The AU Museum and Washington College of Law hosted a panel discussion of human rights in the 21st century. Many older members of the community showed up to see human rights experts Herman Schwartz, Juan Méndez, Susanna Su Cuoto and Cole Sternberg in their discussion.
Claudio Grossman, dean of the AU Washington College of Law and chair of the United Nations Committee Against Torture in 2008, moderated the event. Each panelist gave a short speech.
Sternberg, an artist who attended the law school, spoke about his art exhibited in the Katzen Art Center Museum before giving a brief summary of the other speaker’s topics.
“The way I came about this show was I painted the first painting out there which has the first 111 Articles of the First Geneva Conventions,” Sternberg said. The Geneva Conventions outlined the international standards for human treatment of war victims. “I sat on the floor for about 300 hours writing it perfectly. My law degree, I think, forced me to make sure all the language was correct. It just amazed me how arbitrary some of the language was, and then I talked to Claudio about it, and I said I want to do this show about human rights initially around the Geneva Conventions.”
As Sternberg went deeper into his project, his focus shifted from the Geneva Conventions to current human rights violations.
“When I started to really research, I kept getting more angry about current events going on and I just didn’t understand why certain governments or certain organizations acted one way or another,” he said.
Schwartz, who founded the U.S./Israel Civil Liberties Law Program, has worked with the U.N., among other important organizations, and teaches at the law school, spoke next. He focused on the positive aspects of human rights in the past 50 to 60 years.
The European world became interested in human rights after World War II, in large part because of the Holocaust, he said.
“After the war, to some extent because of that experience - but also because of American influence, the American example - countries began to think in terms of constitutional protections and protections by judges,” Schwartz said.
Many countries developed legal documents similar to a constitution in the following years. With these documents came courts, the U.N. and other international organizations as well as treaties aimed, at least in part, at protecting human rights.
“Many of the national courts — Germany, South Africa, Hungary, Poland, Israel and in even some respect the Russian courts — they developed protections not only for the conventional civil and political rights like speech, but also for economic and social rights, which [the U.S. courts] won’t touch,” Scwartz said.
While human rights violations continue to occur all over the world, progress has certainly been made, according to Schwartz.
“But for those of us who have been witness to these developments, I think it’s fair to say that we’re far beyond what most of us expected,” Schwartz said.
Méndez, whose legal career involved defending human rights primarily in Latin America, spoke about challenges in his own experience that the human rights movement faces. One of the largest challenges is the prevention of these violations altogether, he said. Méndez explained that a good methodology exists to respond to human rights violations, but society has yet to develop adequate prevention methods.
“Certainly, it would have saved a lot of human suffering. And it would be more cost effective, quite frankly, if we could have prevented [them],” Méndez said. “There are many reasons why prevention is harder than reaction. After Rwanda, and after Tanzania, and after Darfur prevention of human rights violations, particularly of genocide and mass atrocities, has become more urgent than ever.”
Méndez said he thinks one of the best ways to prevent these violations is to have clear consequences to such action.
“If we can make it clear that for every human rights violation there will be some state responsibility to react and to put in motion the mechanisms of justice, it will be much less likely that a future violation will be repeated because there will be a price to pay,” Méndez said. “We have to make sure that the remedies are not a poor substitute for justice.”
Prevention of human rights violations, Méndez said, is a long-term goal that the international community needs to start planning for.
“If we do have appropriate remedies, they still need to be consistent and reliable, and that’s why we need to invest a lot in rule of law and institutions,” Méndez said. “That’s a very far-reaching agenda for the future that will not be accomplished in the very near future.
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