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Biden’s Challenge: Redeeming a US Role for Human Rights
A young boy raises his fist during a demonstration in Atlanta, Georgia, May 31, 2020.
© 2020 Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Keynote
Essays
Addressing the Climate Crisis in Times of PandemicAs More Climate Chaos Looms, Slashing Fossil Fuels Is Key
Kenneth Roth
Executive DirectorAfter four years of a president who was indifferent and often hostile to human rights, the November 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency of the United States provides an opportunity for a fundamental change of course.
Donald Trump was a disaster for human rights. At home, he flouted legal obligations that allow people fearing for their lives to seek refuge, ripped migrant children from their parents, empowered white supremacists, acted to undermine the democratic process, and fomented hatred against racial and religious minorities. He also closed his eyes to systemic racism in policing, removed legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, revoked environmental protections for clean air and water, and sought to undermine the right to health, especially for sexual and reproductive health and older people. Abroad, he cozied up to one friendly autocrat after another at the expense of their abused populations, promoted the sale of weapons to governments implicated in war crimes, and attacked or withdrew from key international initiatives to defend human rights, promote international justice, advance public health, and forestall climate change.
This destructive combination eroded the credibility of the US government even when it did speak out against abuses. Condemnations of Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran rang hollow when parallel praise was bestowed on Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. Support for religious freedom abroad was undermined by Islamophobic policy at home. The Trump administration did impose targeted sanctions and other punishments on the Chinese government and corporate entities for their involvement in human rights violations, but its own weak record on human rights, its evident mixed motives in criticizing Beijing, and Trump’s scapegoating of China for his own pandemic failings left these interventions anything but principled, making working with allies difficult.
Yet it would be naive to treat a Biden presidency as a panacea. In recent decades, the arrival of each new White House resident has brought wild oscillations in US human rights policy. George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” with its systematic torture and Guantanamo detentions without charge, was an earlier nadir. Barack Obama rejected important parts of it, although he maintained and even expanded such elements as unlawful drone attacks, intrusive surveillance, and arms sales to unsavory autocrats. Policy reversals, both at home and abroad, have become regular features in Washington.
Global leaders seeking to uphold human rights understandably ask whether they can rely on the US government. Even if Biden substantially improves the US record, the deep political divisions in the United States mean there is little to prevent the election of another US president with Trump’s disdain for human rights in four or eight years.
Yet that reality should be cause for resolve rather than despair. As the Trump administration largely abandoned the protection of human rights abroad, other governments stepped forward. Rather than surrender, they reinforced the ramparts. So even as powerful actors such as China, Russia, and Egypt sought to undermine the global human rights system, a series of broad coalitions came to its defense. Those coalitions included not only a range of Western countries but also a group of Latin American democracies and a growing number of Muslim-majority states.
As Biden assumes office, the US government should seek to join, not supplant, these collective efforts. US leadership can still be significant, but it should not substitute for or compromise the initiative shown by many others. The past four years have demonstrated that Washington is an important but not indispensable member of this broader team defending rights. Biden’s aim in his foreign policy should be to lead not from in front or behind but together with this larger group of rights promoters.
For the benefit of people in the United States, and to be most effective in advancing human rights around the world, Biden should also set a positive example by strengthening the US government’s commitment to human rights at home. As with US foreign policy, that commitment has swung wildly from administration to administration. This fluctuation has been most pronounced on reproductive freedom, the rights of LGBT people, the rights of asylum seekers and immigrants, voting rights, racial and economic inequities, the right to health, and the rights implicated by climate change. The challenge for Biden will be not simply to reverse the damage to human rights done by his predecessor, but also to make it more difficult for future presidents to retreat yet again.
One step would be to reinforce a commitment to human rights by legislation, which the narrow Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress may make possible. Ideally, Biden could press for ratification of core human rights treaties that the US government has long neglected, but finding the necessary two-thirds support in the Senate will be difficult. Biden should certainly allow justice to pursue its course with respect to Trump to show that the president is not above the law, resisting the "look forward, not back” rationale that Obama used to ignore torture under Bush. Like some of his predecessors, Biden can make short-term improvements by executive action, but as in the past, that is vulnerable to being undone by a future US president with less regard for human rights.
Ultimately, the goal for Biden should be to change the narrative on human rights in a more fundamental way – on both US domestic and foreign policy. A simple return to the ways of Obama – a so-called third Obama term – will not be enough. The large protests for racial justice across the United States in 2020, and the hardships imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, could provide a boost for such a reframing.
For inspiration, Biden could look to Jimmy Carter, who first introduced human rights as an element of US foreign policy. At the time, that was seen as a radical move, but it has endured through the decades. Every US president since Carter has sometimes downplayed human rights in favor of other priorities – indeed, Carter did as well – but none could entirely repudiate them.
Biden’s task is to find a way, through policy and practice, to make upholding human rights more central to US government conduct in a way that has a better chance of surviving the radical changes in policy that have become a fixture of the US political landscape. That will require reshaping the public’s understanding by speaking about issues at home more regularly in terms of rights while announcing human rights principles to guide US conduct abroad, and then adhering to them even when it is difficult.
A More Global Defense of Rights
Although the US government has never been a consistent global backer of human rights, it can be a powerful supporter. That the Trump administration overwhelmingly abandoned the promotion of human rights was disappointing but turned out also to be galvanizing. Fortunately, many global leaders recognized that the defense of human rights was too important to forsake just because Trump had done so. A series of governments, some new to the cause, typically acting in coalition, repeatedly mounted a strong and often effective defense of rights. The number of nations involved made the defense more robust, because it was more global and less dependent on Washington.
Latin America illustrates this trend. Traditionally, governments there rarely critiqued each other’s human rights record, in part because that was seen as something Washington did. But to address the cycle of repression, corruption, and economic devastation under Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, 11 Latin American democracies plus Canada came together in 2017 as the Lima Group. The move was unprecedented. Maduro would probably have liked nothing better than to have Trump as the principal critic of his misrule, enabling the Venezuelan government to pass off criticism as “Yankee imperialism,” but the Lima Group acted independently of the United States. It made clear that its concerns involved principle, not politics.
The Lima Group ramped up pressure on Maduro. It persuaded the UN Human Rights Council to launch a formal investigation of his repression. Six Lima Group members asked the International Criminal Court prosecutor to investigate Venezuela’s alleged crimes against humanity – the first such request from a country’s neighbors. Maduro is still continuing his repressive rule, but he is far more isolated than he would have been had the US government continued its traditional, largely unilateral leadership on human rights in Venezuela. Some Lima Group members have now extended their focus to Nicaragua as well, persuading the UN Human Rights Council to authorize the UN high commissioner for human rights to report on repression under President Daniel Ortega.
Another striking example of this broader defense of human rights involved the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 56 mainly Muslim-majority states. In the past, the OIC rarely used the United Nations to condemn human rights abuses other than those committed by Israel, but that began to change following the Myanmar military’s 2017 campaign of murder, rape, and arson against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, which sent 730,000 Rohingya fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh.
In 2018, the OIC joined with the European Union to lead an initiative at the Human Rights Council to create the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, to collect evidence for possible prosecution. In 2019, Gambia, an OIC member, brought a case before the International Court of Justice alleging violations of the Genocide Convention by Myanmar against the Rohingya – the first of its kind by a third-party state. As a provisional measure, the court ordered Myanmar to protect from genocide the 600,000 Rohingya who remain in Rakhine State. In addition, the International Criminal Court is investigating Myanmar officials for atrocities against the Rohingya during their forced deportation to Bangladesh.
Some of the global defense of human rights took place largely outside international institutions. The move that may have saved the most lives involved Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, where three million civilians, half of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria, had been living under repeated aerial bombardment by Russian and Syrian aircraft. Often these attacks targeted hospitals, schools, markets, and residential areas. The German, French, and Turkish governments (the latter despite worsening repression at home under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan) put sufficient pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to secure a ceasefire ending these attacks beginning in March 2020 and largely continuing throughout the year.
With the Russian and Chinese governments having vetoed an effort at the UN Security Council to refer atrocities in Syria to the International Criminal Court, other governments have begun to fill the breach. Circumventing the Security Council, Liechtenstein and Qatar in December 2016 led a successful effort at the UN General Assembly to establish the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria to collect evidence of war crimes and other atrocities for prosecution – the first such mechanism ever created. Several European governments – foremost Germany – have begun investigations and prosecutions in their own national courts, based on the legal principle of universal jurisdiction. The Netherlands has started a process to address systematic torture by the Syrian government, which could lead to a case before the International Court of Justice.
European governments have taken the lead on other important initiatives as well. As the increasingly authoritarian governments in Hungary and Poland undermined the checks and balances on executive power that are essential to democracy, the European Union pressed to condition its generous subsidies to those governments on their respect for the rule of law, although an end-of-year compromise ended up making this tool less powerful than many had hoped. When Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukashenka made the highly controversial claim that he had won the August 2020 elections, and forces under his command proceeded to detain and torture protesters, the EU imposed targeted sanctions on 88 individuals whom it deemed responsible for the repression, including Lukashenka. Following the earlier US example, the EU also adopted a new regime of targeted sanctions involving travel bans and asset freezes for individuals and entities responsible for serious human rights abuses worldwide. The United Kingdom and Canada have set up similar regimes, and Australia seems poised to adopt one soon.
At the UN Human Rights Council, a core group consisting of the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, and Luxembourg secured and then strengthened an inquiry into war crimes in Yemen. Finland led a similar initiative for war crimes in Libya, as Iceland initially did for the thousands of summary executions of drug suspects instigated by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands took the lead in securing an investigation of repression in Eritrea. Australia and then Denmark orchestrated condemnatory statements about Saudi repression.
When Trump reinstated and then dramatically expanded the “global gag rule” – a policy that prohibits foreign organizations receiving US assistance from advocating or providing information, referrals, or services for legal abortion in their own countries – the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden launched a global initiative in defense of sexual and reproductive health and rights, called SheDecides. African governments, led by South Africa, demanded an inquiry into systemic racism and police violence around the world, building a cross-regional coalition to stand up to the US government following the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Germany led joint statements to repudiate Trump’s efforts to undermine the independence of the Hague-based International Criminal Court. Belgium secured a similar statement from many UN Security Council members. And a broad collection of governments – notably India and South Africa – pressed for greater access to vaccines and treatment for Covid-19.
This more global defense of human rights did not always prevail. Abusive governments remain a potent threat. But the greater breadth of the defense intensified the pressure on leaders who would flout the rights of their people. That mounting pressure is an important bulwark against today’s autocratic tendencies.
A renewed outpouring of popular support for human rights bolstered this governmental defense. In country after country, often at great risk, people took to the streets in large numbers to press abusive and corrupt governments to be more democratic and accountable. The causes varied, but the aspirations had remarkable commonality. In Egypt, protests were sparked by social-media posts from a former military contractor detailing outrageous corruption. In Thailand, student-led protests arose because a military-backed government resisted calls for democratic reform. In Belarus, demonstrations, often led by women, were in response to the widespread belief that President Lukashenka had stolen an election – and to his security forces’ brutal crackdown on protesters. In Poland, protests challenged the virtual elimination of access to abortion imposed by a constitutional court whose membership had been manipulated by the ruling Law and Justice Party.
Throughout the United States, people took to the streets to demand an end to police brutality and systemic racism. In Russia, protesters objected to constitutional reforms that weakened human rights and allowed Putin to extend his term in office; protracted protests also erupted in Russia’s far east in response to the Kremlin’s removal of a popular governor. In Hong Kong, the trigger for protests was Beijing’s threat to permit extradition to mainland China without legislative or public oversight – protests that proved intolerable to President Xi Jinping because they demonstrated that when people on Chinese territory are free to express themselves, they reject the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. The global defense of human rights was greatly strengthened when these popular movements joined an expanding array of governmental actors.
China’s Worsening Repression
The most powerful target of this increasingly global defense of human rights was China. Repression in China has deepened severely in recent years under Xi Jinping, with the detention of more than one million Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang to pressure them to abandon Islam and their culture, the crushing of Hong Kong’s freedoms, ongoing repression in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, and the crackdown on independent voices throughout the country. This has been the darkest period for human rights in China since the 1989 massacre that ended the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.
Yet governments have long been reluctant to criticize Beijing for fear of retaliation. Australia suffered economic reprisal in 2020 when the Chinese government imposed punitive tariffs on various Australian goods, because Canberra supported an independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beijing most likely feared that the probe would spotlight its early, three-week denial of human-to-human transmission in late December 2019 and January 2020 as millions of people fled or traveled through Wuhan – an average of 3,500 a day traveling abroad – and the virus went global. The Wuhan lockdown began only on January 23.
In 2016, the US government had organized the first common statement of governments willing to criticize China on human rights, but only 11 other states joined it. When the Trump administration withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council in 2018, many assumed that criticism of the Chinese government’s repression would end. In fact, it strengthened. Over the past two years, governments have grown more confident to criticize Beijing’s repression by finding safety in numbers, reflecting Beijing’s inability to retaliate against the entire world.
The first step took place at the Human Rights Council in 2019, when 25 governments banded together to condemn the extraordinary repression in Xinjiang. Yet fear of Beijing was still on display when, despite a tradition that joint statements are read out loud at the council, none of the 25 would do so.
Since then, the British government has taken responsibility for reading similar condemnations at the council and at the UN General Assembly. Most recently, in October 2020, the German government took the lead in organizing at the General Assembly a condemnation of repression in Xinjiang that attracted 39 countries. Turkey issued a similar parallel statement.
After each statement criticizing its repression, Beijing organized a counterstatement of other countries willing to praise its conduct. The pro-China statement was typically signed by many of the world’s worst human rights abusers, and its numbers were large, given the economic leverage used to secure support. However, the most recent statement, delivered by Cuba in October 2020 to applaud the Chinese government’s conduct in Xinjiang, attracted only 45 signatories – a drop from 54 the year before. That shift, approaching parity with the condemnatory statement, suggests the day may soon arrive when UN bodies can begin to adopt formal resolutions criticizing at least some aspects of Beijing’s repression.
For much of the past two years, the OIC and Muslim-majority governments have tended to support China. In October, however, that, too, began to change. The number of OIC states supporting China’s repression in Xinjiang dropped from 25 in 2019 to 19 in 2020, with the remaining 37 OIC members refusing to join. Albania and Turkey went further and added their voices to the joint condemnation of China’s abuses in Xinjiang. These numbers suggest that the tables may be turning, as more Muslim-majority countries are rightfully outraged by the Chinese government’s horrendous treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang.
The Chinese government in October also sought a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. The last time it ran, four years ago, it received the most votes of any country running from the Asia-Pacific region. This time, it received the fewest votes of any such government that secured a seat. Only Saudi Arabia received fewer votes and, in a positive result, was denied a seat.
This growing international willingness to condemn the Chinese government forced it to respond. For the first time, Beijing gave a number for the Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims directly affected by its conduct in Xinjiang – 1.3 million – although it claimed they were in not detention but “vocational training centers.” It also claimed that many had “graduated,” although this allusion to release must be tempered by the inability to verify independently the number remaining in detention and by the growing evidence that many who were released from custody were coerced into forced labor. Growing global efforts to ensure that supply chains in Xinjiang and other regions of China are not tainted by this forced labor could create a new source of pressure on Beijing to stop its persecution of Muslims.
All of these initiatives are noteworthy for how peripheral the US government has been. Often the Trump administration had nothing to do with the effort. When it did speak out – such as on China – the selectivity of its concern, as Trump embraced a multitude of friendly autocrats, meant the US voice lacked much credibility.
The lesson of recent years for other governments is that they can make a big difference even without Washington. Even under a more rights-friendly US administration, this broader collective defense of rights should be maintained. Even if Biden manages to overcome the swings and double standards that often plague US policy, the defense of human rights will be stronger if a wide range of governments continues to lead.
Lessons for Biden
Biden cannot guarantee that a new US administration in four or eight years will not again turn back the clock on human rights, but he can take steps to make that retrenchment more difficult. Those steps would make the US government a more reliable member of the global human rights system.
Obviously, the more a rights-respecting policy is enshrined in legislation, the harder it is to reverse, which a Democratic majority in the US Congress may make possible . Without two-thirds of the Senate, the prospect remains remote of the United States joining most of the rest of the world in ratifying the major human rights treaties that it has long neglected. For the most part, Biden will have to resort to executive orders and presidential policy to undo the damage of the Trump years. Such steps by Biden would in principle be reversible, but they can be done in a way that makes it harder for the next president to make a 180-degree turn.
To provide greater staying power to a renewed commitment to human rights, Biden needs to reframe how these rights are understood in the United States. As noted, Jimmy Carter accomplished such a reframing when he introduced human rights as an element of US foreign policy. Many of Carter’s successors did not share his commitment to human rights, but none formally rejected it. It had struck a chord with the US public and met a global popular demand. So, for example, although Ronald Reagan broke with Carter’s commitment in Central America and elsewhere, he still ended up institutionalizing the State Department’s reporting on human rights and played an important role in pushing for democratic change in Chile and the Soviet bloc. Biden should aspire to a similar reconceptualization as Carter achieved.
The moment is ripe because the pandemic has laid bare gross disparities in access to health care, food, and other basic necessities, while the Black Lives Matter movement has spotlighted deep-seated racial injustice. Many people in the United States remain hostile to governmental efforts to remedy these human rights violations, which is part of why no administration has taken them on, but the extraordinary events of 2020 could provide a spur for action by having exposed the common interest in respect for everyone’s rights. The challenge for Biden is to seize that opportunity and use it to entrench respect for human rights as a central element of US policy at home and abroad.
One way would be by more regularly framing social issues in terms of rights. Traditionally, the US government has been more focused on civil and political rights than on economic, social, and cultural rights. It has ratified the leading treaty on the former, which codifies rights such as freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right not to be tortured, but never the companion treaty on the latter, which addresses such rights as those concerning health, housing, and food. Yet the pandemic has shown how linked these concepts are – for example, how censorship about a government’s response to the pandemic undermines people’s ability to demand that resources be devoted to their health rather than the government’s political interests. Indeed, both sets of rights often can be found in US law. Biden could begin to speak about human rights in the broader terms in which most people understand them.
With the pandemic still raging, an obvious place to begin would be with Biden’s stated plan to bolster access to health care in the United States, which he should describe as a right. He should make clear that the issue is not simply reinforcing or expanding the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) but upholding everyone’s right to see a doctor without bankrupting their family. Similarly, as he pushes for federal aid to workers left unemployed by the lockdown, he should make clear that everyone is entitled to an adequate standard of living – that the richest government in the world is supposed to help people put food on the table even if they have lost their jobs in tough times. As he addresses the closing of schools, he should speak about the right to education – that a family’s ability to educate its children should not depend on whether it can afford a strong internet connection and a laptop. The more that people in the United States recognize that human rights reflect fundamental values, the less they will allow each passing president to treat rights as mere policy preferences.
Facing his own extraordinary challenges, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal and made the case for a “freedom from want” in his famous “Four Freedoms” speech. Biden should seize on this pivotal moment to enlarge upon that vision and make it a more permanent reality in the United States.
Even within the realm of civil and political rights, more regular reference to rights could help to reduce the major shifts in policy that have accompanied most changes of administration. For example, Biden has expressed a desire to curtail the risk of deportation and provide a path to legalization for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Because some two-thirds have been in the United States for a decade or more, many with US-citizen children and spouses, Biden could speak of their right to live with their family without the constant fear of deportation.
On the issues of racial discrimination in education, housing, health, or the criminal justice system, or the right to choose whether, when, or how to form a family, Biden could note not only that these rights are upheld by US law but also that they are seen as fundamental in most countries around the world. And he should certainly repudiate the Commission on Unalienable Rights, the brainchild of Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, which was a thinly disguised effort to pick and choose among rights instead of recognizing them as a set of binding obligations. That ploy was music to the ears of the world’s autocrats.
More regular invocation of rights will not alone be enough but it could help to shift the public conversation about the fundamental values involved. That might make it harder for the next president to do an about-face.
Adopting a Principled Foreign Policy
A similar shift would help to instill more consistency in US foreign policy. Biden should affirm that the promotion of human rights around the world is a core principle of US policy – and then abide by it. But to make such a statement meaningful, Biden would need to apply it even when it is politically difficult.
For example, Biden has indicated a determination to rejoin global efforts to fight climate change. He should do so by fulfilling his campaign pledge to drastically reduce US greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging other governments to do the same. He also said he would reverse Trump’s planned departure from the World Health Organization. He should go further and work to increase global access to health care.
He should re-embrace the UN Human Rights Council and fully participate in it even though it regularly criticizes Israel’s oppressive and discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), and even when it scrutinizes human rights in the United States. He should resume US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and the UN Population Fund, which keep countless people, especially women and girls, healthy and alive. And he should void Trump’s appalling sanctions on the International Criminal Court’s work – an affront to the rule of law – regardless of the prosecutor’s steps to investigate unprosecuted crimes that are sensitive to the US government, such as US torture in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) and Israeli war crimes in the OPT.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s term concludes at the end of 2021, with a new election due before then. The Biden administration should condition support for any candidate – whether Guterres seeking a second term or anyone else – on a pledge not to repeat Guterres’s lackluster performance on human rights over the past four years. That should include using the UN’s powerful bully pulpit to call out repressive governments by name – something that Guterres has been loath to do – and fully implementing his February 2020 “Call to Action on Human Rights,” which has yet to move from “call” to “action.”
Biden should similarly announce and live by human rights principles as a major determinant of US relations with abusive countries. Biden can be expected to maintain less cozy relations than Trump with certain friendly autocrats such as Putin. But he should also insist that, absent improvement in their conduct, the US government will curb its military aid or (often subsidized) arms sales to highly abusive friendly governments such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. He should reject the fiction that mere “engagement” without serious pressure modifies rather than bolsters their repression. He should press for continued UN reporting on Sri Lanka and concrete steps toward accountability, now that many of the officials who were responsible for past war crimes have returned to power. He should be more outspoken about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s encouragement of discrimination and violence against Muslims, even if India is seen as an important ally against China.
To bolster the global defense of human rights, Biden plans to host a “Summit for Democracy.” He should not repeat the mistake of Bill Clinton who invited allied authoritarian governments to his Community of Democracies in the hope that they might become democratic. That devalues the currency of the invitation. A standing meeting of democracies can provide an incentive to respect democratic standards only if adherence to those standards is the price of admission.
Biden’s biggest foreign-policy challenge may be China, given Beijing’s severe repression at home and its determination to undermine the global human rights system out of fear that the system will target its repression. Trump, after initially embracing Xi Jinping – going so far as to praise the possibility that he might serve as president for life and reportedly to endorse the mass detention of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims – ultimately soured on Xi, particularly as Trump needed a “China virus” scapegoat for his administration’s failure to contain the pandemic in the United States. Although parts of the US government did address Beijing’s repression – the administration imposed targeted sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for the mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang and the crushing of freedoms in Hong Kong – Trump took a more transactional approach, as if enough Chinese purchases of soybeans from his supporters in Iowa would alleviate any problems. The sense that Trump was using human rights to pursue other agendas, coupled with his “America First” unilateralism, discouraged other governments from joining his efforts.
To be effective, Biden will need to pursue a more principled, consistent, and multilateral approach. After years of global ridicule brought on by the Trump administration, significant portions of the US electorate would take pride in Washington speaking with a clear voice on human rights – and demonstrating on the world stage its difference from competing powers such as China, Russia, or India.
Biden should embrace broad coalitions of governments to condemn Beijing’s repression – even if the locale of their statement is the UN Human Rights Council, where the Trump administration refused to join statements on China because of the council’s criticism of Israel. US diplomacy could help to expand those coalitions to include governments that have not yet spoken out, especially in the Global South, and reassure economically vulnerable countries that the US government will help them if they face retaliation from Beijing. Having spoken in strong terms about Chinese repression in Xinjiang, Biden should also press for an independent international investigation, as well as accountability for those responsible.
Biden could endorse a strong version of legislation being considered by the US Congress to force companies sourcing from Xinjiang – and China more broadly – to ensure that their supply chains are not tainted by the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims. And he should encourage other governments to do the same. He should impose targeted sanctions on companies that assist the Chinese government with its highly intrusive surveillance state – and encourage similar action by others. He should set a model for combatting Chinese Communist Party influence in the United States without resorting to bigotry against all Chinese people. And, again, he should adopt a more principled approach to human rights at home and abroad, so others cannot dismiss talk of Chinese repression as a tool of superpower competition but see it as reflecting genuine concern for the human rights of one-sixth of humanity that is matched by parallel attention to people wherever they face persecution.
Conclusion
It will not be enough for Biden to respond to Trump by simply turning the clock back four years, as if an abandonment of Trump’s policies can reverse the devastation he caused. The world has changed, and so must the promotion of human rights. Many rights-respecting nations have responded to the void created by Trump’s indifference and hostility to human rights by stepping forward and playing a more active leadership role. The Biden administration should join that enhanced defense of rights, not seek to replace it.
Meanwhile, Biden needs to recognize that Trump has magnified the traditional shifts in policy between US administrations into a crisis of credibility for Washington and a profound risk to the rights of people in the United States and around the world. Biden should seek to reframe the US public’s appreciation of human rights so the US commitment becomes entrenched in a way that is not so easily reversed by his successors. The sustained role of the US government as a useful partner in defending human rights worldwide depends on Biden’s success.
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United States
Events of 2020
Demonstrators kneel outside the Long Beach Police Department in Long Beach, California during a protest on May 31, 2020.
© 2020 AP Photo/Ashley Landis, File
Keynote
Essays
Addressing the Climate Crisis in Times of PandemicAs More Climate Chaos Looms, Slashing Fossil Fuels Is Key
Important human rights failings of the United States were laid bare in 2020.
The grossly disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on Black, brown, and Native people, connected to longstanding disparities in health, education, and economic status, revealed the enduring effects of past overtly racist laws and policies and continuing impediments to equality. The police killing of George Floyd in May, and a series of other police killings of Black people, sparked massive and largely peaceful protests, which in many instances were met with brutality by local and federal law enforcement agents.
The administration of President Donald Trump continued to dismantle the United States asylum system, limit access to women’s health care, undermine consumer protections against predatory lenders and abusive debt collectors, and weaken regulations that reduce pollution and address climate change. After election officials across the US tallied the votes for the presidential election, determining that Joe Biden was the president-elect, Trump made baseless allegations of voter fraud.
In its foreign policy, the United States worked on several fronts to undermine multilateral institutions, including through the use of sanctions to attack the International Criminal Court. It flouted international human rights law as it partnered with abusive governments—though it did sanction a number of individuals and governments for committing human rights abuses.
Racial Justice
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on racial and ethnic minorities, primarily Black, Latinx, and Native communities, which faced increased risk for infection, serious illness, and death from the disease, as well as severe economic impacts. These disparities are linked to longstanding inequities in health outcomes and access to care, education, employment, and economic status.
Some localities and the state of California recognized that these disparities are connected to the legacy of slavery and considered various forms of reparations to address them. At the federal level, HR 40, a bill in Congress proposing the establishment of a commission to investigate slavery’s legacy and create reparations proposals, gained unprecedented momentum, with 170 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and 20 co-sponsors in the Senate as of November.
In May, Human Rights Watch urged state and local authorities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to provide reparations to descendants and the remaining survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a white mob killed several hundred Black people and destroyed an affluent Black neighborhood.
Thousands of people of Asian descent reported incidents of attacks and racial discrimination after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. President Donald Trump repeatedly described the virus using racist language.
Poverty and Inequality
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated poverty and inequality in the United States, and disproportionately affected Black, Latinx, and Native communities. The pandemic and public health measures necessary to slow its spread resulted in lost wages or jobs, reduced health coverage, and reduced access to other essential goods and services. People of color—particularly women and immigrants—continued to be over-represented in low-wage service jobs, putting them at greater risk. Many, particularly in agriculture and food production, faced unsafe working conditions leading to outbreaks.
Increased unemployment protection and direct payments in relief packages that Congress passed significantly stemmed poverty rate growth. However, many protections expired in July and August. The relief bills lacked protections for those unable to pay bills or medical care costs, and excluded certain workers, including immigrants.
The administration continued to undermine consumer protections against predatory lenders and abusive debt collectors. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gutted a rule seeking to prevent small lenders—including so-called payday lenders—from charging exorbitant interest rates.
California voters passed a ballot initiative sponsored by app-based companies stripping app-based rideshare and delivery drivers of the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and other critical labor protections provided by a state law passed in 2019, setting a dangerous precedent for workers’ rights in the US and globally.
Criminal Legal System
Police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake provoked massive protests calling for police accountability, reduction in the scope and power of police, elimination of extortionate court fines and fees, and investment in Black communities.
Rather than address problems of poverty or health that contribute to crime, many US jurisdictions focus on aggressive policing in poor and minority communities, fueling a vicious cycle of incarceration and police violence.
While no governmental agency tracks police killings, the Washington Post database has documented about 1,000 killings by shootings each of the past five years, revealing significant racial disparities.
Black people report being subjected to many forms of police abuse, including non-lethal force, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and harassment, at higher levels than white people. Police subjected Native American people to similar abuse, and killed them at even higher rates than they killed Black people.
The US continues to lead the world in reported incarceration rates. Approximately 2.3 million people were locked up on any given day in 2020. There are about 10 million admissions into jails each year. Based on 2017-18 data, about 4.4 percent of the US adult population were on probation or parole. In August, Human Rights Watch reported that violations of probation and parole are adding to jail and prison populations. Many people in the criminal legal system continue to face extortionate fines and fees, as well as bars to accessing public assistance, public housing, and the right to vote.
While their relative incarceration rates have declined steadily over the past decade, Black people, and to a lesser extent Latinx people, are still more likely to be imprisoned than white people.
Some of the nation’s worst outbreaks of Covid-19 occurred in jails and prisons, with over 169,286 people in prison testing positive and at least 1,363 deaths by November. Some prisons lacked adequate safety and health measures. Some jurisdictions took steps to release people or to limit the influx of new people, but few institutions made reductions sufficient to limit the spread of Covid-19.
Five US states had executed a total of seven men in 2020 at time of writing; the federal government had executed an additional eight by November, the first death sentences carried out by the federal government since 2003. Colorado joined 21 other states in abolishing the death penalty. Three other states have imposed moratoriums in recent years.
The US Congress has not passed further reform legislation since the 2018 First Step Act. Its implementation has had mixed results. While several thousand people’s sentences were reduced, the government frequently opposed reductions for crack cocaine sentences. Advocates criticized programs for earning credits toward release as inadequate. A risk assessment tool used for release eligibility may create racial disparities and can be manipulated to prevent early release.
Nearly half-a-million people are held in local jails pretrial in the United States on any given day. Pretrial incarceration pressures many people to plead guilty regardless of actual guilt or to take on debt to pay money bail. Many jurisdictions have replaced or supplemented money bail with algorithm-based risk assessment tools, which do not necessarily reduce incarceration rates and entrench racial bias.
California voters rejected a law that abolished money bail but required courts to use risk assessment tools in pretrial incarceration decisions. New York implemented pretrial reform without these tools, resulting in substantial reductions in pretrial jail populations.
Children in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Systems
Arrests of children under 18 for violent crimes have dropped by more than 50 percent over the last 20 years, and the number of incarcerated children has dropped by 60 percent since 2000. However, stark racial and ethnic disparities continue. Youth of color make up approximately one-third of teenagers under 18 but two-thirds of incarcerated youth in the United States.
A movement to utilize alternatives to incarceration for youth who commit certain offenses is reducing incarceration in California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas.
Vermont, Michigan, and New York also increased the age at which people can be tried in juvenile court. Even so, all US states have laws that permit or require children accused of serious offenses to be prosecuted as adults. Since 2009, 22 states have narrowed their adult transfer provisions.
Over 200,000 people were on sex offender registries for offenses committed when they were children, a Juvenile Law Center report found. Many were required to register, sometimes for life, for acts such as streaking, sexting, or consensual sexual activity between teenagers.
Drug Policy
Voters approved the country’s first ballot initiative to expand access to evidence-based drug treatment and support and decriminalize the possession of all drugs for personal use in Oregon. Ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana for adult or medical use passed in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, bringing the total states legalizing adult-use marijuana to 15 and medical marijuana to 36. The US House of Representatives passed the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, a bill that, if enacted into law, would end federal marijuana prohibition.
However, drug possession for personal use remains by far the single most arrested offense in the United States. Arrests are marked by stark racial disparities, even though people report similar rates of use across racial groups; according to a 2020 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, in 2018, Black people were 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people.
In the months following the declaration of a national public health emergency in response to Covid-19, the US experienced a surge in already high drug overdoses, roughly 17 percent higher than in 2019, according to one study. Access to the overdose-reversal drug naloxone has increased in recent years, but drug laws are an obstacle to life-saving harm reduction services in many states, and evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder is not available to many people who need it.
Rights of Non-Citizens
The administration continued to attack the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. Returns of non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico to wait for US asylum adjudications under the “Migrant Protection Protocols” continued with a substantial decrease from April to July, exposing tens of thousands, including many children, to precarious, dangerous conditions and denying fair hearings.
Human Rights Watch identified 138 cases of Salvadorans who were killed after being deported to El Salvador from the United States since 2013, illustrating the toll of inadequate US protection processes. The Trump administration expanded fast-track deportation procedures for families at the border and sent Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers to Guatemala under the problematic Asylum Cooperation Agreement. Human Rights Watch reported on how US restrictions on access to asylum harms LGBT people fleeing persecution, including sexual violence, in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
As Covid-19 cases increased in March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an order closing the land borders, over-ruling career-CDC public health officials’ opinions it was not warranted. This led to the expulsion of more than 330,000 people 0,000 people along the US-Mexico border, including children, without screening for eligibility for asylum or other protections.
Throughout the year, the administration proposed a series of regulations to severely restrict eligibility for asylum and other forms of protection.
US officials suspended some forms of immigration enforcement during the pandemic but continued deportations of migrants detained in the United States, risking spreading the virus globally.
Deaths in US immigration detention spiked to a 15-year high with at least eight fatalities related to Covid-19. In April, Human Rights Watch reported on the detention system’s expansion since 2017 in privately run facilities where noncitizens are subjected to threats and use of force, due process violations, and unsanitary and crowded conditions. Though some were released in response to the pandemic, by November, more than 7,000 people had contracted Covid-19 while in detention.
A federal judge ruled in June that the US government was not in compliance with a settlement agreement limiting the detention of children in prison-like conditions to 20 days. In September, a whistleblower brought allegations of medical neglect and abuse by a doctor working with an immigration detention facility in the state of Georgia; subsequent reporting uncovered accounts of hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures performed without informed consent. Lawmakers called for a full investigation.
Health and Human Rights
At time of writing, the United States led the world in coronavirus cases and deaths. Trump and other government officials spread disinformation about the coronavirus.
The US has made coronavirus testing largely free, but states have struggled to increase testing capacity. Millions of people are uninsured and unable to access affordable health care. Costs of treatment may have forced many to forgo care or face financial ruin.
Rates of people without health insurance in the US were rising before the pandemic, including nearly 10 million women without coverage. Pandemic-related job loss likely increased this number dramatically, with a disproportionate impact on women.
Healthcare workers faced serious shortages of protective equipment.
Voting Rights
Election officials’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic seriously impaired some people’s access to voting in primary elections, but access improved by the general election in November. A federal appeals court ruled people with criminal convictions in Florida had to pay fines imposed before being able to vote. As media organizations projected Biden had won the presidential election, President Trump made baseless allegations of voter fraud and filed lawsuits challenging certain states’ electoral processes.
Right to Education
Schools were closed at some point in all 50 states in response to the pandemic. While closed, many schools switched to online learning, but one in five school-aged US children do not have access to a computer or high-speed internet at home. Various studies warned school closures would widen racial and economic inequalities in education, with a particularly significant impact on children with disabilities.
Environment and Human Rights
The Trump administration weakened car emission and air quality standards, and suspended many requirements for environmental monitoring.
United States farms continue to use more than 70 pesticides that are banned or in the process of complete phase out in the European Union, Brazil, or China, putting the health of farmworkers and nearby communities at risk.
Air pollution from industry, transportation, and wildfires, which are increasing due to climate change, continued to impact people in the US, particularly communities of color. A Harvard University study suggested people with Covid-19 are more likely to die if they are exposed to high levels of air pollution.
Some communities, especially Native Americans living on reservations, faced the Covid-19 pandemic without adequate access to water. Detroit failed to reconnect households, mostly minority, whose water had been shut off before the pandemic. We the People of Detroit, an organization committed to community research, found in July that zip codes with more water shutoffs correlated with more Covid-19 cases.
The United States is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, which took effect on November 4. Biden vowed to rejoin the agreement on his first day in office.
Extreme weather events increased in frequency and intensity in part due to climate change and had a disproportionate impact on already marginalized communities. The summer of 2020 was one of the warmest documented. Some local governments warned about heat-related illness and mortality but most plans excluded pregnant people, who are more vulnerable to heat stress. Premature birth is also linked with heat. Black women, who already suffer higher rates of giving birth prematurely, are especially vulnerable.
Women’s and Girls’ Rights
Lack of access to health care contributes to higher rates of maternal and cervical cancer deaths than in comparable countries. Human Rights Watch documented in 2020 how Alabama is failing to provide young people with necessary information on sexual and reproductive health and failing to persuade the public to take the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which prevents several types of cancer, including cervical cancer. Vaccination rates throughout Alabama remain low in a state with one of the highest rates of preventable cervical cancer deaths in the country, with Black women more likely to die.
The Trump administration continued to limit access to women’s health care. Since the “gag” rule went into effect in 2019, barring doctors receiving federal family planning (Title X) funds from giving women information on the full range of pregnancy options available to them, the patient capacity of the Title X network has been reduced by half. In July, the Supreme Court upheld rules permitting employers to opt out of contraceptive coverage in employee health insurance plans by claiming religious or moral objections.
Some states, like Ohio and Texas, used the pandemic as an excuse to further restrict access to abortion. In July, a law took effect in Florida requiring anyone under 18 to obtain consent from a parent or legal guardian before an abortion.
Older People’s Rights
More than 40 percent of state-reported Covid-19 deaths in the US, but just 8 percent of total cases, were among people living in long-term care institutions. Nursing home operators pushed state and federal governments to give them broad legal immunity. Nursing facilities’ longstanding infection control problems and reduced public oversight of nursing homes during the Covid-19 crisis put already vulnerable older residents at greater risk.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a “no visitors” policy for all nursing facilities in response to the pandemic, with limited exceptions for end-of-life visits, cutting off over 1.5 million older residents from families and friends. Such visitors supplement care by staff, advocate on residents’ behalf, and provide essential emotional support. CMS updated guidance in September to allow for visitation in some circumstances, though protocols varied widely across states.
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
In June, the Supreme Court ruled a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in employment prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Despite the ruling, the Trump administration attempted to roll back health and housing protections for transgender people. More than a dozen states also considered bills restricting gender-affirming care for children, putting their health and rights at risk. At least 28 transgender people were killed in the United States in 2020.
Congress failed to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which includes provisions for LGBT survivors of violence, or pass the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Freedom of Expression and Assembly
President Trump continued to attack news outlets that questioned his administration’s policies. After Twitter placed a fact-check label on Trump’s tweets, the president issued an executive order that attempts to remove legal protections for social media platforms, an attack against online freedom of expression globally.
Local law enforcement agencies in several jurisdictions reacted with excessive force toward people protesting police violence.
President Trump took aggressive action against protesters demanding racial justice. He had federal police remove peaceful protesters from a park next to the White House to facilitate his appearance for photographs at a nearby church. Against the wishes of local officials, his administration sent federal officers to Portland, despite questions about their authority to take enforcement actions. Reports of excessive force and other misconduct followed.
National Security
In October, state and federal authorities charged 14 men linked to extreme-right movements with plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan and overthrow the state government because of Covid-19 related restrictions. The men discussed “taking” the governor of Virginia for the same reason, the FBI said. That same month, the Department of Homeland Security identified white supremacists, along with cyber and other forms of election interference by China, Iran, and Russia, among top threats facing the US.
Also in October, a federal court charged two Islamic State (ISIS) suspects with involvement in the torture and killings of US journalists and aid workers. The UK shared key intelligence on the pair after the US agreed not to seek the death penalty.
The US reported completing repatriations of all citizens held as ISIS suspects and family members in Syria and Iraq, placing the total at 27.
In January, psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, architects of the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-September 11, 2001 “enhanced interrogation” techniques, defended their use of torture on dozens of detainees in their first public testimony on the illegal program. The pair testified at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base pre-trial military commission hearings for five men charged as co-conspirators in the September 11 attacks. Further proceedings were postponed to at least 2021 due to Covid-19 and the consecutive resignations of two presiding judges. Concerns persist regarding prison conditions and access to counsel for the 40 detainees still held at Guantanamo, most without charge.
Foreign Policy
The United States continued to disengage from multilateral institutions.
The administration took unprecedented action in June in issuing an executive order authorizing asset freezes and family entry bans against International Criminal Court (ICC) officials and others assisting them; in September it designated two ICC officials for sanctions. In July, the US took steps to withdraw from the World Health Organization.
This followed its previous withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council and decision to end US funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and Palestinian refugee agency, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The US Department of State’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, a body established in 2019 to “reexamine” US commitments to international human rights, released a report in August advocating a hierarchical approach to human rights and relegating abortion and marriage equality to “divisive social and political controversies.”
In January, the Trump administration cancelled a policy to eliminate all antipersonnel landmines. The administration continued to entrench and expand implementation of its dangerous iteration of the “Global Gag Rule,” and omitted gender identity and sexual orientation from a draft policy on gender by the US Agency for International Development.
The United States admitted 11,814 refugees in fiscal year 2020, an 85 percent decrease from the 85,000 admitted in 2016. In October, the Trump administration set the lowest US refugee resettlement cap on record—15,000—for fiscal year 2021.
President Trump continued to praise authoritarian leaders, and his administration continued to provide military assistance and approve arms sales to states with poor human rights records. The administration also continued to support the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen despite numerous laws-of-war violations and pursued a $478 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia despite two bipartisan votes in Congress to restrict weapons sales.
The United States imposed sanctions on perpetrators of grave human rights violations and corruption, including officials in Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, and South Sudan; Chinese and Hong Kong government officials, state agencies, and companies; and 39 Syrians, including Bashar Al-Assad.
Congress passed legislation highlighting human rights concerns in China and Hong Kong, yet some administration responses—including restricting visas for Chinese journalists, increasing scrutiny of students from China, and efforts to ban applications by Chinese tech companies—raised human rights concerns. The US signed an agreement with the Taliban on terms for a US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The agreement did not address human rights concerns, but the US did press for greater inclusion of women and civil society in the Afghan government’s delegation for negotiations with the Taliban that began in September. The US did not publicly press the Afghan government on its abuses.
In Latin America, the administration focused on serious human rights abuses in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua but failed to scrutinize abuses in allied countries, such as Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico.
In the Middle East, the administration presented in January a plan to formalize Israeli annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank, and helped broker agreements to normalize Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September.
Meanwhile, the US took an increasingly hostile approach to Iran. In January, the US killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force in a drone strike in Iraq; afterwards, President Trump tweeted that retaliation from Iran would be met by targeting Iranian cultural sites, which would constitute a war crime.
In September, following the UN Security Council’s refusal to renew an arms embargo that expired in October as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the US argued it could reimpose UN sanctions. Other permanent members of the council and parties to the JCPOA, as well as the UN secretary-general, refused to accept the US position, since the US had withdrawn from the agreement.
In Africa, the US focused on normalizing relations with Sudan’s transitional government and removed Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list; Sudan began a process of normalizing relations with Israel, reportedly in exchange. The US continued its military activity in Somalia, conducting dozens of airstrikes, some of which resulted in apparent civilian casualties that were not adequately investigated or acknowledged.
In May, the Department of Defense released its third annual report on civilian casualties, documenting civilian harm from certain US military activity and estimating 132 civilian deaths or injuries in 2019, a significantly lower estimate than those by nongovernmental organizations. The report also listed the number of allegations of civilian harm that had been received, concluding that only a fraction of the allegations were “credible.”
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