 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming to the Institute of International European Affairs. Good afternoon. So I just bit of housekeeping initially to remind you to switch off your mobile phones but also to remind you that while the opening comments from our guest speaker will be on the record the question and answer session afterwards és gallwch chi am ac yn ei bod liwr. Ar y cyflwyn cyflwyn yma, rydyn ni'n gwneud y dyfodol a wedi'u swyddfa ar Fy sırfydd, ac rydyn ni'n gwneud hwn i'r ysgolion o'r gwneud ymlaen. Fe amlaen i hynny, i'n fffrind yn gweithio'r ysgrifennu yma o Fy argymffinol. Fyrddwn i dosod i'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu a sy'n rhoi yn gwneud bod ar yng nghymru, Cymru, Andrew Gilmour, i fyny o'r amddangosion â'r dda i gael Arlands yma. ac yn ddod i'r residentd yn yfynwys. Rwy'n εch chi'n ger am yma gweithio ar Arlands, bydd dros y gwaith arnosu cymddeithas i'n mynd i gael yma a doedd yn Cwmgai y gwaith lle o'r platform FFDF. Ac rwy'n ceisio yn y wentlynydd ymateb y byddol ar y gwn launcher mae'r cyhoes yma yma yma ar y FFDF, sy'n gwybod yma o'r Ffawr Hygwyrdd Cymru yn dda i'r Ffawr Hygwyrdd Cymru. ac yr Arland, o'r cymdeithasol, yn amgylch yn ddweud y bydd yn bwysig fy mhwyaf ar y dyfodol. Felly yma, mae'n ddweud yma yma o ffawr hynny'n ardal y bwysig yma, cyfwyrdd Cymru Zeyd-Ael Hwysëinte dobl yn ddwylau i'r Ffawr Hygwyrdd Cymru'r Cymru. Mae gydag i'r Ffawr Hygwyrdd Cymru i'r Ffawr Hygwyrdd Cymru. That was very useful. The support Ireland gives to the O DHR and to human rights manifests itself in a number of ways. Obviously, first of all, is the stand, the positions that we take both in Geneva, at the Human Rights Council, but also in the United Nations. An important thing is that human rights are mainstream that are not just shoved off to Geneva but they come into the security council ac rwy'n gwybod bod yw'n gweithio'n dylenio'r sgol ddim yn meddwl, ac mae'n ddweud y gweithio'r sgol ar y gallwn o wahy. Mae'n meddwl am gyfnodol, a'r ddweud o bobl am gyfnodol... .. ac Arlent yn ei bobl yw'r digwydd o'r cyfrifocorol... .. ac mae'n dweud o gweithio'r ddweud... .. mae'n ddweud o'n ddweud o'r ddweud... .. mae'n ddweud yw'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r maide... We are one of the major donors to OHHR, in fact we are a member of the Rubins Group of major donors. I'm delighted to share with colleagues and friends today that earlier this year while we gave our annual payment an annual grant of €2 million to OHHR, which was mostly an on earmarked funding, that we have looked down the back of the sofa and we have found an additional €138,000 ond we will pay to the general fund before the end of the year. Andrew is going to talk to us this morning about the backlash against human rights, and I think it is really relevant and timely that we have this conversation now. As many of you know that 10th of December is International Human Rights Day, it marks the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. So those of you who are good at maths will realise that we are about to enter on to the 70th year and this is something that OHSHR has really wants to highlight this year because you know we have to be honest human rights is under attack worldwide and we can't be cosy and complacent and say well we're in Europe, we're exempt from this trend because the truth is that on the continent of Europe there are serious challenges to human rights and so for our sake you know from a national perspective we will devote next year's annual civil society forum which will take place on June the 8th to the whole subject of celebrating the universal declaration of human rights and at looking at the universality, the interrelatedness, the indivisibility of human rights, the concept that human rights are everybody's rights and that equally we all have an obligation to protect the human rights of others. So with that very brief introduction I would like to welcome Andrew and invite you to take the floor. A little bit low for me, thank you, take it from here. Thank you so much Natina for those words and for Ireland's consistent support including the most behind the sofa. Is this going to be okay? Actually it's a small room I think you can hear me. I'm assuming that given the choice of title of today and it was my choice it wasn't hoisted on me by Barry or Jill that nobody decided to drop in as a shot in the arm optimism before Thanksgiving weekend. I mean it's not exactly, it contains its own spoiler alert it doesn't say whether human rights forward or backwards it stresses the backlash. Anyway I was actually yesterday actually you mentioned thank you Martin that I was here a month ago giving the keynote at frontline defenders. I mean it's actually something rather ridiculous that it took my mid 50s to come to Dublin for the first time and but it's happy to be back within one month for my second time but as I said yesterday the Ireland's contribution has been actually tremendous particularly and the leadership is shown especially on what I was speaking about yesterday at DSA Ireland on the the nexus between human rights and development and of course starting with Mary Robinson but but but also actually Jill's husband David Donahue ambassador of Ireland in New York until two until recently two years ago paid a key role in ensuring that that the SDGs were underpinned by human rights and but the adoption of the sustainable development goals is actually one of the it's a fairly rare example of recent good news in the human rights world but before getting to the backlash perhaps I could be allowed a very short subjective and slightly simplistic history of human rights of the last century well the universal declaration which as Martino rightly says the 70th anniversary is coming up soon it came after the the horrors of total war and genocide but also after the great depression and therefore there was a it covers the whole spectrum of human rights political civil economic social and cultural and I think the assumption at that time was that human rights would go in that direction but with the cold war two things happened there was a torpor and human rights became hugely downplayed but secondly it went off in two directions into civil political supported mainly by the countries of the west and socioeconomic supported by the soviet bloc and the post-colonial countries but so nothing happened dramatic in the era of human rights but then actually by coincidence I joined the human rights movement amnesty international as a teenager in 1979 and of course we didn't know it then but that we were on the cusp of a human rights revolution in fact and one that lasted several decades I mean and if you think if I just tell you who our first prisoners of conscience were the ones that I would earnestly write letters of about one was a guy in the gulag put in some psychiatric ward because if you opposed the soviet system you had to be insane and the other was some Jehovah's Witness in Greece under the Greek colonels but of course within 10 years both the the regimes of the far right in Latin America and the Greek colonels but also the soviet bloc had ended so and that just gives an example of how human rights that was a major impetus for the explosion of human rights and a whole range of other anti-discrimination areas dramatic progress was was made in in till about till 9 11 probably and when the when because the terrorist outrages counter-terrorism became the order of the day and of course human rights get put on hold in moments like that but that still wasn't the backlash the backlash as far as I'm concerned really kicked in about three or four years ago and this isn't a precise time or even a precise cause actually but but it that that's what happened and and maybe I could explain a little bit what what the backlash looks like and at the end of explaining what it looks like I would suggest a few ways as to what we might do to counter it and resist it but I have to say and this is a second spoiler alert I doubt you will find my suggested solutions to be anything like commensurate with the scale of the problem that I'm going to explain but and that's why actually I would welcome your suggestions as to what more we can do in addition to what I'm going to say but so what does it look like well let's start with Europe it is obviously not by the worst by any means in fact probably the the best region in the world in terms of of human rights but it's the closest and we'll start with Poland and Hungary two countries that give a lot of people very serious cause for alarm with the authoritarian regime liberal democracy and the sort of pushback of rights on a number of fronts then we have connected to that the rise of far right wing parties in many countries of Europe yes Marine Le Pen lost but she's still got 10.5 million votes and her concerns are not going away fast and then there is issues in both Germany and Austria that are alarming as well and we have to say that as a continent our response to the refugees and migrants crisis has not been Europe's finest hour although Chancellor Merkel herself showed astonishing generosity and a nobility of spirit I think in welcoming refugees in 2015 but and this is something we've just come out with and got we in the New York sorry not New York the Human Rights Office of the UN has just harshly criticized the policy of training the coast guard of Libya which allows or enables people migrants attempting to cross being handed to the Libyan authorities and put in conditions that are so unspeakable they can barely talk about them and they um and you will have seen and is connected to this the the slave market that has opened up so this is this is another aspect of it and then just across the Irish sea we have a nation in in self-inflicted turmoil with a threat to many things including rights and in the heat of election campaign maybe but still she said it the prime minister called for human rights to be overturned if they get in the way of the fighting against terrorism now as Zaid the High Commissioner for Human Rights commented her remarks were highly regrettable a gift from a major western leader to every authoritarian figure around the world who shamelessly values human rights under the pretext of fighting terrorism and indeed they were and within weeks we had a war criminal Sri Lanka invoking trees and a saying well hang on if they can claim that excuse why the hell can't we and um and then we have the national disgrace known as the British tabloids whipping up hatred against foreigners Muslims judges even conservative MPs opposed to Brexit um I mean like many Brits I hung my head in shame last week when I saw Murdoch's son calling on the t-shirt to shut his gob after having made some perfectly sensible remarks about the border anyway that's that's Europe in this whistle stop or the human rights situation where in fact as I said human rights are still closer to the debate than it is anywhere else in the world but looking westwards we had for eight years an administration that actually put human rights up more than any of its predecessors and supported us in our work but in the last year we have an administration that's headed by someone who says he actively likes torture not not reluctantly condones it because it's necessary but he actively likes it and he gets cheered when he says it and that has terrifying connotations as she um attacks on freedom of the press the the mainstream media the attacks on the judiciary transgender people international institutions such as ours the vilification of mexicans um somehow presented quite full without a shred of evidence that somehow they commit more crimes than than regular americans and and a whole range of then the anti muslim feeling and the rise in police violence particularly against blacks and and this extraordinary incarceration rate 2.4 million americans in prisoner on any day and um it looked like last year that there was a bipartisan consensus to reduce the numbers but the counter attorney general sessions has uh is pushing back to have uh to restore the minimum minority sentences which will ensure that the figures go up even higher turning to the middle east we had we saw just this year the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war and the start of the israeli occupation of palestinian lands and a half century of sustained and systematic denial of every single article of the human rights of the universal declaration of human rights the entire gamut have had this sustained um assault on the rights and with not much optimism on that front although i'm happy to hear you have one of my un colleagues coming to talk to this institution you'll announce that later i think right um in syria uh we have uh seen half a million people killed in the last four years 11 million displaced atrocities staggering both in scale and in savagery of torture and chemical weapons deliberate starvation by siege and barrel bombs and the rest in ymen a coalition supported by western countries um that has created not only through bombing but by closing the ports possibly the largest manmade humanitarian catastrophe in in memory and with starvation and cholera both very much on the rise turkey which is about my son lives at the moment working for NGO for syrians has taken a dramatic turn for the worst with tens of thousands of people arrested on the flimsiest imaginal evidence after the coup and where there is um very very grim stuff going on in the southeast in the sort of war against um turkish Kurds egypt where arbitrary arrests the level of torture and uh the mass sentencing to death um for for a single killing of one policeman a hundredth sentence to death of the killing of one policeman nothing short of horrifying i won't go through the the entire world but i i would just mention something that's very evident at the UN we have the the great rise of china politically militarily diplomatically and and a growing assertiveness of russia but um two very powerful countries at the UN and yet whose confidence seems striking at odds with their fear of civil society with their fear of human rights defenders and any bit under free press and civil society and and anything that suggests a universal human rights agenda so that's my not very uplifting and very partial global summary of human rights today um how is the backlash manifested um well in many ways and i will briefly go through eight of them one is NGO laws um russia started this in 2012 passing a very harsh law against the functioning and financing of NGOs including human rights NGOs this has been followed by israel turkey egypt kenya india ethopia and many others um and i'll come back to this secondly um reprisals against human rights defenders which is something that i have a particular role in playing um at the UN and ireland has been extremely helpful in this regard two months ago i addressed the human rights council in Geneva and i i said sorry to quote myself but it's frankly nothing short of a warrant that year after year we're compelled to present cases to you the council of intimidation and reprisals carried out against people whose crime in the eyes of the governments was to cooperate with UN institutions we should see these individuals as the canary in the coal mine bravely singing until they are silenced by the toxic backlash against people rights and dignity as a dark warning to us all and there's one particular case to give you an example of what i'm talking about the case of an egyptian called ibrahim matwaili who three years ago lost his son one presumes torture to death by the security forces with another certain but who disappeared and who set up an NGO to deal with people like himself who who who have lost loved ones to to um to the security forces disappeared um he was coming to Geneva on september 21st i i was planning to meet him there but he got arrested at the airport and has been we believe extremely badly tortured himself under the guise of because he support if he's opposing the security measures of the government he must be pro terrorism so that's what has happened and it's a particularly egregious example of what i'm talking about related to that are the attacks against UN officials who speak up about um about human rights and that we were mentioning just now just now and yes color mark who's the special rapporteur on extrajudicial um executions um president duterte o philippines and the man who has um security forces have killed perhaps 10 000 either innocent bystanders or petty criminal and drug users um and encouraged his soldiers to rape village women but only up to three and um but he threatened on us publicly that if i see her i will slap her i mean that that's ahead of state talking about a UN official um because she had she had raised questions about these mass executions not mass that individual but the numbers of them 10 000 is certainly a mass and and these and the similar countries are doing everything to oppose our budget um which is why we need Ireland to step into the breach and and many others um and stopping me from talking and many other ways that they are this is a form of the um the backlash number four is what i would say specifically the the backlash against women women's rights in many countries uh women should know that place um and and men should control their bodies and that that is uh but we are particularly worried about the backlash against women's right number five is the the cruel scapegoating of of minorities i i mentioned europe and the united states already but it's it's not just there look at the range uh in bummer as an example as again six would be counter terrorism where we have country after country pursuing what i would call the stronikov school of response is is is the best scene in my favorite ever film um dr javago when javago is confronting the the red army commander stronikov and he says you burned that village and he said well the village was um providing horses to the white army and javago says yeah but it was the wrong village they said it was another village he said a village gave horses to the white army a village was burned the point was made the javago replies your point there village but so many countries fight terrorism in this brutal and bovine way that actually almost invariably leads to the creation of more terrorists than there were before they started fighting terrorism um through bombings um and not caring how many civilians get killed mass arrests and detention and torture and the crushing of dissent human rights civil society and and the media all under the pretext of fighting terrorism and the last manifestation of the back black of the backlash that i mentioned number eight would be the tendency to dismiss human rights either as interference in internal affairs and china is a maistrate using that argument in particular that that if we mention human rights in that country then we are going against the UN charter which prohibits um external interference in internal affairs um or as an attempt and russia uses this argument that invoking human rights is just an excuse to overthrow regimes the west doesn't like um or alternatively just even if they don't use those things or to sorry to or to impose western values on people on countries that that don't want western values so human rights is presented as a western agenda rather than as a universal one or then there's another subset of people who or countries who dismiss human rights are something okay it's not a bad thing but it's a luxury it has to wait until the great moment when we have ended the conflict or achieved development or imposed security um which for us is completely the wrong way around because we are convinced and we have a lot of evidence to back that up that development is not sustainable and peace is certainly not sustainable unless it is anchored in human rights and you know i recently um challenged members of security council that could come up with one one internal conflict that's on their agenda where human rights was not on was not actually the root cause of of that conflict and with the implication being that if the if human rights is at or lack of human rights is that the root of the problem then it's got to be part of the solution as well so what can we do about it um and i mentioned earlier that these are not going to be commensurate but so we do have a few um tools and a few powers we can have to thank you and number one is would be to defend the defenders now we have in the room andrew anderson who is the director of frontline defenders which perhaps more than any other organisation is at the heart of getting to or is mandated is and does tremendous work in supporting the heroic peoples who are as the name suggests on the frontline and we need there needs to be more than frontline defenders or they need to be given more more means because it is a growing problem and we have to do something more about it but we have to be careful too because we can't play into the gender or the rhetoric that is used by many of the country's violating human rights that these NGOs are a tool of foreign powers so it has this support has to be very smart but it does have to be increased that's one number two is is speaking out now one can take the view that rogue regimes and other governments that wantonly violate the rights of their citizens don't care about whether people like me or any of the rest of us speak out but they do I mean for example um Egypt went nuts when Human Rights Watch came up a few weeks ago with a very strongly argued um report on the widespread torture that goes on and I say one of the few constellations of getting regularly berated by angry ambassadors um so taking the diplomatic equivalent of being taken behind a bike shed is after we issue our strong statements and reports and then they come and but they show by their anger and their complaints about me or they to that to the Secretary General it does at least show that we have struck a nerve in calling them out for it and that they do in fact feel some shame otherwise they wouldn't be reacting quite with quite such dramatic anger when when we call them out on what we know is going on so speaking up does help thirdly is it would be economic power um the boycotts of goods um and I would say particularly tourism I mean I especially like to suggest that when governments invoke the need to brutally repress people in order to crush terrorism so that tourists can feel safe I would say that this is a little legitimate thing legitimate path to take I mean shouldn't tourists be aware as they're idyllically scuba diving um that a few miles away there are people under going unspeakable torture and and that the the guys ordering the torture are invoking the safety of tourists as a as a pretext for doing that I think tourists should be made aware and and I and there are some countries that I think that would have it a very solitary effect on number four is um funding human rights now we have it's a it's a it's a cliche but it started in 2005 but but there is a truth to it at the UN there is no peace without security sorry no no peace without development no development without peace and neither peace nor development without respect for human rights um which and there are and people talk about the three pillars of the UN but these three pillars are not really three pillars because our pillar the human rights arm gets three percent the other two getting 97 of course but human rights isn't free and it doesn't even come cheap if we're going to deal with this there has to be some rebalancing um so that other so that people pursuing development understand that actually they're going to get better results on the development if there's a more of a human rights approach number five would be sort of actions individual and collective um I mean it sent I think an amazing signal I mean when when German the German population went to the stations to meet refugees in 2015 and it was I was personally deeply moved in January this year when thousands of Americans spontaneously flocked to international airports when the infamous Muslim travel ban was announced then and there and therefore there were people in the air who fell victim to it but thousands of Americans went to the airport to go and provide them with legal aid and other assistance um and then of course the the women's marches in the US and elsewhere are inspirational so this is another measure number six um and I suppose this this is the my last one but the last proposal but it and it's aimed at the human rights movement ourselves and the governments including Ireland who support us we need to better understand what it is we're up against um and to change our rhetoric to show that we understand that without ceding out the moral ground um and we have to understand why people are turning to xenophobic and populist rhetoric and siren calls and this this is crucial because the populists are always always opposed to human rights because I mean for many reasons but one very simple one is that they always have to pick out a scapegoat usually from already the weakest most vulnerable sectors of society to blame for society's ills and so that alone but there are other reasons why so as they whip up hatred we have to understand why it is and then present alternatives to address the insecurities that make these populists so attractive to so many people at the moment and in that sense human rights people need to do a better job at showing how human rights are in the interests of what people can see who consider themselves as ordinary feel it's not just about prisoners LGBT disabled and migrants although all of those should be absolutely the top of right gender but we do have to show that it's not just um not just minorities that are the benefit from human rights but the population as a whole and perhaps we'll be using I hope we will be using the the whole 70th anniversary of the UDHR university declaration of human rights to make that point now these are all things we can do I think to address the backlash and the fact that in um high commissioners aids words last month more and more leaders no longer even pretend to care about rights seduced as they are by the masculine posturing of power relationships I I'm a historian by training but I never subscribe to the to the wig view of history that society inevitably progresses towards a better state the backlash is real and I don't know if it is a a temporary blip in the march towards progress or if it's a more permanent reversal I obviously sincerely hope the former what I do know is that the backlash can only be counted that we can push the pendulum back in the way we wanted to only if those who want human rights show the same degree or more guile and determination as those who probably don't want human rights it's all right it's Friday afternoon I've spoken too long and I wouldn't want you going away feeling too depressed and thinking that through a weekend with Finnegan's wake would be light relief compared to compared to what I've been talking about but in that this is actually has been a good week for human rights and I think I've ever said that before and so it's not something I say I genuinely believe it and I'd say in two words what it is um melodic and moogabi and it's been 22 years since the butcher of Srebrenica and the architect or the genocide was convicted and it took him 20 took 20 years for him to be convicted and sentenced and it's been 34 years since the mass killings up up the 20 000 in Matabili land but he too was kicked out so the wheels of justice indeed turn slowly but to mix the matter they do get that man in the end so as I said this is a been a good week for human rights and I'm a Scotsman but tonight in Dublin I'll be drinking the Irish variant of our drink still wondering what the redundant E is doing in there but still and I and I'll be drinking to the fact that maybe as as Churchill said in 1942 it's it's not the end it's not even the beginning of the end but maybe it's the end of the beginning I'm talking about our struggle to contain and then reverse human rights so thank you very much indeed for allowing me to put my case