced out at parties. It can mean you don’t get the aid or trade you were counting on to feed your people (or build your thirty-seventh palace, whatever). It can mean you don’t get the tanks and planes you need to combat the Islamic State of Wherethefuckever. It can, apparently, mean that Donald Trump orders your abduction or assassination (and then your country is a trashfire but what do you care about that, you’re still arrested or dead).
The major weakness of Human Rights Watch’s tactics, according to Kenneth Roth, is that they don’t work against Kim Jong Un. North Korea’s strategies for cementing support among key power bases within its own country have nothing to do with ruling well; committing more atrocities, to some extent, actually makes elites support the government more. And North Korea has been an international pariah for so long that they have no international reputation to lose. Some dictators are, indeed, immune to shame.
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Introductory microeconomics works both ways. You can deter behavior by making it costlier on the margin. But as cutting a deal with you becomes more expensive, people start to look for some other source of military assistance, economic aid, trade deals, and fancy summit invites.
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Ultimately, Human Rights Watch’s moral power comes from the sense that they’re fair: they hold everyone to exactly the same standards; no one they criticize is being unfairly targeted.
Third, Human Rights Watch must only recommend actions that are possible. This isn’t really a constraint on civil and political rights: it’s always possible to hold elections, stop bombing civilians, not commit genocide, let women drive cars, and so on. But some people have declared that healthcare is a human right, or climate change is a human rights violation, or global poverty is a human rights issue.
However, no matter how enthusiastically you shame poor governments, they can’t get money from nowhere. Many poor countries—even if they were run perfectly—would be unable to provide an American or European standard of living for their citizens. And climate change is a complex problem that every country on earth contributes to; no country can unilaterally decide to cap global warming at 1.5ºC. If you shame these countries, you’re blowing political capital for no reason.
Human Rights Watch does address so-called economic rights, but only unambiguous corruption or unambiguously wasteful vanity projects—situations where there’s a specific, concrete action a country could stop doing.
From the article:
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