 Aloha. Welcome to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Cheng, here today to talk about questions about human rights in the United States under a Trump presidency. Joining me today is Professor Aaron Felmas from Arizona State University. He is a professor of law and Willard H. Pedrick, distinguished research scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law. Aloha, Aaron. Thank you for joining me today. Aloha. It's a pleasure to be here. Great. Thank you so much. So you are a professor of law over at Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. Can you tell us a bit about your area of professional specialization? Well, I'm an international lawyer and so what I do involves human rights as well as more generally the way the states relate to one another. Human rights is a bit of an exception though because that's a matter that has individual benefits for people like you and me and is not just about states committing to one another but committing to one another for the specific purpose of protecting the interests of individuals. Yes, and you're also the chair of the International Human Rights Law section of the American Branch of the International Law Association, correct? That's right. The International Law Association is a group of lawyers, academics and diplomats who have banded together to promote international law and its understanding. And the American branch is of course the United States branch of it and my committee is the International Human Rights Committee, right? And recently your committee has set up a subcommittee on the U.S. compliance on international human rights law. What inspired that to be formed in recent months? Well, it's always been important to ensure the United States compliance with international human rights law. It's become more important recently because for the first time in the last hundred years we have a president-elect who's vowed to do some things that very clearly violate human rights law. And so I created the subcommittee in order to monitor the administration and to ensure that it doesn't, well, basically do any of the things that are promised to do. The subcommittee is composed of 16 lawyers from around the world, mostly in the United States, but all over, as well as 14 law students, about half of whom are from ASU, the rest from elsewhere. And this is a nonpartisan group. We're not ideologically motivated. We're not affiliated with any political party. The goal is just to ensure that we maintain the highest standards of commitment to human rights and have a rapid reaction force ready in case something disastrous happens. Yes, international human rights is not ideologically oriented and probably no state in the world has a perfect human rights record. So, I mean, certainly there are reports and criticisms of other American administrations not having perfect human rights record. What raises particular concerns about the human rights observance by the United States under a Trump presidency? Well, that's right. I mean, there is no history of perfect compliance in any administration, but Trump has been very explicit. He said a number of things that would be serious human rights violations that he would propose to do if elected. And then what's more troubling still, some of these are actual crimes against humanity or war crimes. And so they're very serious indeed. Yes. Okay. Erin, we're going to take a short break right here just to deal with a couple of technical issues. So we'll be right back on Global Connections. Stay tuned. This is Steve Katz. I'm a marriage and family therapist and I do shrink wrap, which is now going to every other week all during the summer and maybe forever after. Take care of your mental health this summer. Have a good time. Do what's fun and take good care of yourself. Bye-bye. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Hello, welcome back to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Chang, here with Aaron Thelmuth of Arizona State University. And we're talking about questions about U.S. observance of our human rights violations under a Trump presidency. Welcome back, Erin. Thank you. Yeah, so we were talking about, yes, like records of presidents historically. You know, there are always human rights watchdogs to ensure that presidents or other members of government know when they're not fully living up to their obligations to international human rights laws. Some of the things that President-elect Trump has said, however, raise particular concerns because of, you know, the nature of the statements, kind of reflecting maybe not consideration of even how they, you know, whether human rights play into his way of thinking. That's right. I think he's not very well informed in this subject. And the hope is that a lot of what he said during his campaign is just bluster or said to achieve popularity with a certain segment of the population, and that he doesn't really intend to go through with it. On the other hand, some of the things he said raise his concerns about his moral commitment to the values that underlie human rights, like human dignity and equal respect for human dignity. And so those raise special concerns. If you like, I can discuss some of the things that he said that have been particularly troublesome. Yes, yeah. That would be really, really helpful. Well, on November 20, 2015, last year, for example, he said in an interview with an MSNBC reporter that he would certainly implement a database of all Muslims in the United States. And then the following day at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, he said he would use the database to monitor the activities of Muslims and mosques in the United States. Now, to be fair, most of his statements focus on Muslim immigrants and refugees, but he's never rejected the idea of a universal registry of all Muslims. That would create a number of problems under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States was a party to. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. And there are general principles of non-discrimination involved and, of course, creating a registry of that kind, putting aside the illusions to history that it creates and very disturbing history would almost certainly violate those principles. Those principles are also found in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a very widely adhered to human rights treaty to which the United States is a party. It's been a party for a long time. So, non-discrimination, equality before the law, those would be a problem. There's also an additional provision that most people aren't aware of because it's not really reflected in our constitution so much like equality is. But under Article 27 of the International Covenant, in those states in which ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right in community with other members of their group to enjoy their own culture, to practice their own religion, and so forth. And so, again, any attempt to stigmatize or, you know, isolate or otherwise put Muslims at a disadvantage would put us in violation of our human rights obligations. And during his campaign, some of the things that he said which were a bit unusual for a public figure running for political office statements about women as well as other minority groups, do those, even though he doesn't necessarily come out with any particular policy position, do those raise any questions or concerns? Yes, I know. That's a little more complex because although there are international human rights instruments that forbid even forms of speech that are hateful to specific groups based on ethnicity, religion, and so forth, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women would require some kind of measure to prevent or punish attempts to discriminate against women in public fora. But we're not really, first of all, we're not parties to that convention and second, we have exceptions or what we call reservations that we've made to the conventions relating to regulation of speech. And so, it's disturbing, it's morally repugnant, but is it illegal under international law? Probably not. There are other things that he's proposed to do, though, that are clearly illegal. For example, in December 2015, he said in a campaign press release that he actually read this out loud at a rally in South Carolina. He said he would oppose a total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the country. Again, universal declaration of human rights, the international covenant on civil and political rights, that's forbid discrimination based on religion, and so that would certainly violate those rights. And there are other things, I mean, worse things that he said. Obviously, he said, you may recall this, I'm sure everyone does, that in February of this year, during the Republican debates, he said he'd bring back waterboarding and accused terrorists and do a hell of a lot worse that were his words than that. And he said it again at a campaign event about a week and a half later, he would torture accused terrorists, and then he said on Fox and Friends, he would assassinate the families of accused terrorists. Again, putting aside the loathsome morals of someone who would make a statement like that, human rights problems are just legion with something like that. It would violate the rights to life, liberty, and security of a person. In those two instruments I just mentioned before, the right to recognition of a person anywhere. And also, and this is where I mentioned the thing about war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which were parties to, and have long been parties to, prohibit murder of civilians that prohibited punishment for the offenses that they haven't personally committed, to be specific about that. They forbid, of course, any kind of harm to children. And more generally, they prohibit attacks on civilians. And that's also made its way into the International Criminal Court statute. Again, we're not part of the International Criminal Court statute, but acts that the United States commits in countries that are parties to the ICC statute could give rise to prosecution of responsible individuals before the International Criminal Court. And we're actually under investigation for the tortures we committed in Afghanistan right now, where we're being investigated. Yes, yes, I heard that the ICC prosecutor had brought that up in the discussion for international human rights law. The enforcement mechanisms differ according to what type of violations, what kind of deprivations. One is in the case of war crimes or other types of international crimes, the International Criminal Court could be the venue for that. But another way, sort of, what you are trying to pursue here with establishing the subcommittee is to, you know, make public and put pressure on governments. And that's another way to ensure compliance. So can you tell us a little bit more about the composition and the work that the subcommittee will be doing? Well, the first thing we'll be doing is monitoring, keeping a very close eye on everything the administration does. And human rights is a very broad area of law. There are a lot of human rights that are set forth in various instruments that we have, and these include political rights. They include economic rights, social rights, cultural rights. The ones we have in the United States tend to focus more on political rights, but we're going to be monitoring them all. So whether it's the right to education, whether it's right to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the right against torture, a human right established in many instruments, including a specific UN convention against torture. And by the way, that also extends, I just wanted to point this out, that also extends to any inhuman or degrading treatment. Outrages upon personal dignity, these kinds of things can be war crimes as well as crimes against humanity. And although torture is by far the worst, other forms of inhuman degrading treatment are also forbidden by international human rights law, and specifically the convention against torture, to which we are a party. Anyway, while we've been monitoring this and all the other human rights subjects and making sure that the administration complies, and if it doesn't, basically you're going to have a rapid reaction force of lawyers who will do a number of things. One is ensure that the public is made aware of the relevance of what the administration is proposing to do, what we're doing to our obligations under international human rights law. We'll be taking action through the courts, through international agencies like the UN Human Rights Committee, or the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, and we'll be putting pressure on the administration through Congress. And again, human rights, as you pointed out, Dr. Chang, is a nonpartisan issue. And most members of Congress care a lot about U.S. record of compliance with international human rights law, and so we will be able to act through Congress to ensure oversight and to ensure that any violation of human rights law results in swift and effective action, including impeachment and conviction, if necessary. I mean, maintaining a good record in terms of observing human rights law is very critical for a country that purports and would like to remain a leader in the world. Some of the persons being considered by President-elect Trump for his foreign policy positions have also kind of voiced, I think, some words that might raise concerns about human rights. So you're dealing with both domestic issues as far as, for example, repealing or overturning the Affordable Care Act to what his foreign policy team might be thinking as far as U.S. performance on that arena. That's right. I mean, it's very broad. Human rights is a broad area, and President-elect Trump has threatened to violate many different kinds of human rights. Human right to education, he has never said that he would deny people education, but it's a very important right, and his nomination right now is someone who may not fully implement the right to education in a nonpartisan way and with respect to all faiths and denominations. And that's, it's very important that people not be, for example, coerced into Christian education if they're not Christian and don't want one, and so forth. And so that's been a concern, and there's been a number of others. Most recently, you probably heard in the news that he tweeted that nobody should be allowed to burn an American flag, and citizenship were sent to a U.N. jail. I mean, they just keep coming out more and more. What are these then? That would violate, you know, not only the human rights to freedom of opinion and expression, which includes expression through acts, however deplorable you may find those acts, they're protected, speech, and for a very good reason. But also, there are human rights commitments, for example, not to deprive someone of nationality. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides an article 15. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality. And in the United States, jurisprudence, the Supreme Court has said that the government may not use deprivation of nationality as a weapon to express its displeasure at a citizen's conduct, as Tropidolis in 1958. So there's lots of potential violations that you keep coming out with, and some of them, like you said, are more implicit. It depends on who he nominates. For example, if he nominates someone for the Environmental Protection Agency, whose goal is to tear down the organization, there's a human right to a safe and healthy environment. Human beings can't survive without it. And if no one's protecting that environment, then we've got a problem. We've got a human rights problem, and that's got to be rectified. Yeah, certainly there are many human rights deprivations that could be suffered if we do not protect the environment, such as for health, clean water, many other issues associated with that. So, yeah, so all eyes have been looking at those he's been considering for these high offices. For one of the persons candidate for Secretary of State nomination also seemed to kind of veer away from maybe taking a critical stance on some of the human rights records of other countries that we're dealing with. Kind of, it seems that there's a little bit of discrepancy between how the U.S. has been regarding human rights records, for example, in Russia and what this representative has made statement of. Do you think the Trump administration, or do you think President-elect Trump, we were saying perhaps he's not as well informed about international affairs because he did reach out personally to the leader, the President of the Republic of China, for example. And it seems that he doesn't really appreciate kind of the kind of diplomatic faux pas that that represents. But do you think that this is sort of just a lack of maybe appreciation for how we have been, you know, taking in and internalizing human rights in the United States and our policymaking, or do you think it's willful disinterest in human rights as we have been trying to observe and protect? I can't read his mind. I know that this is not, I mean, he's got no experience in this area. It's not one of his core interests. His life has been trying to make money and make himself well known. That's what his core interests are. If you want to educate yourself about human rights, you've got to be interested in things like being a good person and what international law requires of us and being a leader in the international community. And that's something that almost every political candidate we've had for the presidential office has had very core to their interests and whether they have always been proponents of human rights, maybe not, but certainly they've never made statements they're hostile to the very idea of human rights. And as you said, I mean, some of the things that he said may not themselves violate or propose a violation of human rights, but they do indicate a very fundamental mentality of disrespect for equal human dignity. You can't say something like, you know, illegal immigrants from Mexico are rapists and killers and bad hombres and not vilify an entire class of people. Some people are very decent and law-abiding people otherwise. And it's just a bad sign. Yeah, so yeah, we'll see. A president-elect who hasn't had any experience in public office will see how well-educated he can get in this and other fields. So we'll take a short break here for a minute and you're watching Global Connections here with Grace Cheng and I'm joined by Aaron Thelmuth of Arizona State University Professor of Law and Music. St. Tech, Hawaii, Asia in reveal. I am Johnson Choi, the host. Looking forward to see you next month, December 15th, Thursday, 11, right here at this channel. Aloha. Okay, we want to tell you about Hawaii, the state of clean energy which plays every Wednesday from 4 to 4.30. Ray Starling and me, we co-host that show. Dean Nishina is here. He's from the Consumer Advocate. We just had a show. We liked the show. We had a good time on the show. What do you think, Ray? We're going to have Dean back because there's so much going on at the Consumer Advocate's office and there's so much yet to be done to get to our 100% renewable energy goals. What do you think, Dean? Did you have a good time? I did have a good time and I think this is a good opportunity for consumers to learn more because it'll be really helpful in terms of moving forward with our transition to clean energy. From your lips to God's ears. Thanks, Ray. Thanks, Dean. Watch us for 4 o'clock every Wednesday. You'll see. Aloha. Welcome back to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Chang, here with Aaron Felness, Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. And we're talking about questions about human rights under our Trump presidency and prospects of how that might be observed or otherwise. Welcome back, Aaron. Thank you, Dr. John. Yeah, we were talking earlier about this question about, yeah, as far as being educated in how, well, what kind of obligations the state has when they are party to these kind of international law instruments. And as far as, you know, reviewing some of President Electrum's statements kind of shows that he personally maybe hasn't himself internalized this and is reflected in his own rhetoric. What are some of your particular concerns beyond what we might be hearing? Well, I think this goes back to, you know, a lot of our presidents and presidential candidates have been lawyers. And, you know, we in the United States like to make a lot of jokes about lawyers because, you know, it's tradition. But the fact is that someone who's studied the law has spent a lot of time thinking about the rule of law and, you know, public order and how we structure things like solutions to social problems and things like justice and ethics. People, you know, frequently go into law being concerned with things like justice and ethics. And recently we've had a lot of businessmen running for office and they don't necessarily put a lot of thought into that. And so it could just be that that's his orientation, that he's just not thinking in those terms. He'll say stuff. He's a very off-the-cuff type of guy from what I can pick up from, I don't know personally, but from what I've seen is a very off-the-cuff type of guy and he'll say things that are just, you know, like a high school student might say, without knowing any better. And like you said, it's possible that he'll, you know, get educated. But in the meantime, he's saying a lot of things like, you know, like his tweets. He doesn't really put a lot of thought into these and he hasn't really gotten a background. But he'll, you know, for example, Sean Hannity asks him, you know, basically do you oppose the rights of homosexuals to marry? And he says, I'm a traditional family type of guy. And he's probably completely unaware. The Supreme Court has recently recognized the rights of same-sex couples to get married on equal terms. And again, back to human rights law, this is part of a very large trend in the international community to recognize that, you know, the rights to a family shouldn't depend on the sex of the person you love. That's just a huge, you know, if you're in law, you're very probably aware of it. But I don't think he is. And maybe he don't change his mind once he starts to realize that he's on the wrong side of history. But maybe he won't. Yeah, so yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, coming from a totally different industry, right, politicians generally have been coming from law, but Donald Trump from business. So as far as, yeah, his, you know, his statements, hopefully he's, you know, he seems to be riding this sort of populist wave, but we know human rights really need to stand above the politics as we were talking about. Would you have some closing statement you would like to make about what your subcommittee's been doing and some of the things that you think are important for the audience to take away? Well, I think all Americans have to recognize that in order to have a country we can be proud of, we have to have leadership we can be proud of. And a leader that we can be proud of is someone who is a good person, who's someone who pays close attention to the consequences of his conduct for other people. Because being a good person ultimately means self-sacrifice, putting other people's interests ahead of your own and they're more important than yours. And that's exactly what we should expect of a president. It's what we should expect of any politician, honestly, but foremost the one who stands out as a figurehead and is the most publicly eligible. We should expect especially that person to think in terms of what's good for everyone and not just what's good for him. And so we need to keep a very close eye on what he's doing and make sure that those tendencies of his, which are very strongly rooted in his character, don't dominate his administration and do to shut them down, to take action, to protest, to bring poor cases and that's what the subcommittee is here for. It's to help. But the public has got to be aware of these things too and it's got to basically act according to its conscience, including of course supporting politicians who oppose these measures. Very good. Thank you for discussing that initiative that you've undertaken in the International Law Association so we will all hopefully be keeping an eye out and speaking out in terms of the values of human rights that we want to uphold in the United States. Thank you so much for joining me today, Erin. Thank you for having me, Dr. Chang. All right, no worries. Okay, well, thank you all for tuning in today on Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Chang. You can catch me here every Thursday at 1 p.m. Although, I didn't know I was still...