This week we carry on with the book from last week. Last week I said that this book is from 2022, but must be from the end of 2022, because the correct date is 2023, as you can see if you access the book in its link. I know that has been difficult times to advocate for democracy and human rights, but we can not give up because I've been defending principles and values worth fight for. They are very important for humankind and the people of the world needs more persons to defend them, join us now, become a global human rights defender and help the justice to happen around the world. This summary is the book with the title above published at https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/2022-10-10-reclaiming-human-rights-changing-world-order.pdf
The problem of impunity, the lack of accountability, when human rights violations go unpunished and victims are left without remedy is a serious threat to the human rights system. Given the foundational idea that those who violate human rights must be held responsible and that victims have a right to remedy, various national, regional and international mechanisms have been created to ensure such accountability. Nevertheless, some perpetrators of human rights violations still go unpunished and victims are left without remedies. In the inaugural speech of the sessions of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 1960, its president, Romulo Gallegos, made a declaration:"There is a thirst for justice in various parts of the American continent. It is suffered by conscious people, possessors of the inviolable right to obtain material and spiritual well-being. And our Commission, obedient to the purpose of protecting and defending the rights of human dignity, can not be destined to fail." Right from the start, the IACHR had to deal with a very complex political reality in Latin America. The pendulum constantly swung between democracy and human rights on one side, and military dictatorships and authoritarian leaders on the other. By the end of the 1960s, fifteen of the twenty-one Latin America countries were ruled by military governments. Very early on, the IACHR received thousands of complaints from individuals across Latin America who claimed their rights had been violated. The individual petition system was used then more as thermometer to assess the human rights situation than a strict legal proceeding. And it also served as a warning to the governments that the international community was observing the human rights situation in their countries. However, over the next decades, two main factors would strengthen the IACHR's judicial role: the establishment of the Inter-American Court in 1978, and the return to democracy in most Latin American countries during the 1980s. The rise of China and the reassertion of Russian activism against the West are recasting the international balance of power. In human rights terms this has meant greater emphasis on social rights. China's success in reducing poverty has amplified its global soft power as a model of economic development. Beijing has explicitly sought economic and political alliances with states that shared its rejection of democratic norms. As the balance of international political power has changed since the 1990s in ways that shape the future of human rights protections, so too has technology. Tech is now a threat to the human rights order. The capacity of the international human rights system to respond requires an upgrade not just of the international institutions to monitor and evaluate these threats, but also of human rights groups and activists and their capacity to understand, track, and report their implications to international bodies and to the broader public. Gerald Neuman argues that the rise of exclusionary populism across the globe is threatening the integrity of human rights norms and bodies. Exclusionary populism denies the legitimacy of any opposition and undermines institutional checks and balances. These challenges have been felt and have torn regional human rights systems. The complex machinations of Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Turkey in Africa can contribute to greater instability, as in Libya, making it nearly impossible to guarantee human rights. Taken together, the trends and factors analyzed in the book are eroding the basic foundation of human rights. Our aim is to kick-start a wide-ranging dialogue among scholars, policymakers, and activists on how to confront these challenges and strengthen the fraying consensus. Multilateral institutions need to be updated to focuys on these threats and find ways to generate sustainable funding. The protection of human rights, more than ever, has become a domestic political messaging problem as well as an international challenge. The fundamental consensus around human rights and democracy based on imperfect international cooperation in the post- cold war era is evaporating. This change has gone hand in hand with growing authoritarianism, often by democratically elected leaders with a varying popular mandate, who have become a new breed of human rights abusers. These regimes are not military officers or outright dictators of the past, but elected governments that gradually undermine checks and balances and the rule of law to clamp down on critical voices. These elected authoritarians pose new challenges to human rights. Their ideological range is broad, and include presidents Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, and Maduro in Venezuela as well as prime minister Narendra Modi in India and Viktor Orban in Hungary. How should the international community and local civil society respond when voters themselves back antidemocratic and rights-abusing leaders? One starting point is to recognize signals an elected government's potential slide into authoritarianism. These tactics must be recognized and challenged to discourage would-be authoritarian governments from emulating one another. In the light of these challenges and the analyses in the preceding chapters, we present several ideas and suggestions that heads of state, multilateral institutions, and activists should pursue. 1) Update and expand international institutions to identify and react to threats to human rights stemming from elected autocrats. 2) Focus on renewing countries' democratic social fabric and popular understanding of human rights. 3) Understand and respond to economic insecurity stemming from globalization, the changing nature of work, and imperfect social safety nets. 4) Engage a broad segment of civil society, including a diversity of religious group, in foreign policy and human rights policy. 5) Recommit to a broad human rights agenda among liberal democracies, including in non-Western countries. 6) Improve the capacity to monitor and punish states and business promoting or selling technology that violates human rights. 7) Ensure greater technology awareness among human rights bodies, norms and activists. Privacy concerns and surveillance will become increasingly pressing problems in the field of human rights. 8) Ensure that multilateral organizations and human rights groups, reflect global diversity. 9) Explore existing and potentially new platforms to more effectively challenge and mobilize action on human rights abusers. 10) Upgrade, reform and protect international and regional human rights bodies. 11) Strengthen international solidarity in defense of human rights. 12) Be honest about the challenges today and the need for an upgrade. 13) Consider whether it is time for a new Convention on Human Rights. A global forum led by liberal democracies could be an important step in evaluating and restoring the international human rights regime in a complex and contentious world. It would open up a global discussion on the success of the human rights experiment started seventy-five years ago and on ways to help it evolve and thrive in the future.
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