Human Rights on the Retreat?
We need to continue to resist the actions of more repressive regimes (including our own) to control protest and intimidate civil society.
In Russia Navalny has been poisoned, imprisoned and now his organization is about to be closed down. As the Washington Post reports, “Authorities are also seeking to silence independent journalists, including those who work for U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the independent website Meduza. Both have been required to publish extensive disclaimers labeling themselves as foreign agents with every news report and even blog posts. Navalny is a target of a corrupt dictator who fears that he will share the same fate as the other thugs who once controlled Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics.
China too has continued to repress its Muslim minority and intimate democratic protestors in Hong Kong. Ninety-six countries have taken steps to inhibit NGOs from operating at full capacity, in what the Carnegie Endowment calls a “viral-like spread of new laws” under which international aid groups and their local partners are vilified, harassed, closed down and sometimes expelled. In the US the Republicans are moving strongly in various states to criminalize the right to protest.
The Guardian at the beginning of the year recited a long list of countries that have passed repressive laws against NGOs expressing dissent. Authoritarians around the globe are becoming ever fearful of people exercising their democratic power and rights. Why according to one expert the Guardian interviewed it is because we have entered a new post cold war period where human rights were viewed as universal to a period in which there’s a relativization of political values and the questioning of a common narrative. ” Increasingly too governments are fearful of the power of civil society once it is awakened as we saw in the Arab Spring. Social media is now perceived as a danger to the fragile authoritarian regimes that have no legitimacy other than who happens to hold power and controls the military and security forces.
Don’t for one second believe that the US is immune from these forces. In an absurd and blatantly fascist move as the New York Times reports “Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets.” You need to re-read that piece of news a few times for it to fully sink in. To restate—two states have made it legal to mow into crowds of protestors and kill. As if you were not yet appalled by this the Times reports “A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance.” These outrageous measures were hardly reported or commented on by a media that has fallen back into complacency after the defeat of the January 6 insurrection. But it is all too clear judging from these news items and the continued GOP repetition of the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen that authoritarianism still may lurk in our future.
Could it be that the Black Lives Matter protests and the changing demographics weakening the GOP’s hold on power are taking them down the same road that marked the catastrophic Trump presidency? A presidency characterized by its contempt of human rights and its cozying up to the cruelest of the dicators.
Human rights is always the barometer of how far in the direction of autocracy we are heading. The world lies again in a fragile space. Keep watching and keep resisting those who abuse human rights. A core principle of international law is that a violation of human rights anywhere is a violation everywhere. We need to keep this in mind as we move forward and not allow ourselves to be swayed by any belief that “it can’t happen here” —it is happening here and everywhere.