"People Got to be Free"

On March 2, 1807, the United States Congress passed a bill to end American involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Later that month, the British Parliament did likewise. Both nations backed their legislation with force.

The abolition of the slave trade was one of those most successful human rights campaigns of the modern era, and we would do well to treat it as an example.

The methods used to suppress the slave trade were quite different from those of human rights campaigners today. After banning the practice, the United States and Great Britain deployed significant military force to suppress it. American and British warships patrolled off Africa, seeking to stop slave ships. Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here [1] to listen to or to download it. In addition, Britain pressured other governments to end slave trading, going so far as to give large monetary subsidies to foreign powers in exchange for banning the practice in their territory. Most effectively, Britain threatened to blockade nations that refused to comply.

One by one, governments banned the importation of slaves, with the last ones abolishing the practice in the 1860s. Slavery in the New World was itself abolished soon after. In the space of two generations, two governments, largely unsupported by the rest of the world, stamped out a practice that had gone on for centuries. They succeeded despite entrenched economic interests and significant resistance from slave-holding nations.

There were three key factors that allowed the anti-slavery campaigns to succeed. The first was that they picked a feasible goal, and maintained focus on it for decades. They did not attempt to abolish human oppression, or even slavery. They merely attempted to stop the kidnapping of Africans as slaves and their sale in the New World. The second key to success was that the U.S. and Britain were prepared to use military and economic pressure to achieve their aims, rather than mere words. Many slave powers, particularly Brazil, had to be threatened with naval blockades before they agreed to stop trading in slaves. Most fundamentally, the opponents of the slave trade were prepared to act in the face of disagreement and opposition. The U.S. and Britain began their campaign against the slave trade without international agreement or cooperation: this was very much a “coalition of the willing,” in which each government did as much as it felt it politically could.

In contrast, many human rights campaigns of the last few decades have been comparatively unsuccessful. The campaigns against child soldiers, torture, violence against women, and the like have been absolute failures. In each case, the international human rights community pressed for a treaty. In each case, the treaties achieved near-universal recognition. Alas, in each case, the governments and movements perpetrating the offenses took no notice. Saudi Arabia is signatory to the convention on women’s rights, and yet continues to stone women for adultery. Pakistan, where rape victims are periodically executed, is also signatory. Egypt, Russia and China all signed the torture convention, despite their appalling — and continual — abuses.

The international human rights movement seldom condemns this extreme hypocrisy, and has never succeeded in stopping it.

If we want to really improve human rights around the world, we need to abandon the view that a universal treaty is a sufficient, necessary, or even helpful tool in combating abuses. This approach has been tried. It has failed. Any remaining doubts on this point can be dispelled by considering how little the convention on genocide has accomplished for Darfur in the absence of Western determination to stop the killing.

Instead of trying their utmost to stop genocide, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch aspire to denounce every evil in the world. This allows their members to feel proud of their “moral courage,” of their daring to denounce improprieties in America, where they pay no costs, and run no risks, for their boldness.

Such posturing, however, is a poor technique for actually accomplishing anything. Real progress on human rights requires building coalitions, and hectoring is a quick way to antagonize coalition partners.

Coalition-building does not mean abandoning the substance of human rights to collect another signature on a treaty, but it does mean being willing to work with groups that don’t completely live up to our expectations, so long as they are able to make a useful contribution. Anti-slavery advocates, after all, were prepared to make common cause with slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson in order to pass legislation against the slave trade. Insisting on absolute moral purity is a recipe for not getting anything done.

If the human rights community today wants to make a difference, they ought to focus on the greatest abuses of human rights that are within our power to stop. There are depressingly many such abuses to choose from. Western powers could, for a quite moderate commitment, stop the politically-instigated starvation in Zimbabwe, or the slaughter in Sudan, or the sex tourism in Thailand that victimizes so many children. These are not superpowers, which would be perilous to confront: we can likely impose military, economic, and political pressure on those governments that would cause them to give way and suppress the human rights abuse in question.

If we want to actually improve human rights, rather than our self-esteem, we’re going to need to make difficult choices about priorities and methods. As the abolition of the slave trade shows, real human rights progress can sometimes require exerting economic and even military force. The human rights movement ought not embrace every jingoistic attempt to flex American muscle. But reflexively opposing effective measures and instead carping impotently, can be just as bad. Western pressure, and particularly American pressure, can be a powerful force for human rights in the world, if it is applied in a principled and focused manner.

Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.