Volume 49, Number 10 · June 13, 2002
The Rights Stuff
By Michael Ignatieff
The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement
by Jeri Laber, with a preface by Václav Havel
Public Affairs, 405 pp., $27.50
Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention
by A.W. Brian Simpson
Oxford University Press, 1,161 pp., $85.00
In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All
by William F. Schulz, with a foreword by Mary Robinson
Beacon, 235 pp., $25.00; $15.00 (paper)
Human rights are under pressure these days. During the cold war, they went from being the insurgent creed of dissidents and activists to something like the ruling ideology of Western governments. Like all official ideologies, it was honored more in the breach than in the observance, but still, it had a palpable impact, legitimizing the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s: in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. Now, since September 11, the creed is in trouble. The empire is at war and the imperatives of war seem to trump the imperatives of rights. Why bother with human rights in Uzbekistan as long as the government there provides bases for the war on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?[1] Who cares about Sudan's bloody repression of the Christian south, as long as the government shares its intelligence files on Osama bin Laden? Why criticize Russia's war against Chechnya when Chechen jihadis are fighting America in the mountains of Afghanistan?
Review, 4097 words
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