 I'm Valerie Amos. I'm the director of SOAS, and I really am delighted to welcome you this evening to our panel discussion on human rights futures. This is very much an issue which is at the heart of who we are at SOAS and what we're about, and I'm going to hand you over to Professor Hopgood, who's the pro-director international, who will introduce the panel and moderate tonight's debate. Thank you all very much indeed for being here. Helena Kennedy will join us, but she's in the House of Lords voting on data protection amendments, so she will race here as soon as she's finished, but for the moment we're going to start with an empty seat here. Can I welcome you to SOAS? It's fantastic to see so many people here. Wonderful audience. I'm going to make a few announcements and say something very briefly about the book, and then just introduce my fellow panellists, and then we'll proceed with, as it were, our critic, so we're going to make a couple of remarks about the book. Leslie and Jack will respond. I'm just going to chair tonight. I'm going to try to not say anything substantive, but we'll see how that goes, and then we'll, as quickly as we can, move to a Q&A with the audience as well. Tonight's event is sponsored by the Center on Conflict Rights and Justice, which Leslie is the director of, and the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, the International Relations Speaker Series, which Leslie is also the chair. So we'd like to thank both those organizations for putting this event on. Books will be available, paperbacks, and I promise you we managed to pressure Cambridge into accelerating the production of a paperback on the basis of this event. So we're looking for good sales and an extra selling point. You will probably never get the three editors in the same room again. This is the first time we've been together. So if you want to get all three of us to sign your book, now is the time to buy a copy. Okay? Okay. Very good. There's also going to be a reception afterwards. So once we've had the event, there'll be some soft drinks and some wine outside. We'll sign books for you. We'll talk to you afterwards. So please stay around for the reception, too. Okay. The book itself took us all together maybe three years to produce, starting with a workshop here and then another workshop in New York. We had a very clear idea in mind, which was to produce, if you like, a warm stop shop for thinking about human rights, particularly from a scholarly perspective. All of us had published on human rights before, but what we thought we'd do was invite a series of people from very different traditions within human rights scholarship to come together, to argue out their various positions, not to reach a consensus, but to produce a book which, as you'll see, moves from the outset where we have chapters by Catherine Sinkig and Jeff Dancy and Beth Simmons, which are an Anton Stresnev. Beth Simmons and Catherine Sinkig, in particular, are probably the most prominent scholars internationally of, as it were, the progressive account of human rights that they've been very effective and continue being very effective. The middle of the book is then a whole series of people, Jack and Leslie, Thomas Risser, Shareen Hirtle and others, looking at difficulties with the rights project, why it works in some places and not others, what kind of pushback there is against that. So, not exactly saying the rights project may be deeply flawed in some sense, but these are the things that those advocating human rights have to think about in order to make the project more effective. And then the book ends with Samuel Moyn and myself, who are effectively arguing that there really are deep structural flaws within the human rights project for a variety of reasons. And so, if you make it that far and you still have some optimism, you'll need to gherd yourselves before you go through the final two chapters. And then we frame that with an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction is a sort of state of the art, if you were right, scholarship. The conclusion, and Jack and I were just talking about this, actually comes up with four possible futures for human rights. And we think they stand up pretty well. They're not didactic. They're designed to start a conversation, but about where we may be heading within the framework of a world which is clearly changing reasonably rapidly. So that's the book. As I say, copies will be available afterwards and we'll happily sign them for you. Let me just introduce the panellists and then we'll move straight on to comments from David and Joanne. Helena Kennedy is principal of Mansfield College. She's exceptionally well known in British legal circles. She led the attempts to fund a human rights institute at Mansfield, the Bonavere Human Rights Institute. But she's been a barrister for more than 40 years. She's a Labour peer in the House of Lords alongside our esteemed director, Baroness Amos. I did read that Helena Kennedy is the worst, most, the Labour peer who dissents most from Labour motions in the House of Lords in her Wikipedia entry. Anyway, so when she comes, we don't need to introduce her, you know who she is. On my left here is Jack Snyder, who's the Robert and Rene Belfair Professor of International Relations in the Political Science Department of Columbia University. Jack has published hugely both books and journal articles. Jack is one of the top international relations political scientists in the world. We're very lucky to have him here tonight. I could go on endlessly about his many achievements, but I'll just mention that he's also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Leslie is director of the Center on Conflict Rights and Justice, an associate professor in international relations at SOAS, and chair of the International Relations Speaker Series. She too has numerous publications, both journal articles and books, but many of you will be familiar with her as she's become extremely visible on CNN, Bloomberg, BBC News, and a whole array of international news outlets commenting on contemporary international politics, transatlantic foreign policy and things of this sort. David, no, Joanne's next. Joanne is a senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty International, who's investigated human rights violations around the world, documenting war crimes in Afghanistan, Colombia and South Sudan, political violence in Burundi and Haiti, and prison conditions in the United States, Venezuela and Hong Kong. She also is a regular guest on international media, and before working at Amnesty, she worked for Human Rights Watch in New York. Finally, David Meffam is director of Human Rights Watch UK, responsible for advocacy towards the UK government, and Parliament, I think I may have mixed things up there, so I'm going to leave that. He was previously head of policy and advocacy at Saver Children UK, and before that worked for the Department for International Development and worked with Valerie Amos when he was in the government. So that's your panel. The way in which we're going to proceed is I'm going to ask Joanne to go first and then David. They're going to give a response to the book. They've had a copy for a couple of months, so they're going to give their response to the book, and we're reasonably tough, so this may well be a very critical response to the book. Then I'll give them five minutes each. I'll ask Jack and Leslie to share the five minutes response to that, and then I'm going to ask one or two questions and get all the panellists to engage with those. So thank you very much for indulging my introduction, and I'll hand over to Joanne. Thank you very much for the invitation to participate in what I'm certain is going to be a really interesting discussion. I was going to be the last panelist to speak in presenting the book and the future of human rights, and partially out of fear that everything interesting about the book would have been said, I thought I would supplement a discussion of the book with my view from the ground, because, as was indicated, I really work in the field and do research on human rights more than academic scholarship and advocacy. My view of trends that I've seen and that I believe are going to be crucial to the future of human rights, and I think will really indicate fundamental changes that might respond to some of the critiques in the book. But just to start off about the book, I definitely appreciated the critique of the human rights movement from several angles. I think there's a tendency to see a well-intentioned movement as something of a sacred cow of hesitance to criticize it thoroughly and sincerely, and the book didn't hold its punches as a few previous folks haven't either. And I really think the concerns in the book merit attention, and I would love to see some kind of workshop by which scholars could engage with actual human rights practitioners such of myself and think more broadly about the human rights movement in ways that we generally don't have the time and the fora to do. So I would encourage you to try to develop that. I think the most profound critique of the book is that it raises questions as to whether the rights paradigm is suited for a rapidly changing world and indeed whether the rights paradigm will remain relevant as the world changes. So what I want to briefly sketch out are my thoughts on the way the rights paradigm itself and particularly the human rights movement is changing in hopeful directions, positive directions that I think will maybe obviate some of the critiques of the book. And, you know, I should be clear, my position is as a longtime staffer first to Human Rights Watch for well over a decade and now at Amnesty for about five years. So I'm going to focus on those organizations, something as, you know, bellwethers of larger trends in the human rights movement. The first important trends I want to underscore is the real meaningful globalization of the movement away from the asymmetrical model of the past. And when I say asymmetrical, what I refer to is particularly at the transnational, oh okay, I'm sorry, I thought red was on. Now I can hear myself better. The asymmetrical model that I was referring to is the idea that in the past what you would see would be international human rights groups based in western capitals, namely London and New York City. Staffed by white Ivy League graduates often not fluent in the language of the countries that they are visiting. Going on what we're referred to as missions, which has a lot of connotations, you know, field missions. You'd spend two or three weeks in the country generally at most. You would engage with local activists. You know, you would hire a translator to fix her and you would learn as much as you could about abuses going on in that country. Then you would return to your western capital, write a report and launch it hopefully with a lot of publicity and gain the attention of the western, you know, that certainly the focus was on the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the western media, and try to get western governments to lobby to change the abusive patterns that were documented in the report. And, you know, I'm maybe slightly caricaturing, but not a whole lot. And as you can see, I think this model veered sometimes dangerously close to the western white savior complex of, you know, sort of exoticizing what we're seen as brutal places abroad and not looking critically at your own abuses. I think this has really changed a lot. And interestingly, the book raises the question of whether the human rights movement could be a casualty of the decline of the west. I, in contrast, think that the, you know, sort of increasing democratization of global space is strengthening the human rights movement tremendously. As you may have heard, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have in recent years taken really important steps towards diversifying their locations of their offices geographically. So it's no longer the London headquarters and people being sent abroad. It's people based abroad. It's people who were born abroad. It's people documenting abuses in the country in which they live, in the region in which they live. So Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have significantly decreased staff in the headquarters and expanded very much the presence abroad. And Amnesty now has offices in Dakar, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Lima, Bangkok to name a few. And I think, you know, this is important both symbolically and practically in terms of proximity to the places in which you work and also leveling the playing field in which, you know, London is also a place in which we work and in which we document abuses as is New York. I think it's also important practically and even more important is the diversification of the staff. So in parallel with the diversification of offices we see that organizations that were previously primarily staffed by white westerners with Ivy League educations are now much more heterogeneous. They are racially, ethnically, linguistically diverse. They have people from really a range of national origins. And I think most interestingly, often people who are bicultural, people who are perfectly bilingual and perfectly at home in more than one culture. So I guess I'd emphasize that these changes have started at the researcher level. They started at the level of, you know, sort of the staffers who document abuses and who do the, you know, layman's work of advocating for change. But they've slowly been going up the chain of command in the organizations and have reached the senior director level. And just as sort of a bellwether or a benchmark, I would make a prediction in 1993 when R.A. Nyer handed over the reins of Human Rights Watch to Ken Roth. You know, it was basically one New Yorker handing over the reins of international human rights, you know, one of the very leading organizations to another Ivy League educated New Yorker. I very much doubt when Ken Roth decides to leave Human Rights Watch that you'll see a similar change, that you'll see, you know, a white male take over the organization. Both at Human Rights Watch and at Amnesty, you see many more people of color and people with very diverse backgrounds and very diverse sets of influences in position of power and authority. There are also efforts to diversify both organizations fundraising and anyone who is not entirely naive about how organizations function know that funders and sources of funding are important. So I think this too will help diversify the attention of the human rights movement. And I guess also I want to really emphasize that these aren't just changes in packaging. These changes really affect the substance of the organization's work. They help broaden the organization's constituencies and make them more responsive to a broader range of concerns. So many have noted an increase in focus by human rights organizations away from a narrow focus on political and civil rights to economic, social and cultural rights. I think that diversification of the staff is part of, you know, part of that change. And similarly, the move toward greater scrutiny of abuses by, you know, very namely the US government, but other Western governments as well. And it's hard to imagine now, but until about 1999, Human Rights Watch did not even have a program that covered the United States. The first time I saw a Human Rights Watch speaker give a talk, they were explaining why it was unnecessary for Human Rights Watch to document abuses in the United States. Well now the organization has a vibrant US program that's, you know, very active and very well staffed. The second trend I'll quickly outline is similar in terms of diversification, but here it's a diversification, diversification of skills and expertise. The human rights movement, I think, is very marked by the predominance of lawyers and prosecutorial and lawyerly approaches to narratives. What we've been seeing though in the past decade especially is a much broader range of skills and a background of people getting involved in human rights. So there's the field, the fast-developing field that some of you may have heard of, of forensic architecture which brings expertise in spatial analysis and satellite imagery and even physics to the fore. Certainly design and visual and aesthetic skills, you have many more photographers and videographers and web designers on staff of human rights organizations. We have military arms experts now who are able to forensically trace the origins of military weaponry. You have statisticians, computer scientists, it's just a much greater range of skills and I think this too really affects the focus and the substance of the organization's work because when you have a hammer, as we all know, everything looks like a nail, when people have a whole range of skills they have the ability to rely on different methodologies and I think that allows them to find new models for effecting change. The final trend that I'm just going to briefly describe is the increasing democracy of communications. So in the original model of the human rights research and methodology I mentioned at the outset, you would visit a country, come back with the information, rely on the media to do the actual dissemination to the broader public. Those steps have now been collapsed and we have real-time monitoring that happens and real-time and direct dissemination. I lament the decline of the media for many reasons but I do applaud or see great benefit to the ability for human rights activists to reach the public directly and also not for local human rights activists not to rely on international organizations to reach an international public. Local activists in Broondie and other places now can reach you directly and that is happening more and more and I think it brings a lot of new information and a lot of new ideas to the field so I'm optimistic. Thank you very much, Joanne. David. Thank you very much. So I stick with green. I don't move to red, is that right? Yeah, green's good. Joanne has mentioned Human Rights Watch quite a few times in her own remarks. I was kind of wondering where there was much more for me to say but I will give a few thoughts and I think I've got five minutes in this opening segment, Stephen. So if you'll forgive me in terms of my five minutes, I'll come to the book which I know you're very keen for me to do and I'll give three quick reflections on the book. Yeah, Human Rights Futures. Yes, absolutely. But I think it's important perhaps in front of this audience. I don't know, I guess there's primarily students in the audience but maybe a range of academics and others here too. Just to give two examples of the work that Human Rights Watch is doing, perhaps make this assumption that you know what amnesty in Human Rights Watch and organizations of our kind do but perhaps I could give two very quick examples and I'd be really succinct and they're quite different examples actually. The first is Yemen, which some of you will know is an extremely poor country underneath Saudi Arabia, which has been involved in a brutal war for the last couple of years, a war between a Saudi Arabian-led coalition. Saudi Arabia is by far and away the largest party but it's got a number of Arab states alongside it, waging a war against the Houthi rebel opposition group. That war has been going on since March 2015. It's extremely brutal. It's killed over 5,000 people, over 8,500 people have been injured. I think the thing that brings this back to the UK where we're having this conversation is that the Saudi Arabian-led coalition has been substantially armed by the British government. British government has sold over £4 billion worth of arms since the start of the conflict in March 2015. It's also armed by the French and the Americans. Human Rights Watch has been involved. I think mischaracterisation sometimes by some of the contributors to the report about the way in which organizations like Human Rights Watch operate. But what we've done in Yemen, working very closely with local partners, is to try to establish the extent to which both parties to the conflict, the Houthis and the Saudi Arabian-led coalition, are violating the laws of war. So the laws of war is that sort of parallel strand of law that sits alongside international human rights law. You have international human rights law and you have international humanitarian law, the laws of war, some of which actually precedes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. So there's a substantial body of law that's been assembled that talks about the way in which warring parties can conduct war. And the critical thing is actually they should distinguish and differentiate between legitimate military targets, combatants and legitimate military sites and civilians. And what we've seen through our research, on the ground research, working with local partners as well as through satellite imagery, is there have been many, many occasions in which both the Houthi opposition group and the Saudi-led coalition that we are supporting are violating the laws of war by hitting mosques and markets and schools and hospitals in the way that has killed and injured many, many civilians. So we've done a lot of work on that and we continue to press that very hard with the British government in my case, but also the Human Rights Council and the UN Security Council. It's been an uphill struggle because the UK is very heavily invested in the Saudi government, but I think we've had some impact at the recent Human Rights Council in getting that Human Rights Council to agree to an international inquiry into violations by all parties to the conflict in terms of who's responsible for what and what's going on, ensuring a degree of accountability. So, again, a kind of crisis conflict affected state is one example of what we in Amnesty and many others do. A very different example, which I want to put on the table because I think, again, perhaps challenges some of the mischaracterisations about the breadth of our agenda, is work that we've done at Human Rights Watch on disability rights. And I think it's fair to say that perhaps, you know, the mainstream human rights movement, the big international organisations came quite late to disability rights. There were many local organisations clearly that were working on this issue for a long time. In our own case, we've only relatively recently started a disability rights programme, but we're extremely active and extremely energetic in identifying a whole range of rights violations suffered by people with disabilities working with local groups across the world. And one issue I want to flag for you tonight, which we've been very active on, which I think is hugely important and significant, is the phenomenon of shackling. And it's hard to believe in the 21st century in 2018 that there are many people with disabilities who are locked up for years and years and years because their families and their communities believe they are possessed by kind of evil spirits. There are examples that we've come across in Ghana and Indonesia where scores of people were held, in one case, a man who was held for 15 years literally chained to a tree, given food and water but no other medical assistance. We, working with local partners, helped to expose that barbarity, I can't think of another word to describe it, that horrendous inhumane treatment. Working with the governments of Ghana and Indonesia, we've actually ensured that there is a commitment on the part of both governments to actually address that problem, to unshackle the disabled people that were shackled and to put in place mental health services appropriate for people facing the disabilities that they face. So two very different examples, a conflict affected case and a case of disability rights that we are very active on. And of course an organisation like ours, like Amnesty, is working on many many different countries around the world and on many many thematic issues. Let me turn quickly to some very quick succinct points on the book itself, which I really enjoyed. I think it's a huge contribution to the debate and I like Joanne. I welcome and Human Rights Watch welcomes energetic vigorous robust debate about where the human rights movement is going and what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are, the impact we're having, the impact we're not having, I think that's a debate that we should all enter into honestly. But let me say this in terms of my first point, I would firmly plank my flag on the camp of the people that argue that there has been progress in respect of human rights and that the human rights organisations of which I represent one has contributed to that impact. I think some of the contributors to the volume are pretty skeptical about whether there's been progress and whether human rights organisations are making more than a negligible impact. I'm very much of the view on the basis of my own experience with Human Rights Watch in the last seven years that we are having impact and I agree, I think, very strongly with Catherine Sir King's chapter in the volume that talks about some of the objective indicators that she's referenced that suggest there's been progress overall in respect of advancement on critical human rights issues, both civil and political and economic and social. I think it's important to be specific, so let me just give you on this impact question, let me just give you some examples. Just in the last year in 2017 of impact affecting just one area of human rights, this is just the area of children's rights. We work on a whole range of other thematic issues and a whole range of other country situations, but just on children's rights in the course of 2017 these things have happened which I would say were progress. The UN, as some of you will know, certainly distinguished, what are you, the principle of so-as will know this extremely well. The UN publishes a list of shame of countries around the world that actively recruit children into their armed forces. It's a very important thing that the UN does. I think it's published by the UN Secretary General on an annual basis. Last year, the Democratic Republic of Congo, whereas we all know there's been years and years of vicious conflict, the DRC was taken off that list. UN concluded that the DRC's own armed forces were no longer actively recruiting children into its army. I would say that that was progress. In the case of the United States, and no doubt we'll talk a lot about the US in the course of this conversation tonight, there are awful things going on with President Trump, we all know that, but in the case of the United States in 2017 the states of Arkansas, California, New Jersey and North Dakota, all banned sentences of life without parole for child offenders. That's an issue that we've been really actively involved in for over 10 years. The absurdity of a child of 13 or 14 committing, in many cases, a serious crime, but having a life sentence with no parole. That has been overturned in four important states in the United States, and I think in part due to the work that we've done. One other issue just to thank you in the course of 2017, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that sex with a child bride is rape. Previously people have been able to argue that it was no such thing. I would say that all of those examples of impact that we have helped to contribute to working with local partners were real progress that we should celebrate. That's not to say there aren't many more challenges that we're facing, but they are examples of progress that we should recognise and welcome. Second quick point, and this I think builds on some of the points that Jack Snider made in his chapter in the book. I agree with you Jack, I think if I read your chapter correctly that going forward the human rights movement needs to think much more politically about the country context in which it operates and the way it seeks to bring about change. I think we need a deeper political, social, cultural analysis of the countries where we're trying to affect change. I'm not saying we never do that now. I'm not saying that's not something we've got better at in recent years, but I think that's something we need to invest much more heavily in if we're trying to affect change around the world. Of course it applies to our own country too. It applies to the UK, and actually I could just flag this with you as a point of interest. Just last year, about six months ago, the London Office of Human Rights Watch, which I headed up, did something we'd never done before. We actually commissioned a communications agency that carries out opinion polling and focus group work to do some focus groups for us to try to ascertain where Middle Britain was in its attitude to human rights, what it thought human rights were, whether it thought human rights were a good thing or a bad thing, which human rights it liked, which human rights it didn't like, what its concerns were about human rights. I think that has helped to inform the thinking that we do about UK focused advocacy in the coming period. I agree with that we need a more political analysis. You also talk a lot about the need to build a bigger mass movement for human rights, and I think that's true. Obviously there is a challenge between a more established democracy like the UK and an authoritarian or an undemocratic society. You also talk a lot about political parties, and I think there are some challenges for human rights watch which has charitable status, at least part of what we do has charitable status in the UK in getting too involved in party political work, but I don't dissent from your basic premise that in difficult environments around the world in undemocratic societies and societies and transition, there needs to be much more effort made to try to encourage mass mobilisation and a bigger public constituency behind the objective of human rights. Third point really quickly, I promise, is about economic and social rights. Again, I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding that organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and I think Joanne very effectively corrected this in what you said, that we don't work on economic and social rights. We have done four years. It's interesting, a number of people, I think Jack you might have referenced what Ken Roth said about 15 years ago in one article, but actually if you look at our website we have a host of work on education and the right to education and a huge amount of work on the right to health. So these are big important areas for us that we value, but I think it's fair to say going forward that it's areas of work that we should do more on and we should give more attention to and publicise more. I think it is true to say that when Human Rights Watch and possibly Amnesty previously talk about their work, they tend to talk about the crisis work or they talk about civil and political rights and we haven't given as much attention to our economic and social rights work, but that's not because we're not doing it, but I think going forward perhaps particularly, and perhaps I'll close on this, in the context of the whole populism debate that No Doubt will talk more about in the course of this evening, I think there are a whole series of factors that contributed to populism and let's not pretend there's a simple explanation for it, but I think a sense on the part of certain groups of people that they were left behind by economic progress, that they were suffering economic disadvantage, that it wasn't being attended to or listened to or recognised, I think that has contributed in some way to the rise of populism, so I think giving more attention to economic and social rights, perhaps particularly affecting those communities, can be part of the way in which we try to challenge the challenge and the threat posed by populism. I'll finish there. Thank you, David. I'm going to ask Leslie and Jack to respond briefly and then I'm going to ask a couple of questions of all the panellists. While they're responding, I'm going to check my phone, not because I'm not engaged, but because I want to check whether Baroness Kennedy is on her way or whether maybe she said she's not going to make it, so I apologise for that. Leslie, would you like to go first? Or would you like? Okay, great. Happy to. Thank you so much, Joanne and David, for those great comments which, if I have time, will help lead me into a number of the themes. Two or three minutes, Jack. Two or three minutes, okay. When an academic says if I have time. Joanne, your point about the human rights movement becoming more global and not asymmetric north speaking to south as it was before. Let me just give an anecdote from a meeting that I helped to organise in Amman, Jordan in August, where we were discussing with people who were human rights scholars and activists from all over the Middle East, the reform of the UN treaty bodies system. In looking for people to invite to this meeting, we found it rather difficult to find people who were not extremely well socialised into the international way of thinking about human rights. And often I felt like we were having the same conversation in Amman as we had just had the previous month in New York City. So it was a way of being still very global and standard while having people who were from the region. Except for a few people who were sort of at the fringes of this socialisation and sometimes they said things that were quite different and that challenged the conventional wisdom. We had a professor from Alasar University in Cairo, the premier SUNY institution of higher education in the world, who was a really heroic guy who had spent his whole career working on women's health and rights issues in Egypt and East Africa. And his approach had been to use a combination of public health and medical strategies. He was a medical doctor combined with religious education of what the Quran actually says about women's health issues. And he took the floor at one point to complain about what other people in the room had been saying about how terrible it was that countries like Saudi Arabia had signed the CDAW Women's Rights Treaty with reservations and how unacceptable it was given the universal nature of women's rights to have these reservations. And he said, you know, first of all in my country these are matters of religious belief. And secondly he said, you will take the tools out of my hands in struggling for women's health and women's rights if I cannot frame them in terms of the religious vernacular of my society. So the vernacularization of rights talk was one of the big themes in our book Sally Mary's chapter among others. And one of the unresolved issues in our book is the two-edged sword quality of vernacularization. On the one hand, talking about rights and progressive change in terms of the language of the society in which the persuasion is being carried out can help get the idea across sometimes better than legalistic international language. But on the other hand it can be a slippery slope. Rachel Wall was an American scholar who just published a book on torture carried out by Indian police who had had human rights training and who justified the torture of local suspects on the grounds that they needed to do this to protect the human rights of the community from bad people who were predators. So I think there's a lot more thinking that needs to be done about the shift from being global to being vernacular. I know my two minutes are up and I have... Do you want to write one more point? So let me make my points as the conversation goes along. Leslie. OK, I'll be very quick. First of all, thank you to everybody who's here tonight. It's fabulous to look at and see a lot of true experts and scholars who are just extremely knowledgeable and accomplished and have made very important statements in their work about human rights here in the audience. So we are by no mean the only experts in the room and I hope that we'll hear from all of you. The book was a long time in the making for a lot of complicated reasons. Perhaps one of the biggest ones was that it really is a book that brings together people who disagree quite seriously. And usually when you see edited books, it's a lot of people who more or less agree and are trying to make a common statement. Certainly in the academy they're trying to develop a common theoretical framework. And we knew from the get-go that that would be completely impossible. We weren't even certain that the three of us would be able to get through a joint introduction and conclusion, but we did. And so that was quite a tremendous accomplishment. I think it's wonderful that Steve is chairing, but don't let him off the hook because he's written one of the most interesting and very most controversial chapters in the book. So he's fully open for questions, I think, from the audience. But we also wrote the book at a time when a lot of the focus and Joanne's comments reflected this was very much on the global south, on the Middle East, on the shrinking space for civil society and authoritarian pushback. It was just after the period that dominated the space when I arrived at SOAS in 2007 which was actually a focus on the U.S., because it was a focus on torture and a lot of people, especially people like Brad Adams who visited us from Human Rights Watch, would say the biggest barrier that we face as Human Rights Watch in our advocacy around the world is the United States because when we stand up in China they say, well, what about the United States? We then, when we were working on this book, I think a lot of people were focused on Africa's pushback against the International Criminal Court, certainly I was, and a number of problems across, again, the global south and other parts of the world. And now, of course, we're in a very different space where a lot of the conversation is about the West. A couple of the chapters, and I want to say this and then comment very quickly on two of Joanne's points, several of the chapters are getting at this question of, and mine is included in this question of to what extent does a backlash that we've seen have, will it have a lasting repercussion or is it just temporary? Catherine Sicking's chapter, she's, as you know, a leading scholar of Human Rights who's now based at Harvard, like to say in that chapter that David's acknowledged that it's just a bump along the road and we're getting there, and of course there are always setbacks. It's just a natural part of progress is that you have setbacks. So we shouldn't take the backlash too seriously and there's a lot of pointing the finger at very violent types of backlash and saying, you know, they go away. And what some of us tried to look at was not so much the violent types of backlash, atrocities, but at other kinds of backlash that were defined by leaders trying to undermine norms and to create new institutions, formal or informal, that fundamentally altered the relationship between the state and the state's autonomy and the individual and individual rights and did it in a way that could create a new form of path dependence that over time would chip away at the fundamental premise and aspiration of human rights. And certainly when I wrote my chapter I was thinking largely not about the US, although I did talk about the fact that democracies do this and we saw the torture memos and all sorts of things, but we did have civil society mobilisation and a lot of international pushback as well as domestic pushback. And I'd say we're back to that space now where there's a lot of recognition that the things that we take for granted, the norms are as significant as the more formal institutions in safeguarding human rights. So I think this conversation about backlash and its longer term consequences and the forms that it takes is an extremely important one historically, but especially in the contemporary environment. So on Jan's two points about the democratisation of space and global communications, I mean I think it's very important and very significant the comments about the decentralisation and the regionalisation, the strategies, the amnesty and human rights watch have pursued are impressive, they've been fascinating to watch, they're very significant as the global communications. But my immediate reactions were one, the democratisation of space has also in the contemporary environment been accompanied by an absence, we know this, we hear it too much but one can't say it again, the absence of leadership, the absence of an articulation of the liberal values coming out of the west. And some people certainly at SOAS would say well that's okay because it was always a project that was all about hypocrisy but if you go back to Catherine Sicking's work and she does have the first substantive chapter in the book after the introduction, their argument has always been that it doesn't matter if it's hypocrisy, the fact that you put the language out there creates the basis for weak actors in transitional states and authoritarian states to draw on that international language and framework and use it to put pressure on the governments to effect change. So if you buy that basic claim then the absence of hypocrisy and you think it's hypocrisy when liberal leaders in the west have historically put forward the language of rights and of democracy and of liberalism then it's a problem for the liberal scholars who have contributed to the book that democratisation of space has also been accompanied by an absence of leadership. On global communications, one of my key concerns is the other part of the downside of global communications is what's happened in media, in social media, the echo chambers that we hear about the siloed conversations that are taking place and the demise of the editors, the moderators and the intermediaries that have maintained a certain basic level of truth, of fact, of civilized discourse and people moving into their silos in a way that makes it much more possible to reinforce native sentiments and sectarian sentiments and that I think is that potentially works very much against the project of human rights of liberalism of civil society and so I think that the global communication space is one that's very problematic right now. There's certainly many good things but there are some deeply problematic things that are not on the side of human rights unless we repair and take care of them quickly I think. Leslie, thank you. OK, I did have quite a complicated plan of asking various questions, getting more responses but obviously time is already getting away from us. My sense is Baroness Kennedy will not make it as she was still waiting quite recently to vote. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read out the three questions I was going to ask sequentially. I'm going to start with David and work along and ask our four panellists to make a brief comment on one or all of these questions as they see fit and then I'm going to open it up to questions from the audience to the panel. So the three questions we were going to look at are what have we learned from generations of human rights advocacy about the necessary requirements for its success and what are the standout cases of that success and both Joanne and David particularly have pointed to some examples of that success. Secondly, is there significant pushback against human rights norms in the contemporary international system and if so what forms does it take and is it a transient or permanent phenomenon? Leslie to some degree addressed that in her remarks in Jack, bear in mind the last part of that. Is it a transient or permanent phenomenon? If you look at my chapter in the book I'm very pessimistic about the future for human rights in what I would describe as a post-Western world and so I think it's a permanent shift but I'm probably the only person on this panel who would argue that. The third question is, do current concerns about liberal democracy suggest alternatives to conventional rights approaches might be necessary or that different strategies need to be employed for progressive change? Different strategies to human rights strategies for progressive change. So I'll start with David, I'll ask you each to make a brief comment on one or all of those questions and then I'll open the floor up to questions from the audience. David. Okay, so we don't need to take necessarily take all of them. No, no, just take one if you want. Or maybe I'll take one on advocacy. Sure. That's okay. So I think in terms of the lessons of success in terms of the advocacy that we've done in recent years and arguably lessons going forward although we obviously need to adapt to change circumstances I don't think the importance of meticulous research goes away. I think one of the strengths of human rights watch and amnesty of human rights organisations is that we do actually invest a lot in the quality of the research and getting the facts and being clear about the facts and getting accuracy in respect to the facts is hugely important to our credibility and I'm sure from time to time we make mistakes and I hope that when we do we own up to them and we apologise but I think if we make mistakes too often we make allegations about things happening which didn't happen or misrepresent or spin the facts we'll get into very serious trouble. So I don't think that changes in the change context. I think the importance of researching being accurate and meticulous in our research remains a critical component of effective advocacy. I do think the whole communications story has changed a lot and Lesley you referenced this. I mean we've not been at Human Rights Watch ashamed for a very long time about putting the media spotlight on the abuses that we document we see that as an essential part of our theory of change that it isn't enough just to have a quiet word in the ear of our policymaker you actually have to shine the public spotlight maximise your media coverage, maximise your communications exposure in order to get anybody to care about what you'll be working on and to do anything about it. So I don't think that changes either but I think the social media, the media landscape particularly social media has changed so much that we all of us need to think more creatively about the way in which we use the media and the way we deal with some of the regressive things that you referenced in terms of you know there are other people who are very antithetical to human rights who are extremely good at using the media and one of them sits in the White House who regularly uses Twitter at apparently 6.30 in the afternoon while eating a cheeseburger. So we need to be more you know to keep up with the people that hate human rights and everything that we stand for and are using social media and other kinds of media to do us down and to undermine liberal values and attack human rights we need to be since cleverer, more creative, more experimental in the way in which we try to use different forms of media to draw attention to our issues. I do think there is a lot in this whole thing that a lot of us grapple with about telling stories. I mean I'm a sort of slightly clunky policy want guy that likes big reports and will read a book like that in my Christmas holiday but there are a lot of people that won't and won't read human rights watch around us to reports of the length that we used to write them. So I think getting people that can tell a compelling story about what a human rights violation means to them and to their life and find ways to communicate that to much larger groups of people who can potentially be both affected by it but also energised to do something about it. I think that's hugely important going forward to think about the communications dimension to our work. I think building, I put down building broad based alliances I'm not sure that changes either. I think maybe the nature of some of our alliances will change and Joanne talked a lot about the internationalisation thrust which has been an important part of Amnesty's work and Human Rights Watches as well but I think whoever the alliances are with the critical importance is to have a very broad base of alliances and organisations that are supporting a cause if you're likely to have any chance of effecting change. Perhaps the fourth and final point about what are the conditions for effective advocacy is long-term commitment and engagement. That's actually harder to do at the country level. We work on countries and we work on thematic issues and country situations as we all know change from year to year from month to month. Sarah Leah Whitson, if she was here at one point to talk to us, probably said this story but in 2010 the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch got together for its retreat and decided it was going to be women's rights across the Middle East that they were working on and then a few months later the Arab Spring kicked off and all of the plans that had been laid about what we were going to work on and how we were going to work and what the projects were going to be were all thrown out of the water. Big circumstances had changed on the ground so I think country work is much more necessarily reactive but I think on thematic work you can stay committed for a longer term and have some real impact and let me give you some examples and again there may be ones that you don't expect but I think there are real examples of impact that reflect some of these examples of impact and success that I've talked about or preconditions for impact and success. One is the ILO Convention on the Rights of Domestic Workers. People think the rights of domestic workers, who the hell are they? They are cooks, cleaners, nannies, home helps, drivers, various estimates around the world. Some people suggest there are 100 million of them working in people's homes and people's houses. They are some of the most exploited people in the world and not so long ago in 2011 that the ILO Convention on the Rights of Domestic Workers came into force. It's now been ratified by 28 countries. It's having real impact. There are countries around the world that are putting in place. They're not just signing up to the international convention and I know there is a skepticism about whether those international treaties and conventions actually ever amount to anything but they're actually changing their domestic laws, giving domestic workers the right to days off, to proper pay, to pension entitlements. I think it's an international convention that has really worked its way down to the national level in a form that had a very positive impact. So I would highlight the ILO Convention on the Rights of Domestic Workers as a really good example of human rights impact in recent years. The other is the work that's been done on child labour. Sorry, I'm talking a lot about children today, but child labour, where since 2000 there has been a one-third reduction in child labour rates around the world, which is 100 million less children involved in child labour than would be the case without that reduction. That's a very, very significant change affecting millions of children around the world. Two more examples, which I think are... Very briefly. The work that we've done and others have done too on the male guardianship system, this would be my last case, the male guardianship system in Saudi Arabia, which people may know means that women and girls have to get the permission of a male relative, a father, a brother, a husband, before they can open a business, get medical assistance, travel, whatever. That is beginning to change and I think there are a lot of organisations, including Human Rights Watch, that have worked for years on that issue in a way that appears to be having some impact because it looks as if the Saudi authorities will begin finally to change that, anomalous and outrageous and discriminatory system. Thank you, David. Joanne. I'm going to address the question of pushback, which is, I think, a really serious problem today, but I guess I'll start by putting in a little bit of historical context and emphasise that there's always been, at every stage of the movement's growth and development, there's been pushback. None of the successes of the Human Rights Movement have been given, have been offered up by governments or armed actors. They've all been fought for and they've all been difficult. The 80s, which was a movement of, I think, great success of human rights and the research and advocacy methodologies that rely on today were really honed during that period. Human rights defenders were maligned as subversives, as communists, by the right-wing governments in Latin America. When they criticised eastern bloc countries, they were called CIA fronts and apologists for American imperialism. People were put in jail and killed. On the basis of such criticism. So those kinds of criticisms can be really dangerous. But I think now we're seeing what is, in some sense, possibly more dangerous, which is the degree in which our traditional allies, liberal Western governments, are joining in the course of criticism of human rights. Leslie, you've opened this discussion. I think your chapter is a very good primer on some of this backlash and Leslie coined a phrase, strategic legalism, to describe one aspect of this backlash that I think is quite apt for what we're seeing from the U.S. where it's not, I mean, I'm going to kind of outline some of the ways in which the U.S. and other governments are attacking human rights, but sort of the most insidious way is using our tools against us, attacking, trying to redefine norms and rejigger the institutions of human rights in order to weaken them. So on the pessimistic side, this year Prince Zaid, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in December, announced that he was going to be resigning from his post because essentially he felt that his position is untenable. He spoke of the many trends across the world that seem to negate and deny the value of human rights. And he made kind of an emotional speech last June that presaged his recent announcement that was equally pessimistic, that decried the rise of populism, the rise of nativism, the way in which these movements have taken over and succeeded in many Western governments and particularly spoke about Trump and the U.S. or at least the Trump administration's attack on basic human rights values. He ended his speech saying what is happening to us, which I think just gives an emotional sense of his feeling of pessimism. And as a global spokesman, as kind of the official global spokesman for the human rights movement, that is, I think, worth paying attention to. The developments that he spoke of and that we certainly feel sometimes on a day-to-day basis in our work are one, just increasing explicit criticism of human rights norms, not just attacking certain norms or certain human rights actors, but saying that human rights itself gets in the way of expressing priorities such as security. Obviously, I'm sure you all heard of Trump's explicit defence of torture, saying that maybe necessary in some circumstances, his comments that exemplary extrajudicial executions can be a useful tool in some circumstances. Secretary of State Tillerson suggesting that the promotion of human rights can be an obstacle to the pursuit of more serious and core economic rights concerns or economic interests. This year, Theresa May called for human rights laws to be overturned if they get in the way of the fight against terrorism, echoing some of what we saw during the Bush administration. And of course, in the Philippines, President Duterte has now really broken with past presidents and broken a taboo of explicitly bragging about human rights violations and the most egregious violations, extrajudicial executions of criminal suspects. We've also seen various attempts to nullify and displace human rights law and most notably the efforts of the United States during the war on terror, but continuing efforts to carve out a space for counterterrorism efforts to be waged without regard to either human rights or humanitarian law constraints, a wide-ranging effort to sabotage the institutional architecture of the human rights movement. Specifically, the ICC, as Leslie's chapter describes, you have now the broondi withdrawal from the ICC, the South African promised withdrawal, and a range of African states and African institutions undermining the ICC. You have the U.S. strategy of embedding language in the Security Council resolution that referred the Libya case to the ICC that exempted citizens of non-party states, i.e. the U.S., from prosecution before the ICC. You have attacks on other human rights mechanisms. Last year, nine Arab states that belong to the Saudi Arabia Coalition that's bombing Yemen made an unprecedented threat to withdraw from the UN if they were listed as perpetrators in that list of shame that David made reference to. And then finally, and I think most worryingly and most personally, you see really a wave of attacks on both human rights organizations and human rights defenders. And this is characterized by often new laws, new regulations that attack the budgets and funding of human rights organizations that restrict their activities, that bar them from registering or bar them from being involved in protests. Nearly half of the world's states have passed such laws in recent years, so it's not an isolated problem. And then we're also seeing actual prosecutions of human rights defenders and for amnesty this is something that comes really close to home because 11 of our staff are being prosecuted in Turkey, including the chair of Amnesty Turkey who was arrested last June and charged and still in prison for the supposed crime, really the baseless accusation of being a member of an armed terrorist group. So they face prison terms of up to 15 years, this is really very serious and the next hearing in the case will be at the end of this month. But these are the kinds of attacks, this is the kind of backlash that the human rights movement is facing now. Thank you, John. Leslie. I'm very depressed. I mean those are terrific comments and very important and not wrong. I guess I've now changed what I was going to say, I'm going to be very brief because I really want to hear from so many people in the audience, but let me just say quickly, I think it's very hard to know how things will work out. There is no end point so this is forever a space for contestation, pushback, progressive change, all sorts of things going on, but just a few almost, rather than a big point, let me just make a few comments and then we can maybe come back to big points in the Q&A. It's not clear to me that this is not an indefensive Donald Trump promise, I promise you, but just analytically it's not clear where Donald Trump stands on human rights. Look at his comments on Iran, he's supporting, I'm not going to say anything about why, it's complicated and we can be very cynical. However, pushing for the protests, talking about the abuse of human rights in Iran, making a big speech in Seoul about North Korea's human rights program, Donald Trump certainly uses a language of human rights promotionally in certain cases for reasons that have to do with his other strategic or tactical goals or the policies that he's trying to push at that particular point in time. And to certain extent that doesn't differ from other leaders, but there are times when he is actually using the human rights language, he hasn't completely abandoned it, it's complicated. And then I guess the thing I would say about domestically in the west and especially in the US, but in Europe in the US, yes, we're very fixated on a conservative mobilisation and backlash, but the United States is not Donald Trump, it's quite extraordinary the level of mobilisation from civil society in response to the Muslim ban, time one, two and three, in response to the withdrawal from Paris. The pushback has not only been from civil society, it's been from cities, it's been from states, it's been from corporates, it's been from university presidents, it's been from Michael Bloomberg, it's been from John Kerry, it's been quite extraordinary and the verdict is definitely still out and unfortunately I think that the media in the UK has done a very poor job of covering the broader contestation that's going on in the United States, it's been better in the UK but not terrific. It is a highly divided country, the US is highly divided, it's highly partisan, but it's not moved to the right, it's moved towards division. And so the left is very, very strong as is the right, that's what's disturbing perhaps, but contestation is extraordinary and if you watched the reactions to the violence in Charlottesville and especially to the president's response to the violence in Charlottesville from the private sector, it was quite remarkable and anti-racism pro-human rights. So I think that it's a much more complex picture and for that reason I think that we're not in an inevitable state of decline. But there's a lot more to say but I won't say it now. Okay, thank you Leslie Jack. So I want to start with the question of impact. One of the things that really struck me across our 15 different contributors to the book who had very different views on almost everything was that they tended to agree quite convergently on the question of impact of what makes a country have good or not so good human rights. And they agreed to the following list of scope conditions which has emerged from various forms of social science research. Number one is you have good human rights if the country is at peace. Number two is if it's a democracy. Number three a bit further down is per capita income. The scope conditions continue with, well sometimes if the country, the state is too strong like in China, you can't pressure it and so it can have bad human rights but sometimes if the state is too weak like Somalia, there's no state to put pressure on and human rights suffer. The condition that people agreed was the one where human rights activism, the standard formula of sign a treaty, hold the signer accountable and apply universal standards, that has the greatest impact. Beth Simmons' book shows in countries that are already partly democratic, that already have partly independent legal systems and when they sign a treaty and that system kicks in, then it allows civil society actors space to mobilize, the legitimacy to mobilize and it allows the courts to be a venue for litigation. But that's a particular slice of the countries that does not include the horrible authoritarian rights abusing worst offenders and it struck me that there was a lot of agreement on that. There was way less agreement in general on whether the shaming tactics of human rights organizations work or not. Most people don't like it when they're shamed and as Leslie was saying, they tend to push back and so the most prominent article on this subject in social science finds that one of the most common things that happens if you're shamed for doing one thing, you'll try to hide it or stop doing that but do some other bad thing that allows you to repress the opposition in some other way that isn't getting shamed yet. So we should also remember and so the question of child labor has been brought up that sometimes the kinds of outcomes that human rights proponents want can be brought about by ways that are not normally thought of as human rights mechanisms. So the two countries in the 20th century that most rapidly reduced child labor were China under Deng Xiaoping and Tanzania under the single party state and in both cases a big part of it was providing good quality universal free public education and in the Chinese case it had to do with the change in the economy which gave parents the ability and the incentive to keep their kids in school. It had nothing to do with what we normally think of as the human rights repertoire of methods. So just let me close with my second point about alternatives to the standard way of approaching human rights. As David, thank you, mentioned, my argument in my chapter is that politics needs to come first and justice and rights follows that this is... So when you ask R. E. Nyer, the founder of Human Rights Watch, what he looks to as a load star to guide the strategy of human rights promotion, he says look back to the iconic cases, anti-slavery, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. He interprets this as the success of relentlessly moralistic advocacy and unyieldingness and no compromise with the perpetrators. But if you look at those cases, all three of those cases were instances where they were mass movements. They were not just a handful of unyielding principled human rights activists, but they were mass movements where many of the people were demanding these rights in their own self-interest. They were not only a mass movement, but they were all associated with a progressive political party that could win votes and make deals, and they were all backed by religious ideas and religious networks. And I think that this tripod of progressive political party mass social movement, plus the principled activists is something to think about in the future in constructing political coalitions that will give the political power behind the human rights movement that it has sometimes lacked. Thank you, Jack. Okay, let's take a few questions. I think there's a microphone. Question down here. Be very quick please, so we can get a few questions in. Thank you very much. My name is Hashim. I'm from the Iraqi Democratic Movement. It's a political group, but obviously giving the nature of a situation in Iraq or Iraq always come back to human rights. It was interesting to listen to the distinguished speakers from the human rights organizations talking about the changes that the movement is going through to become more effective. As I understand it, Jane talked about diversifying the staff and opening offices, et cetera. Both spoke about partners. My question is, wouldn't it be much better and more effective strategy if you focus on facilitating the work of those human rights activists in their countries because they are the front line? With all due respect, you are not. You are a big bronze. You can be seen in all the big meetings. You have access to decision makers. You can use that to help and support and facilitate the work of the local human rights activists because there is no question that that would give you more credibility, and that would help, and I think one of the speakers spoke about it, help the local activists to actually better their activities and their work and be more effective. Wouldn't that be a better strategy than actually following the model of, it may sound harsh, the church when they have a few brown and black faces, bishops to change the image. That's not going to change it. Thank you very much. I'm going to ask you to hold so we take a few questions and then I'll give everybody a chance to make a final comment. If you put your hands up while the question is being asked. Thank you for your talks. One thing which hasn't been mentioned is the rise of non-state actors wielding power, not just corporate entities but also regional movements. Many, many states are now under the control of no particular power. Many companies run states. How would that affect human rights in future? This is not just a matter of globalization and rising corporate power and neoliberalism, but essentially more and more power is moving away from politics and human rights has always been affected by a symbiotic relationship with the state. It relies on the state to enforce human rights. It critiques the state for not enforcing human rights. What will be the challenge of future with non-state actors? Great, thank you. There's a question right behind you, the gentleman in the pink or orange shirt. Question to Joanne or anyone else who can take you on diversification. How would this surface-level diversification help us bringing attention to the subjectivity of human rights? Human rights may be perceived to be a Eurocentric, leocannolio endeavour. Leslie pointed out that the language of human rights is weaponized by neoconservatives such as Donald Trump in the same way that Bush did so in Great Iraq. The diversification, Joanne, that you mentioned first of all in terms of intellectual skills, you said that there should be more architects, military, forensic experts to add to the lawyers. These are all objective fields. They can't point out for example what Professor Snyder pointed out. He's obviously a leader in political science and IR fields that deal with subjectivity. He saw the cultural diversification you mentioned to fight this white saviour complex. He found it to be useless because the Middle Easterners that he came across in Amman were subscribing to Western Eurocentric liberal thought. How are we going to bring attention to the whole subjectivity of the idea of human rights, especially considering the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948? There was no voice for Conservative Islam. There was no voice for Africa. There was no voice for the Far East. These are usually the regions that are most likely to be accused of abusing human rights. Thank you very much. Maybe we could stop at this point and go to the next one. Can I take one more question? There's just someone at the back there. I'm going to take one more question, then I'm going to let you come back. Thank you. Actually, this is a bit of a continuation of the previous question, but speaking along the lines of the subjectivity, just going to the core of the cultural relativism of what the human rights paradigm was conceived to be and what it is now and how it is weaponized, I obviously haven't looked at the book yet, but was there any discussion at all in terms of re-considering what human rights would mean in a plural or non-western way? Do you see that as a productive tool to maybe not be so pessimistic about the future of human rights? That's a great question. Thank you very much. Maybe I'll let Joanne and David go first, because they got the line. Joanne, okay? First, your point is well taken, but I want to reassure you that is the way we operate. We work extremely closely with local groups, always when we visit a country, if we're not already based in the country, the first people we meet with our local groups, we often bring representatives of local human rights groups to government meetings with us, to UN meetings with us. Often they get access because of working with us that they haven't gotten before. As you suggest, they are the ones that are putting their lives on the line much more than we are, but we absolutely recognize that and we also invite them on visits to often the US or Europe and bring them into the offices. I'm sure David, that's a big part of your work, bringing people into the foreign office, introducing them to influential media journalists and so forth. We agree with you and we are doing that. On non-state actors, again, are really important points. One, if you look at our website, and Human Rights Watch's website as well, you can see we have a growing body of work on corporate abuses and corporate complicity in abuses. You're right, the traditional focus of the human rights movement, and if you look at the UN treaties and so forth, is constraining the power of state actors, but more and more obviously the world is, you know, the abuses that we see in the world are very much done by and influenced by corporate actors and we are changing the focus of our work to take that into account. On human rights as perceived as being a neocolonial endeavor and the need, or what is the impact of diversification on that, I think people may have different formal skills, but their backgrounds as well, their subjective backgrounds influence their views of how human rights should be implemented and how human rights compliance can be affected. Pardon me, David, for another Human Rights Watch example, but I mean I was privy to a lot of discussions at Human Rights Watch about the need or, you know, instances in which we might be advocating for humanitarian intervention, and I saw a clear difference between people from the global south who are just in general much more skeptical about US power and the motivations behind US power, because let's be honest when we're talking about humanitarian intervention, we're talking about Western intervention in the global south. So those debates were often very heated and I would say the voices of those non-Western actors, those human rights activists from the global south was crucial in those debates. Thank you. David, very quickly please. Yeah, I don't have a lot to add. I think I agree with all three government's responses that Joanne gave. I mean it's also our operating model. If you don't think that's working in the case of Iraq, we should talk afterwards, but we've got, that's very much the approach that we adopted at Human Rights Watch, of working with human rights defenders, human rights activists, trying to give them the space to operate effectively in their own countries and obviously taking very much a lead from them in terms of how we should approach the government. In terms of the non-state actors, I think you had a term for it in the book. Was it limited sovereignty or was the qualified sovereignty? There was a specific term in one of the chapters about where the writ of the central government doesn't exist throughout the country. Yeah, yeah, yeah, limited state. Limited state. Limited state. On the services chapter, which is a very common phenomenon. We tend to have this assumption that there is a central government that has a barbarian state, which can exercise power throughout the whole country where the writ of the central government runs and often that doesn't happen. I'm not sure it's the case that the corporations are taking over the running of bits of a state. Certainly we have a strong corporate accountability programme at Human Rights Watch as well and there's a lot of stuff on that on our website which you should go to. But I think there's perhaps a slightly more challenging issue about where, say in Pakistan, the central government wants to make something happen in North West Frontier province but simply is incapable of making it happen. I think that poses very big challenges for the human rights movement where there are human rights abuses happening in those parts of the state and I don't really agree with really what everything Joanne said in response to the final question. Thank you, David. Okay, Leslie Monson. No, I'd just love to hear more from the audience but I didn't say that Donald Trump was a neoconservative. Okay, Jack. So, on the question of whether human rights are somehow just subjective, I don't think so. So, except for oil producing states and Singapore, no country has ever made it out of the middle income trap without adopting the full panoply of civil and political and rule of law rights. There's something of an objective social fact about human rights and how they function in modern societies that if you try to get around that, you'll pay a price. And so I see them as having objectivity. Okay. Thank you, Jack. Thank you all very much. I want to make two announcements. First of all, there's a reception outside and we're selling books. You know that. Secondly, there's an exhibition opening tonight which is entirely opposite to our discussion called Legacies of Biafra. It's in the Brunei Gallery where you came in. You just, rather than turn left, you go straight on. They've agreed to keep that exhibition open for half an hour extra. It's an extraordinary exhibition. So please, on your way out, pop in there. It's free. Just have a look at some of the photographs and some of the material there. Thank you very much to our panelists and thank you very much.