Module 8: Human Rights

This week, we are doing something a little bit different. We are going to listen to the 2017 Massey Lectures by Professor Payam Akhavan. The Massey Lectures are an annual five-part series that focuses on an important political, cultural or philosophical topic. They are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and the University of Toronto’s Massey College. The lectures are subsequently printed as a book.

Professor Akhavan received his doctorate from Harvard Law School and is currently a professor of international law at the University of McGill. Prior to joining McGill, he worked for the UN in the conflict zones including Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Timor-Leste. He has been legal council in cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Supreme Courts of Canada and the US.

This year, Professor Akhavan’s talks are entitled “In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey”. His lectures brilliantly weave together the overarching history of human rights with deeply personal insights generated by his own experiences and those of the people he has met in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, and Syria. The lectures are highly unsettling but at the same time foster hope for meaningful change in the future, rooted in the resilience of the human spirit. This is something that is too often missed in academia. When speaking of human rights, it is necessary to confront the deeply personal impact they have on so many people in so many places. It is also necessary to discuss how we, both individually and collectively, can work towards progress on global issues such as human rights.

In the next five sections, you will be asked to actively listen to the lectures and answer the posted questions for your journal. At the end, you will have to submit a graded assignment that brings the five lectures together.

Lecture one was delivered in Whitehorse, Yukon. It deals with Akhavan’s emigration from Iran to Canada in the 1970s. It speaks to the difficulty of leaving everything you know to move to a new country. It touches on the discrimination experienced by the Bahá’í faith in Iran and then dramatically turns to his awakening to human rights through the tragic experiences of his friend Mona Mahmudnizhad. It asks the listener to think about why some people pursue justice at the global level. It deconstructs passionate advocacy to the level of personal pain. It asks the listener to move past broad generalizations of why bad things happen to others in the world and look deeply at the personal impact these events have on individuals who are not unlike us. In the end, it sets up the lecture series by situating the pursuit of international human rights as necessary and he would argue their attainment perhaps as being inevitable.

Lecture two was delivered in Vancouver, BC. It deals with Akhavan’s experiences of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the attempt to bring the war criminals behind the massacre in Srebrenica to justice. He deals with the politics of establishing the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and the trouble of enforcing its mandate once created. To this narrative he adds the personal stories of not just the victims of war crimes, but also of those who perpetrated them. This lecture asks the reader to situate the pursuit of human rights in historical context. It looks at how we have sought to create rules for the prosecution of war, going back to the American Civil War and the important work of Henri Dunant in establishing the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross in the late 19^th century. However, until the Holocaust, sovereignty remained a serious impediment to any global effort to prosecute individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Srebrenica and Rwanda made the world confront crimes like ethnic cleansing and genocide. This led to ad hoc tribunals and pressure for a permanent institution resulting in the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court. However, this lecture also deals with the deeply personal stories of those behind the atrocities in the 1990s and the difficulty in effectively seeking justice. It asks the listener to see the progress and difficulties in the human rights regime. It wants us to understand the reality of those who are trapped in conflict and horror. It forces us to confront the need for redress and not to hide behind banal justifications of expediency and political realism.

Lecture three was delivered in Montreal, Quebec. It deals with the genocide of Rwanda and the absolute dereliction of duty by the UN. He speaks to the degree of premeditation necessary to kill nearly a million people in 100 days by primitive weapons. This is a genocide that was allowed to happen. The international community was warned but the will to intervene was not there. Akhavan speaks to this gap between capability and will but also to the resilience of the human spirit. This lecture speaks to the processes of dehumanization that always precedes crimes against humanity and genocide. It speaks to premeditation and planning. Crimes like the holocaust and the Rwandan genocide are not spontaneous, they are calculated. They are predictable. They are preventable. If this is true, it forces us to ask ourselves about our values and how civilized we really are. If we as members of the international community, or simply as individual human beings, sat on the sidelines and watched nearly a million people be killed by machete, fire, and fist in 100 days, how can we call ourselves civilized? If we justified their deaths as simply things that happen to ‘others over there’, we have committed similar sins of dehumanization. In our eyes ‘those’ people are less than us and their horrific deaths are simply unavoidable given their barbaric cultures. This lecture asks us to not only understand the problems out there but to understand the way they are facilitated over here.

Lecture four was delivered in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. It deals with how the horrors Akhavan witnessed in conflict zones around the world followed him to New York in 2001. He traces the geopolitical impact of the Cold War on events in Afghanistan and the failure of the West to build a more stable world when the Cold War came to an end. He links the white saviours on one side with the extremist jihadists on the other. They are the two sides of an essentialized conflict that is potentially unending as they feed off each other. But Akhavan argues that it doesn’t need to be so. Rather, he sees a path towards a world commonwealth as being inevitable, it is only a matter of whether it comes in response to calamity or foresight. This lecture asks the listener to confront the terrible events of 9/11 but also to understand the roots of contemporary jihadist extremism in geopolitics. It asks us to question the narratives being spun by both sides of this conflict. It asks us to think beyond parochial ideologies and think about where are humanity lies. It suggests we need to have global responses to global problems. It suggests we need to fundamentally reorient ourselves to see another world is not only possible but necessary.

Lecture five was delivered in Toronto, Ont. It is the concluding lecture of the series. It deals with current problems with compassion kitsch, disparaging the idea that the rich and famous are able to change the same neoliberal order that made them rich in the first place. On the other side, the extremists have successfully tapped into public rage and alienation. The inauthenticity of one creating fertile grounds for the other. He interrogates the values of western society and the emphasizing of profit before people; of how neoliberal policies are legitimated by human rights platitudes. This is all brought together by the issues of war time sexual violence and brought home with Canada’s history with Indigenous people. This lecture asks the listener to be critical of the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we hear of others. It asks us to question the motivations of others and more importantly to question the implicit and explicit motivations of our own actions both singularly and collectively. For example, Canadians and the Canadian state have a narrative of being good international citizens and there is evidence to support this, Lester B. Pearson and Peacekeeping or Lloyd Axworthy and the Anti-personnel Landmine Ban. But it is also contested by the treatment of Indigenous Peoples in Canada or the internment of the Japanese during World War Two. According to Akhavan, if we critically deconstruct these narratives, we come to the realization of ‘us’ as an indivisible whole. If we see ‘us’ as an indivisible whole, we realize that injury done to one part is injurious to the whole. That when we allow a genocide to occur, we are allowing part of us to die and the rest is left tainted. Alternatively, when we embrace empathy and altruism, we find a path to a sustainable world through the upholding of human rights.

Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.

The International Criminal Court is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal that is located in The Hague in the Netherlands. The ICC has the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Slacktivism is using the internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement, e.g., signing an online petition or joining a campaign group on a social media website.

Genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It was established in 1948 following the Nazi Holocaust.

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group, often with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous.