Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

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For anyone concerned with human rights and international humanitarian law, two dates in 1948 — December 9 and December 10 — are of crucial importance, as these are the dates when the recently-formed United Nations, via its General Assembly, idealistically and optimistically adopted, on December 9, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), and, the day after, adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which established, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and which, as the UN explains, “inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties.” Ever since, December 10 — today — has been known and celebrated as Human Rights Day, while December 9 is marked as the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.

One of those subsequent treaties is the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the Torture Convention), which, after decades of wrangling, was finally adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

The Genocide Convention, and the long quest for accountability

The Genocide Convention, drawing on the work of the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term during the Second World War, defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Convention also defines the crimes that can be punished as not only genocide itself, but also “conspiracy to commit genocide”, “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”, the “attempt to commit genocide”, and “complicity in genocide.”

Created specifically in response to the Nazi Holocaust, when six million Jews and eleven million other people (including nearly eight million Soviet civilians and prisoners of war) were murdered by the Nazis, the Convention had a troubled genesis, as, foreshadowing difficulties that remain in place to this day, both western nations and the Soviet Union demanded the dilution of Lemkin’s original definition — as “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” by means such as “the disintegration of [its] political and social institutions, of [its] culture, language, national feelings, religion, and [its] economic existence” — fearing that it could be applied to them, with western nations concerned about their own colonial history, and the Soviet Union working furiously to block any application of the Convention to the destruction of political groups.

Despite these caveats, the Genocide Convention has contributed to a growing body of international humanitarian law designed to prevent the worst human atrocities, alongside the continuing evolution of the definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression, and also involving the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Additional Protocols of 1977 relating to the protection of victims of armed conflicts.

Over the last three decades, accountability for genocide has finally begun to take place, initially via international UN-led or UN-facilitated courts — involving the genocides in Cambodia in the 1970s, in Rwanda in 1994, and in Bosnia, in relation to the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995 — and, since 2002, via the International Criminal Court (ICC), where a genocide case is ongoing against Omar al-Bashir, the former president of Sudan, in relation to atrocities committed in Darfur in 2003-04.

Now, however, the long struggle to hold individuals and nations to account for horrendous atrocities has strayed into territory that the western powers tried so assiduously and cynically to prevent happening when the “rules-based order” was first established — the pursuit of one of their own.

While genocide has proven notoriously difficult to establish, war crimes and crimes against humanity are much easier to identify, as is apparent from the list of indictments by the ICC over the last two decades, involving investigations of war crimes and crimes against humanity against prominent individuals in 16 countries, mostly in Africa. A handful of these cases have resulted in convictions, and others are still ongoing, but, on November 21 this year, a line was crossed when arrest warrants were issued for two western allies — Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former defense minister Yoav Gallant — for war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with Israel’s ongoing atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu and Gallant are now fugitives from international justice, and while they may have — to date — avoided charges of genocide at the ICC, their conduct, and that of many other prominent Israeli political figures, is under intense scrutiny at another international court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague along with the ICC. The ICJ, sometimes known as the World Court, is the court established as one of the six principal organs of the United Nations at its founding in 1945, empowered to adjudicate general disputes between nations, and to provide advisory opinions on international legal issues.

In January this year, responding to a genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel, the ICJ indicated that Israel was engaged in a “plausible genocide”, and issued provisional measures designed to give Israel the opportunity to avoid the Court concluding, after further deliberation, which will take many years, that the threshold of plausibility has indeed been crossed, and that Israel has been definitively engaged in a genocide.

Given its customary arrogance, and its contempt for all international bodies, Israel completely ignored these provisional measures, but, as evidence of its genocidal intent, and its brutal enactment of that intent, has continued to mount, it is inconceivable that the ICJ will not, eventually, deliver a definitive ruling that it has indeed been engaged in a genocide, not only damning an apparently key western ally, but also ending shockwaves of complicity throughout all those western countries who, in defiance of all logic and decency, have, for the first time in modern history, directly backed, facilitated and supported a genocidal ally to plumb depths of unconscionable depravity.

The significance of Human Rights Day and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Just as the west’s “ironclad’ embrace of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people marks a new low point in western morality, so too western governments’ general treatment of human rights in the third decade of the 21st century marks a shameful descent from the idealism and optimism that attended the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 76 years ago today, when Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President  Franklin D. Roosevelt, held up a giant poster of the Declaration’s 30 Articles, having played an instrumental role in drafting it as the Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights.

Translated into more than 500 languages, and often taught to children and young people, the UDHR, celebrated on what has long been known as Human Rights Day, remains a blueprint for a better world, and has undoubtedly helped to shape the worldview of many of those who been taught it or have otherwise encountered it in the 76 years since its publication, even though, on numerous counts, governments around the world are failing to fulfil their obligations to its clear enunciations of fundamental rights and equality, and far too many western citizens are also failing to heed the lessons of history, and are drifting into dangerous far-right intolerance.

In the west, in particular, the rise of racism, and a growing hatred of refugees and migrants is a deplorable descent into inhumanity, while western leaders’ enthusiasm for endless war, in the face of catastrophic climate change, strikes me as nothing less than a collective psychic derangement.

The Convention Against Torture, the Senate torture report, and torture today

Regarding one of the UDHR’s Articles, on the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the long struggle to create the Torture Convention is also worth remembering today, on the 40th anniversary of its adoption by the UN General Assembly.

As a scholar of the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror” — both at Guantánamo and in the CIA’s “black sites” — the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, in defiance of the Convention, has long been a preoccupation of mine, and the focus of much of my work.

in 2009, I was the lead writer of a UN Special Mandates report about secret detention around the world, in which I focused on what, at that time, were the still-shadowy parameters of the CIA’s post-9/11 “black site” torture program, involving secret prisons in other countries (Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania), run by the CIA, and proxy torture prisons in the Middle East, run by their own notorious in-house torturers. Little did I know that, at the time that I was compiling a list of 94 prisoners in the CIA program, the Senate Intelligence Committee was also working on an extraordinary report, drawing on over six million pages of classified documents, whose 500-page executive summary was released ten years ago yesterday, and which I wrote about at the time in an article for Al Jazeera, entitled, “Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report.”

Ten years later, there has been no accountability, and the full, 6,700-page report remains hidden, but what was released still constitutes an astonishing demonstration not only of the brutality and futility of the program, but also of the US’s ability, when it wishes, to demonstrate that checks and balances between the executive, Congress and the courts can still exist.

I have also assiduously analyzed, and commented on torture and other forms of abuse at Guantánamo, in relation not only to its early years, when specific torture programs were officially employed, but also through a focus on the persistently abusive and ongoing nature of conditions at the prison.

This, I’m glad to say, is a perspective that was vindicated last June when, after becoming the first UN Rapporteur to visit the prison, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, produced a devastating report in which, taking into account the failure to “provide any torture rehabilitation to detainees,” and the continuing violence at the prison, the “structural and entrenched physical and mental healthcare deficiencies,” the “inadequate access to family,” and the “ongoing, arbitrary detention characterized by fair trial and due process violations,” she concluded that “the totality of these factors, without doubt, amounts to ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”

Today, as we mark the 40th anniversary of the Torture Convention, we must not only remember the men still held at Guantánamo, but also the tens of thousands held in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, which were partly an inspiration for Guantánamo, where arbitrary detention is the norm, where torture in ubiquitous, murders are widespread, and due process is denied. Always deplorable and unacceptable, the conditions in these prisons has worsened dramatically since October 7, 2023, as a UN report recently explained, under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the fanatical far-right settler who is part of Netanyahu’s coalition government, and is the Minister of National Security, responsible for the police, prisons and security services. In a sign of the horrors to come, Ben-Gvir banned all international observers (chiefly the International Committee of the Red Cross) from all of Israel’s prisons for Palestinians after October 7, just as the US government hid the very existence of its “black sites” from the ICRC.

He too deserves to be indicted by the ICC, along with his fellow far-right colleague, Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, who is primarily responsible for Israel’s expansionist ethnic cleansing plans, including noticeably increased violence in the West Bank.

In addition, it’s not possible, while marking the 40th anniversary of the Torture Convention, to overlook another longstanding horror story — the network of unaccountable torture prisons and subterranean extermination camps in Syria, which are currently being liberated after the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad, and where at least 30,000 prisoners are estimated to have been murdered since the initial uprising against the Assad regime in 2011 — or to forget that, when the US was seeking out proxy prisons for its “war on terror” prisons, one of the regimes that it worked with closely, along with Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, was the Assad regime in Syria.

So is hope still alive?

In conclusion, to return to my opening question, “Is hope still alive?”, the answer has to be yes, despite the grisly catalog of current and past horrors exposed on the anniversaries of the Genocide Convention, the UDHR and the Torture Convention.

Until a few days ago, no one thought that the Assad regime could fall so quickly, and those who remain giddiest about their supposed invincibility — the US and Israel, above all — ought to be aware that the sands of time can shift abruptly, and that no empire or marauding genocidal colonizer lasts forever. Above all, however, I have hope because I still believe in the mechanisms put in place after the atrocities of the Second World War to try to prevent similar atrocities from happening again.

What does strike me particularly, however, is how those same powers who only tolerated the enshrinement of human rights and international humanitarian law after WWII as long as it never applied to them still retain disproportionate influence in the much-changed world of today. In particular, although the UN and the ICC undoubtedly have the moral high ground, the lack of enforcement mechanisms — particularly through the permanent veto reserved for the “victors” of the Second World War in the Security Council (the US, the UK, France, Russia and China) — is an anachronism that allows the US in particular, and persistently in defense of Israel, to shamefully override the will of the rest of the world.

This needs to end, as does any lingering presumption that any one country or any bloc (in this case, the west) has any right to dictate to the rest of the world how — or even whether — mechanisms introduced after the Second World War to restrain our worst impulses are somehow optional, or can be suppressed or discarded for narrow sectarian interests.

Human rights, as we must conclude on Human Rights Day, are for everyone equally, or they don’t exist at all.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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