Pathways to Peace, with guest Agnes Callamard

My guest in this episode of the Pathways to Peace series is Agnes Callamard, the well-known human rights expert who is now the Secretary General of Amnesty International.  
She has had many roles, including that of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions from 2017 to 2021.

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Transcript

Derek MacCuish:

My guest in this episode of the Pathways to Peace series is Agnes Callamard, the well-known human rights expert who is now the Secretary General of Amnesty International.  She has had many roles, including that of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions from 2017 to 2021.

To begin our conversation, since the theme of this series is peace, I asked her thoughts about conflict.

Agnes Callamard:

There are new conflicts, there are many old conflicts, the vast majority of conflicts unfortunately are proactive, there is rarely an end to them or they come back. You know that is the reality of the environment right now. There are an increasing number of so-called international, internal conflict, and they few of them right now, are getting to a peaceful, quick resolution.

Something that I have observed as a human rights activist, something that I've found working with Amnesty International over the last ten months. The other thing I can say about conflict, and I think when we left, made the final tour, all my knowledge here is that over the last year or so, the lack of global interest in bringing the pandemic COVID-19 pandemic to an end has meant that, in many countries in the world, the drivers for conflict have been fed and watered. 

Whether it's rising poverty, food insecurity, repression, or instruments of invalidation by governments of COVID. So all of that is creating now the fertile ground for future conflict, and I'm not talking about very far away conflict. That's certainly something that we have noted at Amnesty International, the proliferation of third parties, interventions, proliferation of non-state actors involved in conflict.

There have been a few interstate conflicts, but they remain the minority. Most of them, as in the point that I just described, are internal but with an international dimension. That is the reality of our environment and the, you know, the multiplication of human rights violations in the context of those conflicts. That's what we find. 

Derek MacCuish:

There has been discussion in this podcast series about failure of governments to protect human rights and the social order.  Do you agree that there has been a failure of government?

Agnes Callamard:

If we are talking about the last decade and certainly the last few years, then yes, the human rights situation around the world is deteriorating, largely because governments are failing to take necessary actions. I've just given you the example of COVID, which is a typical example of how, as an international community, states who can do something, who can protect rights, because of their influence or money, fail to do so and are planting the seeds for greater instability. 

I've mentioned the fact that domestically the vast majority of countries around the world have instrumentalized the pandemic to curtail freedom of expression and protest.  We at Amnesty International have just done a quick survey, in fact, of how governments have failed in terms of the protection of safe space and what we have a found is that the majority of the countries have adopted rules that curtail freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and so on, in ways that are violating international law.  Freedom of the media is under attack either because of government censorship or because of the monopoly practice of some media owners who tend to grab different media outlets or different forms of media. So the diversity of the media is certainly at stake here at the moment.

The right to health, I've already mentioned. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, governments have withdrawn from investing into public health. And that now has implications for our inability to address the pandemic, COVID, until very recently. 

These are just a few examples, but at the principal level, at the meta-level, human rights protection has decreased, the capacity or the willingness of states to respect rights decreased, and I think that is an outcome that you can probably conclude is global. So, yes, I will agree with the previous speakers on their assessment. In fact, in my view, the situation is so alarming that I have compared it to the 1930s in the previous century. I’ve said, and in fact, I'm not the only one to say so by the way, that we seem to be moving steadily toward an abyss. And I don't know whether we will have the capacity, the willingness or the institution to avoid falling into it. 

My hope is that we can move around it. My hope is that we will not be a repeat of the 1930s generation. My hope is that we will be more like the 1948 generation, the one that came up with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But you know, I think right now the journey doesn’t look very good in terms of the direction.

Derek MacCuish:

How do we respond, how can a response be developed? Can there be a response, within the international institutions, within the UN system, the financial institutions, or is there a role for corporation? And finally, where do we fit as, as citizens?

Agnes Callamard:

The tree (fear?) growing here is for us, the people, because if we don't do something who will?  I'm personally optimistic in my belief into people. I think there are terrible individuals, human beings, and there are certainly very worrying organized groups at the moment, but at heart I liked to think that given the choice, given the space, people will go for the option that defends dignity and human life.

I'm hopeful when I see people getting organized, when I see young people demonstrating, when I see young people as young as twelve, thirteen, protesting against the climate injustice. I'm hopeful when I see how brave the people in Myanmar or Iraq or Sudan are, when they march and confront soldiers who do not hesitate to shoot and to arrest.

So I'm very hopeful in the courage that there is within every society.  I'm hopeful too when I see the imagination and the creativity that people were put into responding to the repression or to organize themselves how they use the environment, the social media, and you know, every tool at their disposal to dream a better world.

I think that there are also people within the private sector who can and will be working alongside civil society. I know for instance, that's how our colleagues at Oxfam have just released a very important report on inequality, and they received support from ultra-rich insurers who have said, we want to pay taxes. We want to be on the right side. We don't want to be escaping our responsibility, including fiscal and financial. So there are people like that. There are people in the private sector who know that we cannot be continuing that endless search for profit and greed that shareholders cannot be determining public policy, that there needs to be far more to our position on climate change, and our position on China, our position on the other matters than those being imposed by their shareholders.  

There is a realization of that within the private sector. There is a realization that we need to work with a strong state, able to mitigate the negative impact of the liberal market economy right now and the instability to security that it's created for many people around the world. I think that there is increasing realization that we, as societies, must find ways of embedding a universal income, or certainly social protection, within our societies as a way of protecting against the worst impacts of globalization, COVID, and you know, whatever, artificial intelligence, robotics, and move towards a different point of the economy, a green economy, all of that needs to be taken into account. And for that, we need to add, you know, public policy that is centred on the human, centered on their rights and that they are prepared to invest to mitigate the wealth's implications of our system. 

So I am hopeful that there is a great deal of energy to build a better path. There's also a great deal of energy to force the world into a further conflict, armament trades, an economic model that is putting all of the focus on what shareholders can get. 

So, you know, we have a lot to do in order to respond to those very powerful individuals and forces that are pushing us in the wrong direction. 

Derek MacCuish:

Thank you very much for taking time to speak with me today.  Was there anything else you wish to add before we close up?

Agnes Callamard:

Maybe the only thing I will add is for people to rise up to the challenge. You know, we are not powerless vis a vis corporate actors. We are not powerless vis a vis historical forces related to climate change. We can change it. We can shift it. We can mitigate it. We can demand better protection and better rights.

It’s within us to do that, to take action, to speak up, in public meetings, on social media. We can speak up against racism. We can speak up against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. We have that capacity still in us, in many societies, not all, in some places to speak up when gets you to jail or worse. But where we can do that safely, then we have no excuse for not doing it because they have too many people around the world who can’t. And it is incumbent upon us who have the capacity, who have the means and the resources to stand up, to speak up and to defend.