Phil Robertson on Defending Human Rights in East Asia

Rabbit Hole: At times, Human Rights Watch tries to persuade and work with governments to address human rights violations. At other times, it condemns them. When do you employ these different approaches?

PR: Well, we always have recommendations to improve human rights. That may not be the headline in every report, but if you look at our reports, you will see that there is a very clear set of concrete recommendations to governments and other key players in any given situation to improve human rights. We critique human rights abuses because they are clearly against international law, and all our work is done on the basis of the UN international human rights conventions, which have been ratified by governments all around the world. When governments claim that these rights don’t apply to them, people just need to pull out the history books and look at the ratification of these international human rights instruments, and they can see that these same governments that are saying that these don’t apply to them are the ones who voted for them when push came to shove at the UN General Assembly. So, the condemnation happens because, clearly, they are doing something wrong. But we are always interested in trying to improve human rights issues, and we will work with governments, companies, and whoever is abusing rights to address the human rights issues and human rights abuses that we have brought up into the international attention. We are not just name-and-shame for the purpose of naming and shaming – we’re here to try to change things, and that’s a critical piece that often governments deliberately overlook in their rush to try to condemn whatever we’ve said.

Rabbit Hole: Well, my guess, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that you will probably take the more cooperative approach with governments first, right? At least you would try that, and as long as there’s a genuine willingness to address an issue and improve a human rights situation you’d cooperate with them-

PR: Mm hmm.

Rabbit Hole: I suppose there are times, though, where the human rights violation is not the result of negligence, it’s not the result of an oversight – it’s a deliberate strategy, a deliberate policy to stay in power, right, when they, let’s say, persecute political opponents, or when they persecute free press because they’re writing unflattering stories about them. I mean, that’s not a mistake; that’s a deliberate strategy so that they can look good and they can remain in power. Or, alternatively, there may be cases where a policy may not be that necessary to remain in power, but for some reason that government is very wedded to it, like China’s persecution of the Uyghur minority – they’re very stubbornly wedded to it, they’re not gonna reverse themselves on it anytime soon. And, in those cases, you would go from trying to cooperate with them and go into condemning them.

PR: Yes, well, we would certainly condemn human rights abuses wherever they occur, and in some cases, for instance, if you look at North Korea, there’s a deliberate policy by North Korea to intimidate and create fear amongst the North Korean people, because that’s the way that the government maintains power, maintains control. And if you look at North Koreans, if they’re given the opportunity, they will try to escape the country, rather than trying to fight the power, to fight against Kim Jong-un and his regime. I think there are many cases where governments are trying to, in fact, intimidate the population so that they remain quiescent, and in those cases it’s outside voices like us- We always face difficulties operating in closed environments like Vietnam or North Korea, but we’re able to get interviews, we’re able to talk to people, we have our ways of doing this. And, in China, the same. I think that there’s always an effort to try to expose governments, especially where they’re trying to keep the lid on it by intimidating the people, that is a core strategy within many governments: they’re trying to use their power to – there’s an old Chinese adage, to “kill the chicken and show it to the monkeys” – the idea is that you can intimidate one person, make an example of them, and [that] will keep everybody else in line. And we are involved in trying to break that pattern, we are involved in trying to bring the abuses to light so that ultimately people recognize that it’s not just them that are facing these rights abuses and that others have as well, and the international community is prepared to speak up about it and do something about it.

Rabbit Hole: Tell me more about working with authoritarian governments like Laos and Vietnam; in many ways, they often seem intransigent, and you would think that they would not be too receptive to an organization like Human Rights Watch telling them what to do. So how do you persuade them to improve human rights and to listen to you?

PR: Well, it’s hard. In the case of Laos, we’ve not been able to persuade them to do the right thing, in fact, they’re in complete denial about, for instance, their enforced disappearance of Sombath Somphone, about their abuses in drug detention centers, about so many different things, and the Lao government just denies everything. In Vietnam, it’s interesting that, up to about 2013, 2014, we were actually in a discussion with Vietnamese government representatives about a possible trip, [an] official delegation by Human Rights Watch to Vietnam. But we were in the negotiation process and they were discussing how it would happen and what we would be able to do and what we wouldn’t be able to do, but we also continued our work on reporting on Vietnam, including the issue of deaths in custody caused by the police. And we brought out a report that the Vietnam government didn’t like, and they shut down the dialogue, they shut down the discussion. And, as a result of that, I have not been able to go back to Vietnam since 2014. So, it is difficult, but we just put out another report about Vietnam this past February, about restrictions to people’s right to freedom of movement, particularly dissidents and activists who face a phalanx of police and thugs who try to prevent them from leaving their homes. We can get the information, we can do the reporting, and if the government is prepared to talk to us about these issues then we’re prepared to discuss it with them as well.

But oftentimes what we get is governments that are just refusing to have any sort of discussion with us whatsoever. Another case is Malaysia. During the period of time when Najib Razak was prime minister, freedom of expression in that country took a tumble – it was really quite horrific, there was literally dozens of people being tried for sedition and other cases because they were saying negative things about the government and saying negative things about [the] 1MDB [corruption scandal], but when the 2018 election took place, and all of a sudden the Pakatan Harapan [political party] was in power, all of a sudden we had access to all levels of government. I met the foreign minister several times, I met the minister of home affairs, I met the minister of finance and others – people who we knew from when they were in opposition, and who were prepared to talk to us now that they were in government because they recognized that we had good suggestions about what they could and couldn’t do on human rights issues […] But, of course, now that the government has changed back again, we’re back out in the cold. And that’s the way it goes: we find the access points where we can, we do what we must to try to reveal what is happening in the country on human rights issues, and if a government is prepared to talk to us on these issues, we’re prepared to talk to them too. We’re prepared to do it confidentially as well as publicly depending on how they want to handle it, but we’re tactically very nimble, but where we don’t compromise is on our principles, and our principles are: We’re independent of governments, we work on human rights issues based on international human rights conventions, full stop.

Rabbit Hole: How does an organization like Human Rights Watch, which is chiefly driven by principles and ideals, deal with governments, which are chiefly driven by self-interest?

PR: Well, you have to figure out where their self-interest coincides with doing the right thing on human rights, which is sometimes difficult. But sometimes you can find it. For instance, we’ve had cases where governments in other parts of the world are prepared to do something positive on one aspect of human rights in order to get the pressure off on other issues. So sometimes they’re tradeoffs. It depends on a government’s perception of international pressure, it depends on who’s talking to them and what leverage they have, it depends on what are the sensitivity of the issues on human rights in various areas that the government is addressing. If it’s something that they care less about, they might be prepared to make some compromises.

Rabbit Hole: Would you – and would Human Rights Watch – consider tradeoffs as well when deciding what to say about particular governments? Let’s say, you may be cooperating with a government very well to address a certain human rights issue, say, the rights of disabled people. But then that government does something really awful in another area. Would you think to yourself “Ok, maybe I might refrain from condemning them too harshly in that area because I don’t want to jeopardize the good work we’re doing cooperating with them on human rights in another area”?

PR: No, I mean, obviously this is in the realm of the hypothetical, but, in general, no. Human rights are indivisible, one human right doesn’t get priority over another human right. There have been times where we have done projects, for instance, on disability rights, that you mentioned, where the report that we did, for instance, on Russia, five or six years ago, was something that the Russian government found to be very helpful, and they’ve viewed this in a very positive light as good recommendations where they could improve the situation, and for them it wasn’t political. But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t, for instance, speak out fully about the rights abuses that are happening in Chechnya. So, no, there’s no tradeoff there. We’re not gonna play that kinda game.

Rabbit Hole: What are the most challenging parts of your job?

PR: Coping with all the human rights abuses that come across my desk every day. It’s like trying to take a drink of water from a firehose. There’s just too much for us to be able to handle on any given day, and so there’s always prioritization which takes place that, you know, we have to decide what can we work on right now, what can we push off to next week, and what are the things that we’re just not going to get to. That’s a tough time to make those kind of decisions because ultimately we recognize that there are a lot of issues and situations on human rights abuses that deserve our support, but we just don’t have the capacity or the resources to do that kind of job we need to do if we’re gonna take it on. We’re not going to try to do something in a shoddy way; [if] we’re dedicated to do something, we’re gonna to do something on it, and we’re gonna do it our way, which means making sure it’s comprehensive, making sure it’s fact-checked every way, and making sure that we can stand behind whatever we’ve come up with in terms of the research and the conclusions.

Rabbit Hole: And how do you do that? How do you prioritize these cases? Or rather-

PR: Trade secret! Trade secret!

Rabbit Hole: Sure. Ok, but could you tell us, let’s say-

PR: I would say that there’s always- Possibility of success may be one issue. The imperative right in front of us, whether something is a urgent crisis, whether something is a perennial problem, you know, there’s too many dynamics here to say that there’s one formula – it’s simply not that, you just basically over a period of time recognize what the organization can do, what you can do, and you basically develop a sense of what you’re able to take on.

Rabbit Hole: There’s no shortage of serious human rights issues in East Asia, but which are the most serious right now?

PR: Well obviously Burma is a tremendous mess, you’ve talked about it- A government that was democratic, albeit not perfectly, backsliding into what is now civil war, with all the attending abuses. It’s hard to overstate how bad the situation is in Burma. Countries like North Korea, where the rights abuses are so bad that they’re hard to believe, except when you do the research on it and you realize these things are really happening. China is a problem across the region, not only because it’s a big country, but also because it’s an influential country. And what we’re seeing is China’s trying to change the rules of the international system, particularly at the UN, to diminish concern and focus on human rights issues, and trying to bend the rules for themselves and their allies, so that’s a big problem. We have countries where ostensibly they’re democratic, but there’s been a great deal of backsliding, countries like Thailand, countries like the Philippines, countries like Malaysia. In Indonesia, the kind of harassment and abuse that social and sexual minorities face – whether they be a religious minority, whether they be LGBT – it’s disastrous, the kind of things that they’re facing. The list goes on and on, you know, Vietnam has got over 200 political prisoners – how come we don’t hear about that? All these things are something that we’re working on, but we try to also figure out how we can get leverage on these issues and do more, and that is always difficult.

Rabbit Hole: Can you tell us more about how China’s trying to change the rules in the UN in order to diminish the focus on human rights?

PR: Well, certainly they’re creating problems at the Human Rights Council. They have continuously tried to pass resolutions that erode rights. We see them at times teaming up with Russia on quasi-populist approaches, sort of preserving cultural traditions as a human right, sort of thing. It’s on and on. There’s a committee on NGOs that is involved in granting UN recognition of observer status at ECOSOC [the UN Economic and Social Council, which discusses economic and social issues] and the, sort of, hoops that are being placed in front of NGOs that are, for instance, hostile to Vietnam or hostile to China – in their perception – I mean, they’re really legitimate human rights groups, they’re basically prevented from getting registration through the manipulation of the committee. I’ve been dealing with a group that works on Khmer Krom issues – the Khmer Krom minority in Vietnam – and they’ve been trying to get registration for the better part of 10 years and are getting nowhere, in part because China and Russia block every effort to get them registered. It’s not supposed to work that way, but what we have is governments throwing their weight around to try to prevent groups from accessing a UN that is supposed to belong to all the peoples of the world.

Rabbit Hole: How would you evaluate ASEAN as a body in dealing with human rights violations?

PR: *Chuckles* Pathetic. ASEAN doesn’t do human rights. Let’s just be clear about this. The ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights is the only human rights commission that I know of that doesn’t have the capacity to receive human rights complaints. I mean, ask yourself: “What does a human rights institute, like a commission, do?” Everybody would say they receive complaints. Well, this one doesn’t. What we see within ASEAN is, of course, the use of veto power of any government to basically refuse to have certain things put on the agenda – it’s used to block human rights issues consistently. And their insistence on consensus. The fact that ASEAN in August decided not to invite the political representative of Myanmar to a meeting was taken as a big step forward. You know, I’m sorry, but the fact that somebody wasn’t invited for a meeting, yes, maybe in the ASEAN context that means something, but everywhere else in the world, it’s quite silly. ASEAN is probably the least capable organization to deal with the crisis in Myanmar, but this is the group that the US and European Union and others keep saying has to handle it, they say, “Well, we believe in ASEAN centrality.” Well, ASEAN centrality in Burma means nothing, because ASEAN has no consensus on what it’s supposed to do. It has a five-point consensus it agreed to with the military junta. As soon as the junta supremo Min Aung Hlaing got back to Myanmar, he said “We’ll implement that when we’re good and ready.” Which means that basically it’s just a piece of paper. ASEAN is not serious about human rights, full stop. They view human rights as being somehow destabilizing and dangerous. And they want to be able to say that they believe in human rights, but what they really believe [human rights is] about is the equivalent of a caged bird. They want it safely locked away where it can’t get out and cause problems.