by Noam Chomsky
The US has upheld Article 14 in this manner since Carter (and Christopher) “promoted human rights” by shipping miserable boat people back to torment under the Duvalier dictatorship, a respected ally helping to convert Haiti to an export platform for US corporations seeking super cheap and brutalized labor-or, to adopt the terms preferred by USAID, to convert Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” The violations of Article 14 were ratified formally in a Reagan-Duvalier agreement. When a military coup overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president in September 1991, renewing the terror after a brief lapse, the Bush administration imposed a blockade to drive back the flood of refugees to their torture chamber.31
Bush’s “reprehensible, . . . illegal, and irresponsible refugee policy”32 was bitterly condemned by candidate Bill Clinton, whose first act as president was to make the illegal blockade still harsher, along with other measures to sustain the junta, to which we return.
Again, fairness requires that we recognize that Washington did briefly depart from its rejection of Article 14 in the case of Haiti. During the few months of democracy (February-September 1991), the Bush administration gained a sudden and short-lived sensitivity to Article 14 as the flow of refugees declined to a trickle—in fact, reversed, as Haitians returned to their country in its moment of hope. Of the more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by US forces from 1981 through 1990, Washington allowed 28 claims for asylum as victims of political persecution, granting 11 (in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans). During the seven-month democratic interlude under President Aristide, with violence and repression radically reduced, 20 claims were allowed from a refugee pool one-fiftieth the scale. Practice returned to normal after the military coup and the renewed terror.33
Concerned that protests might make it difficult to maintain the blockade, the Clinton administration pleaded with other countries to relieve the US of the burden of accommodating the refugees. Fear of a refugee flow was the major reason offered as the “national security” interest that might justify military intervention, eliciting much controversy. The debate overlooked the obvious candidate: Tanzania, which had been able to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, and would surely have been able to come to the rescue of the beleaguered United States by accepting a few more black faces.
The contempt for Article 14 is by no means concealed. A front-page story in the Newspaper of Record on harsh new immigration laws casually records the fact and explains the reasons:
Because the United States armed and financed the army whose brutality sent them into exile, few Salvadorans were able to obtain the refugee status granted to Cubans, Vietnamese, Kuwaitis, and other nationalities at various times. The new law regards many of them simply as targets for deportation [though they were fleeing] a conflict that lasted from 1979 until 1992, [when] more than 70,000 people were killed in El Salvador, most of them by the American-backed army and the death squads it in turn supported, [forcing] many people here to flee to the United States.34
The same reasoning extended to those who fled Washington’s other terrorist wars in the region.
The interpretation of Article 14 is therefore quite principled: “worthy victims” fall under Article 14; “unworthy victims” do not. The categories are determined by the agency of terror and prevailing power interests. But the facts have no bearing on Washington’s role as the crusader defending the universality of the UD from the relativist challenge. The case is among the many that illustrate an omission in Orwell’s analysis: the easy tolerance of inconsistency, when convenient.
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
Articles 13 and 14 fall under the category of Civil and Political Rights. The UD also recognizes a second category: Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. These are largely dismissed in the West. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick described these provisions of the UD as “a letter to Santa Claus. . . . Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of ‘entitlements,’ which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.” They were dismissed in more temperate tones by the US Representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Ambassador Morris Abram, who emphasized in 1990 that Civil and Political Rights must have “priority,” contrary to the principle of universality of the UD.35
Abram elaborated while explaining Washington’s rejection of the Report of the Global Consultations on the Right to Development, defined as “the right of individuals, groups, and peoples to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy continuous economic, social, cultural, and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.” “Development is not a right,” Abram informed the Commission. Indeed, the proposals of the report yield conclusions that “seem preposterous,” for example, that the World Bank might be obliged “to forgive a loan or to give money to build a tunnel, a railroad, or a school.” Such ideas are “little more than an empty vessel into which vague hopes and inchoate expectations can be poured,” Abram continued, and even a “dangerous incitement.”
Closely paraphrasing Abram’s thesis, we may understand the fundamental error of the alleged “right to development” to be its tacit endorsement of the principle that36
everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
If there is no right to development, as defined, then this statement too is an “empty vessel” and perhaps even “dangerous incitement.” Accordingly, this principle too has no status: there are no such rights as those affirmed in Article 25 of the UD, just quoted.
The US alone vetoed the Declaration on the Right to Development, thus implicitly vetoing Article 25 of the UD as well.37
It is unnecessary to dwell on the status of Article 25 in the world’s richest country, with a poverty level twice that of any other industrial society, particularly severe among children. Almost one in four children under six fell below the poverty line by 1995 after four years of economic recovery, far more than other industrial societies.38 Britain, though, is gaining ground, with “one in three British babies born in poverty,” the press reports, as “child poverty has increased as much as three-fold since Margaret Thatcher was elected,” and “up to 2 million British children are suffering ill-health and stunted growth because of malnutrition.” Thatcherite programs reversed the trend to improved child health and led to an upswing of childhood diseases that had been controlled, while public funds are used for such purposes as illegal projects in Turkey and Malaysia to foster arms sales by state-subsidized industry.39 In accord with “really existing free market doctrine,” public spending after 17 years of Thatcherite gospel is the same as when she took over.40
In the US, subjected to similar policies, 30 million people suffered from hunger by 1990, an increase of 50 percent from 1985, including 12 million children lacking sufficient food to maintain growth and development (before the 1991 recession). Forty percent of children in the world’s richest city fell below the poverty line. In terms of such basic social indicators as child mortality, the US ranks well below any other industrial country, alongside of Cuba, which has less than 5 percent the GNP per capita of the United States and has undergone many years of terrorist attack and increasingly severe economic warfare at the hands of the hemispheric superpower.41
Given its extraordinary advantages, the US is in the leading ranks of relativists who reject the universality of the UD by virtue of Article 25 alone.
The same values guide the international financial institutions that the US largely controls. The World Bank and the IMF “have been extraordinarily human rights averse,” the chairperson of the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Philip Alston, observed with polite understatement in his submission t
o the Vienna countersession. “As we have heard so dramatically at this Public Hearing,” Nouri Abdul Razzak of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization added, “the policies of the international financial institutions are contributing to the impoverishment of the world’s people, the degradation of the global environment, and the violation of the most fundamental human rights.”
In the face of such direct violations of the principles of the UD, it is perhaps superfluous to mention the refusal to take even small steps towards upholding them. UNICEF estimates that every hour, 1,000 children die from easily preventable disease, and almost twice that many women die or suffer serious disability in pregnancy or childbirth for lack of simple remedies and care. To ensure universal access to basic social services, UNICEF estimates, would require a quarter of the annual military expenditures of the “developing countries,” about 10 percent of US military spending.42 As noted, the US actively promotes military expenditures of the “developing countries”; its own remain at Cold War levels, increasing today while social spending is being severely cut. Also sharply declining in the 1990s is US foreign aid, already the most miserly among the developed countries, and virtually non-existent if we exclude the rich country that is the primary recipient (Washington’s Israeli client).43
In his “Final Report” to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Special Rapporteur Leandro Despouy cites the World Health Organization’s characterization of “extreme poverty” as “the world’s most ruthless killer and the greatest cause of suffering on earth”: “No other disaster compared to the devastation of hunger which had caused more deaths in the past two years than were killed in the two World Wars together.” The right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being is affirmed in Article 25 of the UD, he notes, and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, “which places emphasis more particularly on ‘the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger.’ “44 But from the highly relativist perspective of the West, these principles of human rights agreements have no status, though they are officially endorsed.
There are other differences of interpretation concerning Article 25. The UN Commission on Human Rights was approached by Third World countries seeking means “to stem the huge flow of dangerous substances” to the poor countries, concerned that “dumping toxic products and wastes threatened the basic rights of life and good health” guaranteed by the UD. The UN investigator determined that the rich countries send “masses of toxic waste” to the Third World and, now, the former Soviet domains. “She said information she gathered shows ‘serious violations of the right to life and health,’” the press reported, and “in some cases ‘had led to sickness, disorders, physical or mental disability, and even death.’” Her information was limited, however, because she had “little cooperation from developed countries or corporations,” and none at all from the US, which is moving to terminate her mission.45
Article 23 of the UD declares that “everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment,” along with “remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.” We need not tarry on Washington’s respect for this principle. Furthermore, “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”
The latter right is technically upheld in the United States, though legal and administrative mechanisms ensure that it is increasingly observed in the breach. By the time the Reaganites had completed their work, the US was far enough off the spectrum so that the International Labor Organization, which rarely criticizes the powerful, issued a recommendation that the US conform to international standards, in response to an AFL-CIO complaint about strikebreaking by resort to “permanent replacement workers.”46 Apart from South Africa, no other industrial country tolerated these methods to ensure that Article 23 remains empty words; and with subsequent developments in South Africa, the US may stand in splendid isolation in this particular respect, though it has yet to achieve British standards, such as allowing employers to use selective pay increases to induce workers to reject union and collective bargaining rights.47
Reviewing some of the mechanisms used to render Article 23 inoperative, Business Week reported that from the early Reagan years, “US industry has conducted one of the most successful anti-union wars ever, illegally firing thousands of workers for exercising their rights to organize.” “Unlawful firings occurred in one-third of all representation elections in the late ‘80s, vs. 8 percent in the late ‘60s.” Workers have no recourse, as the Reagan administration converted the powerful state they nurtured to an expansive welfare state for the rich, defying US law as well as the customary international law enshrined in the UD. Management’s basic goal, the journal explains, has been to cancel the rights “guaranteed by the 1935 Wagner Act,” which brought the US into the mainstream of the industrial world.48 That has been a basic goal since the New Deal provisions were enacted, and although the project of reversing the victory for democracy and working people was put on hold during the war, it was taken up again when peace arrived, with great vigor and considerable success.49 One index of the success is provided by the record of ratification of ILO conventions guaranteeing labor rights. The US has by far the worst record in the Western hemisphere and Europe, with the exception of El Salvador and Lithuania. It does not recognize even standard conventions on child labor and the right to organize.50
“The United States is in arrears to the ILO in the amount of $92.6 million,” the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights notes. This withholding of funds “seriously jeopardizes the ILO’s operations”; Washington’s plans for larger cuts in ILO funding “would primarily affect the ILO’s ability to deliver technical assistance in the field,” thus undermining Article 23 still further, worldwide.51 This is only part of the huge debt to international organizations that the US refuses to pay (in violation of treaty obligations). Unpaid back dues to the UN are estimated at $1.3 billion. “Our doors are kept open,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan writes, “only because other countries in essence provide interest-free loans to cover largely American shortfalls—not only NATO allies . . . but also developing countries like Pakistan and even Fiji.”52 A few weeks later, still refusing to pay, the Senate voted 90 to 10 that the UN “thank the United States for its contributions,” lower its obligations, “and publicly report to all member nations how much the United States has spent supporting Security Council resolutions since January 1, 1990.”53
The illegal attack on unions in violation of Article 23 has many effects. It contributes to undermining health and safety standards in the workplace, which the government chooses not to enforce, leading to a sharp rise in industrial accidents in the Reagan years.54 It also helps to undermine functioning democracy, as people with limited resources lose some of the few methods by which they can enter the political arena. And it accelerates the privatization of aspirations, dissolving the sense of solidarity and sympathy, and other human values that were at the heart of classical liberal thought but are inconsistent with the reigning ideology of privilege and power. More narrowly, the US Labor Department estimates that weakening of unions accounts for a large part of the stagnation or decline in real wages under the Reaganites, “a welcome development of transcendent importance,” as the Wall Street Journal described the fall in labor costs from the 1985 high to the lowest in the industrial world (UK aside).55
Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in February 1997, Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan was highly optimistic about “sustainable economic expansion” thanks to “atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity,” plainly a desideratum for a good society and yet another reason for Western relativists to reject Article 25 of the UD, with its “right to security.” The February 1997 Economic Report o
f the President, taking pride in the Clinton administration’s achievements, refers more obliquely to “changes in labor market institutions and practices” as a factor in the “significant wage restraint” that bolsters the health of the economy.56
The “free trade agreements,” as they are common mislabeled (they include significant protectionist features and are “agreements” only if we discount popular opinion), contribute to these benign changes. Some of the mechanisms are spelled out in a study commissioned by the Labor Secretariat of the North American Free Trade Agreement “on the effects of the sudden closing of the plant on the principle of freedom of association and the right of workers to organize in the three countries.” The study was carried out under NAFTA rules in response to a complaint by telecommunications workers on illegal labor practices by Sprint. The complaint was upheld by the US National Labor Relations Board, which ordered trivial penalties after years of delay, the standard procedure. The NAFTA study, by Cornell University Labor economist Kate Bronfenbrenner, was authorized for release by Canada and Mexico, but delayed by the Clinton administration. It reveals a significant impact of NAFTA on strikebreaking. About half of union organizing efforts are disrupted by employer threats to transfer production abroad, for example, by placing signs reading “Mexico Transfer Job” in front of a plant where there is an organizing drive. The threats are not idle. When such organizing drives nevertheless succeed, employers close the plant in whole or in part at triple the pre-NAFTA rate (about 15 percent of the time). Plant-closing threats are almost twice as high in more mobile industries (e.g., manufacturing vs. construction).57
These and other practices reported in the NAFTA study are illegal, but that is a technicality, as the Reagan administration had made clear, outweighed by the contribution to undermining the right to organize that is formally guaranteed by Article 23—or, in more polite words, bringing about “changes in labor market institutions and practices” that contribute to “significant wage restraint” thanks to “greater worker insecurity,” within an economic model offered with great pride to a backward world, and greatly admired among privileged sectors.