The Idea of Rights

An interview with Nicholas Bequelin.

We have launched a new issue focused on grasping the extent and the history of U.S. foreign intervention — how does the U.S. conceive of its role in the world, what has it done to maintain that role, and what has or hasn’t changed over time. A new foreign policy consensus seems to be rapidly emerging, and, per usual, the most helpful thing to do is to slow down and try to understand the context of the moment we are in. This is our fifth interview of the series.

This interview with

Nicholas Bequelin

, Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, who previously served as Asia Regional Director at Amnesty International and as a Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch, was conducted and condensed for clarity.

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Would you start by introducing yourself and telling me how you found yourself working on human rights to begin with?

I started studying Chinese and Chinese civilization at university, which brought me to China. I decided to do a doctorate in political science on the far west peripheral region of China called Xinjiang, which is located on the Silk Road. The population is essentially Turkic Muslim, Uyghurs, but also includes a constellation of other ethnic groups: Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and so on. I was working on the expansion of the Chinese state in this area after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.

I spent a lot of time in Xinjiang doing this research and preparing my doctorate. That work awoke me to the serious human rights issues that were taking place in the region. There is a long-standing history of colonial oppression in Xinjiang. I was progressively led to take a bigger interest in human rights issues. After I finished my PhD, I started working for Human Rights Watch as a consultant, and from then on, I have had a career in human rights.

And then a few years ago, I joined Yale Law School to work more precisely on the issue of political harm, which is the type of harm caused by political arrangements. My concern is how to prevent avoidable harm to human beings. I am currently at Yale working on this and writing a book.

I wanted to ask about the decline of human rights and the decline of the popularity of human rights as a priority or an idea that people are talking about. But before we get really into the decline of it, can you talk to me about the acceptance of it?

I think it's important to say that I've approached human rights from a practitioner's angle. I've spent the last 20 years — more than 20 years — living in Asia and other parts of the world, working on actual human rights investigations, advocacy, and change. My perspective is really informed by that. I'm looking for pragmatic solutions rather than trying to crack some philosophical puzzle.

The idea of human rights is an old one, and it's definitely tied to morality — what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust. Human rights are a framework that puts these ideas into a legal arrangement, assigning both rights and duties. In that political arrangement, the subjects of rights are mostly individuals, sometimes communities, but mostly individuals. And the duty-bearers are primarily states, as well as entities regulated by states, like big corporations.

This makes sense when you consider that we live in a world of states. We live in sovereign states, and these states have enormous power — to arrest, to determine who belongs and who doesn’t, to tax, to conscript for war, to structure the goods we can enjoy, to limit our freedoms, and to impose punishments. And in the mid-20th century, we saw the emergence of the modern industrial state that has enormous power, that could wage wars of previously unimaginable proportions, and even try to obliterate entire communities of people. The Holocaust was the triggering historical event, particularly in Europe and the U.S., where we began to think whether there should be limits to state sovereignty.

In the 1930s, when the Nazi regime was gaining power, if you look at the diplomatic communications, it shows awareness of what was happening: Jews, Roma, LGBTQ+ people were being rounded up. But the prevailing view was, “This is their government. This is Germany. They have sovereignty. It’s deplorable, but they can do what they want.”

The Holocaust and World War II ended that view. There was agreement that we needed mechanisms to prevent such regimes from emerging again. That was the impulse behind the post-war effort, led by the United States, to create the United Nations, adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and embed human rights as principles meant to prevent a return to the tragedies of the early 20th century. The belief was that protecting human rights could help prevent belligerent regimes from forming and unleashing global catastrophes.

The states didn’t see these principles as enforceable, but rather as noble ideals — guidelines to aspire to, but then the Cold War quickly intervened and it was quickly revealed that states weren’t suddenly going to behave better. But advocacy from the bottom up, from lawyers, activists, and newly independent countries, pushed these standards forward. They worked to turn the Universal Declaration and other parts of the UN Charter into real, enforceable norms. Legal standards, procedures, and institutions were developed to give human rights real weight. Over the past 50 to 80 years, international norms have developed, and human rights are now enshrined not only in international law but also in national legal systems. Many constitutions reference human rights as principles to uphold.

So, that’s the broader view. There’s the philosophical debate: Do humans really have rights? Who gets to decide? Is this just a Western construct? And then there’s the pragmatic view: There are standards that have developed over time, codified in treaties, monitored by institutions. And a lot of people around the world seem to believe in them and are willing to fight for them. That’s the side I’m interested in, the real-world application, rather than abstract philosophical inquiry.

In terms of real world application of all of these things, you mentioned these international organizations having the ability to wield some sort of power over states. Do you think that has gone away? Have the “teeth” of these organizations lessened?

It's difficult to say for sure, but there definitely was an era of optimism starting from the mid-nineties, up to the launch of the global War on Terror, which created massive exceptions to human rights in the name of preventing and fighting terrorism.

The system was still there, but now there were massive exceptions for mass surveillance, disappearances, and torture and all sorts of unsavory alliances with repressive regimes. I think this was one of the turns where the human rights regime lost some credibility. The countries that dominated the international order, the US among them, created more and more exceptions, first for terrorist suspects, then migrants, then people suspected of ties to cartels, and so on. And over time, that really undercut the legitimacy and authority of these norms because of the double standards.

I think we have evidence of this in public sentiment, when people compare the reaction of the West to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the tragedy happening in Gaza. People have an instinctive sense that something isn’t right, that there is an instrumentalization of human rights. And this crisis of legitimacy, then, of course, translates into the erosion of the authority of these international norms. We call it international “law”, but international law is not like domestic law, because you don't have a world government that can enforce it. It’s really a set of agreements that can always be reneged on.

And, within the body of international law, human rights is really one of the weakest parts. Governments are very often tempted to cut corners on human rights for reasons of expediency, either because it serves their political aims, or it contradicts other interests they may have. So, we may frown upon the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, but they have a lot of oil. Therefore, we have an interest in maintaining good relations. We may frown at the fact that Egypt has one of the largest populations of political prisoners, but we see them as a guarantor of regional stability. And therefore, we're not going to make them pay a price for that.

The extent to which human rights norms are upheld is really a matter of political will, and I think the political will has been declining.

Countries also increasingly feel unconstrained by these norms. There was a time when any government, no matter how repressive, at least paid lip service to respecting human rights — whether it was the Soviet Union, the junta in Myanmar — they all said they respected human rights. Now, for the last 15 years or so, you see open anti-human rights sentiment. It’s no longer a sacred cow, so to speak.

All of this contributes to the impression that the civil rights ideology is no longer supreme, is no longer uncontested, and is less authoritative and less effective in preventing injustices and oppression from happening.

Enforcement relies on norms established by Western hegemony, but the hypocrisy of the United States has detracted from those norms. So whose job is it to uphold these rules?

The post-war world order is a fairly recent creation. The institutions and the distribution of power within this system are a direct descendant of the arrangements made immediately after the Second World War. We are living in a system that is not really representative of the current distribution of power in the world. At the time when the UN is created, when the new rules of the game are created, the new world order, the U.S. is the only country standing, really. It has unmatched economic power. There are only 50 countries at the UN at the time. The U.S. is dominant.

I think we have to realize that the essence of human rights across the world — the way that this idea scaled up incredibly quickly and with enormous effect — was the product of a number of factors, but one of them was the domination of the U.S. as a world power. The hegemony of the U.S. created very favorable conditions to advance this.

And then we have another major development, which was the birth of 24/7 news coverage, particularly television. CNN suddenly put distant world crises into people's living rooms. That really created a lot of empathy and goodwill, which, combined with a sense of hegemony and superiority, gave people the impression that, “Here is a problem—we can solve this if we want to.” And then, of course, it becomes more complicated because very often we can't solve it.” We can't solve Afghanistan, we can't solve Iraq, we can't solve the Middle East, we can't solve Somalia.

But I don't know if the conclusion is that it's impossible. I think the conclusion is, did we do enough? Were we committed enough?

I'll give one example: Libya. Libya had been under Gaddafi’s control, which was a very particular type of tyranny. When there was a rebellion in the east of the country and the Gaddafi government decided to send troops to crush it, particularly the rebellion in Benghazi, the second-largest city in the country.

There was a collective alarm about the human toll that this crackdown could provoke. After multiple rounds of negotiation between France, the U.S., Europe, NATO, the decision was made to intervene and prevent this crackdown. That was the good side: this impulse to prevent suffering. But then, it was clear that the situation would have required a lot more presence, investment in blood and treasure. No country was really willing to do this. They had diverging interests.

The result was that piles of weapons throughout the country were abandoned, unsecured, and quickly seized by various armed groups, or sold throughout the region. This led Islamist and rebel groups throughout the Sahel and beyond to suddenly have a bonanza of advanced modern weapons, destabilizing an entire region.

So this is a good example. Was the problem too much human rights? Should we never have intervened because we could not prevent Libya from breaking into different factions? Or did we not even do the minimum to ensure that the country had a chance to stabilize and reach an equilibrium point, where it wouldn’t turn into a geopolitical crisis?

I think a lot of crises of this type boil down to that question: is the problem too much concern for human rights, or is it too little? And if we look at the map today, I think, from my end, it’s really a mismatch between the expectation of easy results, the messy reality, and the willingness to endure over time.

There’s certainly an issue of arrogance and ignorance from advanced Western countries who think they have the keys to economic development or political arrangements, or how countries should be ruled.

My question was going to be: are there examples where we did just the right amount? Is peacekeeping always violent? Or are there versions where diplomacy really worked? I’m curious where you see the right balance in terms of intervention.

Well, I’ll start by saying that people in the human rights space have never had many illusions about any states, including the United States, being a benevolent power. But yes, I do believe that there are immense benefits to the human rights framework. We cite some examples, which are never perfect, but I think East Timor, the containment of the Yugoslavian war, the construction of Europe, the ailing but nonetheless vibrant democracies in Latin America, the democratization of many countries in Africa.

There’s also the general consciousness of gender equality. I would say that a lot of the benefits of human rights are not really tangible and visible. It's also about harm prevented, general attitudes toward what is just and unjust, and whether states should be constrained in some ways or held accountable.

And there are certainly a lot of studies–if we move into peacekeeping, which is a slightly different idea–showing that, yes, it doesn’t necessarily prevent bad things from happening, but on the whole, it’s a very economical way of trying to stabilize a situation. But you need the participants to the conflict to be on board with this.

And in some of the conflicts we are seeing now, such as Yemen, or Sudan, or Myanmar, to just give a few examples, the difficulty is that you have a lot of regional actors who are fueling these conflicts through proxies. So it’s not a conflict between two countries, well delineated. It’s not even a civil war between two cohesive forces. It’s a very messy situation in which foreign powers and regional powers push their own interests by supporting their proxy groups. And that makes peacemaking and peacekeeping intrinsically more difficult.

I’m interested in looking at this in the Sahel.

I mean, from the start the idea that you could stop Islamism by unleashing some sort of multinational counter-terrorism force without reading any of the dynamics on the ground as well as the macro factors like climate change, was delusional.

Is there a world in which, you know, we see the United States shrinking in power and others rising, and does that shift the standards we're talking about?

So I think we are talking about issues of international order: what makes an order, what decides, whatever the sort of the laws that regulate such orders. And these are really open questions in the field of political science and international relations, but I think we can rely on a few thumb rules.

The first one is that it's a well-known paradigm of political science that institutions lose their relevance over time because they're designed to respond to a particular set of circumstances. The circumstances change, and then you have a disconnect between the institutions and the reality. And the larger the gap, the more instability you have. And so we are definitely going in that direction, right? The institutions of the international liberal order are increasingly at odds with the actual distribution of power with the rise of countries like China, the resilience of Russia, but also countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey that are regionally very significant geopolitically.

So there are two paths: one is evolution and the other is revolution. Everybody agreed that the institutions — the UN, the World Bank, the IMF — had to evolve, and it was not done. And now the consequence is a breakdown of that order.

You are right to point out that at the moment, the U.S. doesn't seem to believe that it derives enough benefits from running the international system. The core belief that animated the architects of the post-war liberal order was: if we run the system, there are costs, but we will benefit from it.

And I think that has proven to be right. The U.S. is the richest, most powerful country by a mile, and therefore, it's hard to argue that the system didn't work for the U.S.

But, maybe the U.S. overextended, maybe other countries were doing free riding (Europe on security, China on trade and global trade and so on). I think the question now is whether the U.S. retrenches in an organized, predictable way or whether it's a more chaotic, sudden, unpredictable way where the U.S. just decides, “Well, we are not gonna underwrite this function of the international system and that function, and we're not gonna abide by this rule and that rule.”

If it is the latter, at the global level, the costs are higher than ever before.I don't think that China or any other power has the ability — and in the case of China, the will — to do anything beyond a very narrow set of interests that would directly serve them.

That means the rolling back human rights and the status of liberal democracy as the gold standard of behavior for states in the international system. In the current system, you could really only be a member in good standing if you were respecting democratic principles. This is why China — despite becoming a modern, advanced country, a leading scientific power, technology power, economic power, having not launched any war in decades, could never acquire the same kind of status and influence that a democracy would.

And ultimately, I think the biggest factor of all, by a wide margin, is going to be where the U.S. lands on the divide between autocracies and democracies. Is the U.S. going to remain on the side of liberal democracies, or is the system tilting into not a full autocracy, but what political scientists call competitive autocracy or illiberal democracy, which is basically a system in which the rule of law is not consistently upheld, and human rights are severely restricted—freedom of expression, association, dissent, the right to a fair trial, and so on.

And I think where the U.S. political system lands across this divide will have enormous implications for which way the international system as a whole goes.

Are you optimistic about our future with competitive autocracy at best and full autocracy at worst? Are you hopeful?

I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic, I am determined.

I think that every step, every action we take to make the world a little bit less unjust is worthy. We may have to abandon the idea of making a just world and settle for trying to make it a little bit less unjust.