Democracy and Human Rights
Address by Carl Gershman, President of the NED

At the symposium of the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa on
Human Rights Today: 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Estoril, Portugal
June 28, 2008

At the opening session of this conference, Prof. Joao Rosas made a distinction between human rights, meaning pre-political or moral rights, and political or citizen rights, meaning democracy. I won’t elaborate further on what I said then about these rights, except to say that from its very beginning 25 years ago, NED has acted on the assumption that there is a very close and mutually reinforcing relationship between these two kinds of rights. In our founding Statement of Principles and Objectives, we said that one of our goals would be to aid organizations “whose aim is the protection of human rights, the promotion of religious tolerance, or the defence of victims of persecution.” We then said: “While democracy and human rights are not identical objectives, they reinforce each other: human rights groups protect democracy activists and expand the political space available to them; and democracy is the best guarantee for the respect of human rights.”

The organic link between human rights and democracy can also be found in the Universal Declaration, where the fundamental freedoms of thought, conscience, religion, expression, assembly and association that are contained in Articles 18-20 are followed immediately and logically, in Article 21, by the core principle of democracy – that “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives,” and that “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

But the compatibility of democracy and human rights has not always been so self-evident. It’s not a secret that the birth of the NED a quarter of a century ago was not welcomed by the main human rights organizations in the United States. The reasons had a lot to do with the politics of the time –mostly domestic politics. The human rights groups, which had their origin in the Carter Administration, saw the NED as part of the Reagan Administration’s Cold War agenda. In their view, human rights were rooted in universal norms, whereas democracy was both a Western idea and an ideological weapon in the battle against communism.

In taking this “above politics” stance, the human rights groups conveniently overlooked the fact that the Carter Administration itself saw its human rights policy as a weapon in the global ideological contest of the Cold War. In his memoir Power and Principle, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, said that its purpose was to “increase America’s ideological impact on the world,” and that “by emphasizing human rights” we would be able “to infuse greater historical optimism into our outlook on the world,” making ourselves again “the carrier of human hope, the wave of the future,” thereby overcoming “the spreading pessimism” that he associated with the policies of Nixon and Kissinger.

The human rights groups, in turn, were not trusted by many anti-communists associated with or supporting the Reagan Administration. They suspected that the human rights community was far more interested in targeting so-called friendly tyrants like the Shah in Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua than communist dictatorships. The passions generated by these divisions were further inflamed by the conflict in Central America, which polarized U.S. politics throughout most of the 1980s.

Activists outside the United States had difficulty understanding these disputes. I remember the reaction of the Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim when I told him about these divisions nearly two decades ago. He found them incomprehensible and was simply flabbergasted.

To be fair to the human-rights liberals who were sceptical about democracy promotion, their concerns did have some substantive foundation. It was legitimate, for example, to worry that elected governments in post-dictatorial countries might engage in serious human rights violations and would do so with relative impunity because they were elected. But democracy advocates also worried about “illiberal democracy,” especially as many of the third wave transitions stalled or unravelled. And as we know, democracy promotion has focused at least as much on strengthening the core restraints on executive power – an independent judiciary, a strong parliament, free communications media, and a vigorous civil society – as it has on supporting free and fair elections.

It was also legitimate to worry that transitional governments might overlook past human rights violations so as not to provoke a backlash by the old guard that would undermine the transition. Yet democrats in post-authoritarian countries like Chile and South Africa, and also in some post-communist countries, have tried to strike a balance between the requirements of justice and transition through the aptly named “truth and reconciliation process,” and this has been an important area of cooperation between human rights advocates and democratic transitional governments.

All of this has a touch of ancient history about it since a de facto truce was reached between the human rights and democracy communities with the advent of the liberal Clinton Administration which not only embraced but dramatically expanded democracy promotion as a dimension of U.S. foreign assistance. The expansion of the Soros-funded Open Society Institutes in many post-communist countries, as well as in Africa and Burma, and the appointment of the former director of Human Rights Watch to oversee the OSI, also demonstrated the new liberal embrace of the democracy-promotion agenda.

The subsequent further expansion of the democracy agenda under President Bush as par t of the post-9/11 war on terrorism has re-introduced many of the old tensions. Some human rights groups have charged, for example, that the Administration has violated human rights norms in Iraq, Guantanamo, and in other aspects of its anti-terror policy, and by so doing has weakened its moral authority to conduct a global democracy campaign. But such criticisms have also come from within the democracy community – the writing of Tom Carothers is a case in point – and they don’t reflect a new split between the human rights and democracy communities, just a legitimate disagreement over how the United States should deal with the new challenges in the age of global jihad.

More important is the underlying tension between a human rights community that sees international law and global institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court as the best guarantors of human rights; and advocates democracy for whom human rights can only be realized and protected through the institutions of the nation state, which are not about to be swept away by globalization and the strengthening of which should be the foundation of any meaningful human rights agenda. But this is a fairly abstract disagreement, and it carries with it, at least until now, nothing of the political edge that characterized the earlier disputes between the human rights and democracy camps.

What is not abstract, though, are the severe human rights abuses taking place in scores of authoritarian and often conflict-ridden countries that are deeply resistant to democracy: from Belarus, Russia, and the “stans” of Central Asia; to Zimbabwe, the Congo, Somalia and Sudan; to Venezuela and Cuba; to Burma, North Korea, and China; and throughout the Broader Middle East, including tough dictatorships like Syria and Libya and semi-authoritarian countries like Egypt and Tunisia. Regrettably, the democracy-promotion community has for the most part failed to provide help to activists in such countries who are on the front-lines of the fight to defend human rights and create democratic openings.

There are many reasons for this failure, not the least of which is that democracy practitioners have difficulty engaging in countries where they have little or no access – and closed or conflicted societies, as well as semi-authoritarian countries ruled by unfriendly autocrats, are almost by definition off limits to on-the-ground democracy practitioners.

But this is not the whole of the problem. Since the end of the Cold War, the democracy promotion community has expanded exponentially, and it has become highly technical, top-down, bureaucratic and governmental. This is certainly the case for programs funded by the European Commission and the U.N., as well as by many governments. Such programs are primarily designed to improve governance in emerging democracies or to help states rebuild after conflict, two important dimensions of democracy promotion. But the challenges are very different in what we might call pre-democratic autocracies – places that can only be accessed by supporting exile groups as a channel to internal dissidents, or through the Internet, or by finding creative ways to aid and defend indigenous actors who are or may seem marginal and powerless.

If the democracy community cannot find ways of engaging with democrats and human rights defenders in such situations, it will either be reduced to working in the very restricted spaces offered by the various governments in these places, or it will be totally disengaged and irrelevant. But it is possible to do more, and the place to begin, I believe, is to elevate political and financial support for indigenous human rights and democracy activists in the most difficult countries on the agenda of democracy support in the world. This will involve some tough decisions, such as being prepared to aid independent activists in powerful autocratic countries such as Russia and China, as well as developing the largely non-governmental institutional mechanisms that can deliver such support. Taking such steps would not only aid and give hope to courageous activists working in hostile, remote and dictatorial environments. It would also link the democracy support effort of the established democracies more closely to the global movement for human rights, thereby reviving its political dynamism and, even more important, strengthening its ability to influence the future of democracy throughout the world.

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