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Humankind has faced greater challenges than the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, we were already confronting a few of them as the world started to lockdown earlier this year. Now, more than ever, is the time we need a United Nations of purpose and resolve, writes Dr Lissa Johnson.
During his speech at the opening of this years session of the UN General Assembly (GA), the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, described a world turned upside down. He told attendees that, the pillars of our world wobble on already shaky footings. Those who built the United Nations 75 years ago had lived through a pandemic, a global depression, genocide and world war. Today, he said, we face our own 1945 moment.
Outside, in the populations that the UN exists to serve, poverty and child malnutrition are predicted to double in the wake of coronavirus restrictions, 79.5 million people are displaced by violence and persecution, 37-59 million of them by the War on Terror alone, and arms control agreements fail as economic depression looms. Against that backdrop, the UNs mission to improve the worlds welfare and security is perhaps more urgent, and more pressing, for more people in more corners of the globe, than ever.
Lofty ambitions
As the UNs primary policy-setting body, the GeneralAssembly determines how the UN will tackle some of humanitys most pressingproblems, including achieving greater peace and security, protection of humanrights, disarmament and economic welfare. One of its primary policy initiativesfor addressing current global governance challenges are the UNs 2030 SustainableDevelopment Goals, also known as the 2030 Agenda, which seek to end poverty andworld hunger, and promote safe, peaceful, equitable and sustainable societies forall.
According to a2015 resolution adopted at the 70th UNGA, the new Agendarequires a revitalised Global Partnership to ensure its implementationbringing together Governments, the private sector, civil society, the UnitedNations system and other actors and mobilizing all available resources.
Such a humanitarian Global public-private Partnership was, of course, ambitious even in 2015. Now, with the global economic and social fabric tearing under COVID-19, precisely how the private sector, governments and civil society might merge to mobilise all available resources is up for grabs, quite literally.
The pandemic has facilitated what has been described as oneof the greatest wealth transfers in history, with the US Government pouring$4.5trillion of COVID relief into corporations and big banks, seeing USbillionaires fortunes soarby $565 billion during the first 11 weeks of the pandemic, while42.6 million Americans found themselves unemployed.
What will become of the UNs vision for economic andhuman welfare amidst such a steep rise in economic inequality, with its corrosiveimpact on health and human rights?
As Guterres stressed, COVID-19 has laid bare the worlds fragilities,including rising inequalities rampant corruption and dangerous new threatsto human rights The pandemic has exploited these injustices, preyed on themost vulnerable and wiped away the progress of decades.
In response, will transnational corporate interests continueseizing the disaster-capitalist moment, and capture the levers of global power withinvigorated zeal?
In the United States, for instance, COVID-19 vaccinedevelopment is taking place in secret, outside the usual oversight mechanisms, aspart of a collaborationbetween defence contractors, military officials and pharmaceutical companieswith poor track records on safety. Why? What has the military, or secrecy, gotto do with peacetime development of medicines and vaccines?
While the world grapples with improving health outcomes across the board, is the militarisation of for-profit medicine really a good idea? What are the broader implications for the human right to health?
If a new more humanitarian global arrangement is to emerge, the 2030 Agenda stressed that the world will require an efficient and effective United Nations system. Clearly, if ever there was a time to take stock of the United Nations system, that time is now. If ever there was a critical moment at which to review and strengthen the global mechanisms for protection and enforcement of human rights, that moment has arrived.
Getting real
The enormous gulf between the pressing need for globalpolitical leadership and governments failure to rise to the challenge becamepainfully obvious at the October 15th meeting of the UNGA Social, Humanitarian & CulturalCommittee, where the UNSpecial Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, rang the alarm bell. Hesaid, Today, 75-years after the establishment of the United Nations tortureand ill-treatment continue to be practiced with impunity throughout the world.(0:53:00)
Practiced with impunity? Throughout the world? Why?
The stark discrepancy between the universal prohibitionand the worldwide complacency with such abuse is not a singular phenomenon,Melzer explained, but highlights a more generalised gap between the declaredambitions and the actual practice of human rights protection. In fact, thepersistent failure of the international community to eradicate torture andill-treatment exemplifies the broader incapacity of contemporary governancesystems to fulfil the promises of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Incapacity of contemporary governance systems?Complacency worldwide? After 75 years?
Its a sobering reality the Rapporteur observed.
But with the worlds best legal and human rights minds comingtogether at the UN, year after year, decade after decade, one is tempted toask: What is going on? What have they been doing all this time? What is wrongwith their normative frameworks and enforcement mechanisms that the best theycan achieve after 75 years is complacency with torture? Worldwide.
Nothing, according to Melzer. He added that the rootcause is not a lack of expertise, resources or normative consensus.
What is it then? Bad actors? Psychopathic leaders? Rottenapples? Trees? Orchards?
Nor [is it]generalised malicious intent, he said.
Then what?
To address that question, the UN Special Rapporteur answeredthe UN Secretary Generals callfor the international community, to be guided by science and tethered to realityduring this foundational moment.
Theroot cause, Melzer explained, resides not in bureaucratic incompetence nor generalisedmaliciousness, but in the science of human psychology and decision-making.
In his UNGA report, titled Biopsychosocial factors conducive to torture andill-treatment,the Rapporteur wrote, Inspired by the theories of the Age ofEnlightenment in the eighteenth century, modern statehood, political theoryand governance systems are founded upon the presumption of rational decision-making based on an innate orlearned moral framework.
That presumption, however, is wrong. It is perhaps asuseful to modern statehood as bloodlettingand blowing smoke would be to modern medicine.
The report continues, Although humans are endowed with reason incontrast to traditional presumptions of rationality and morality, modernscience has demonstrated that, in reality, human decision-making is guidedpredominantly by unconscious emotional processes pursuing the fulfilment ofbasic human needs.
Okay, sure. But what has that got to do with modernstatehood and governance? Or worldwide complacency over human rights?
In his 25-page report, Nils Melzer explained that humannature, human neurobiology and human social psychology render all of usinherently and inescapably susceptible to patterns of moral disengagement,involving psychological blind-spots to our own atrocities and misdeeds.
When faced with unwelcome information such as evidence ofhuman rights violations, bothperpetrators and bystanders tend to suppress the resulting moral dilemmasthrough largely unconscious patterns of self-deception and denial.
These patterns of self-deception, Melzer wrote, Severely impair the ability and willingness of political leaders, judges, officials, the media and even the general public to accurately perceive and act upon allegations of official misconduct. This, he stressed, can corrupt and neutralise even sophisticated frameworks for the prevention and prosecution of torture and ill-treatment, thus producing the current worldwide prevalence of complacency and impunity.
A Reality Show ofSelf-Deception
The UN Rapporteurs statement to the UNGA was followed byquestions and comments from State representatives, which doubled as anuncannily convincing reality-show demonstrating the very processes that Melzerhad described.
Most strikingly, after thanking the Special Rapporteur, the representative of the United States observed (1:17:25), We take this opportunity to register our categorical rejection of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment. The human rights enshrined in our founding documents abhor the notion of torture in any form. Americas values are universal values, and they are based on the sanctity and protection of individual rights.
This, of course, is the same America that illegally tortured suspects in secret CIA torture black-sites around the globe, as exposed in a 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee report. The clandestine US torture program entailed an 81 million dollar contract with psychologists, whose task it was to design innovative forms of torture on behalf of the US state, such as rectally force feeding victims with hummus, pasta and nuts and sexually assaulting them with broomsticks, as well as more traditional forms of brutality including slamming victims into walls, stringing them up naked and threatening to harm their children and rape their mothers, or slit their mothers throats in front of them.
Many of the programs victims were subjected to theinfamous practice of waterboarding, putting them through the agony ofdrowning to the point of unconsciousness and then resuscitating them just to doit again, up to 183 times.
The US UNGA representative continued, The United Statesplayed a leading role in enacting the Convention Against Torture, and we remaintrailblazers in the campaign to end torture and related practices worldwide.
This is also the same America responsible not only for secrettorture black sites, but for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, all facilitatedby governmentmemos denying victims the protections of the Geneva Convention. It is thesame America that hosts blatantly inhumane detention conditions at USSupermax facilities and elsewhere.
The US President, moreover, has publicly endorsedwaterboarding and said that tortureworks.
The US representative went on, We are staunch advocatesfor the victims of torture No society can be free, nor any individual secure,when torture is permitted.
Which does not augur well for freedom and security onAmericas watch. The only people prosecuted for the US policy of torture werethose who informed the public of the states crimes, such as John Kiriakou,Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. The ones who participated in torture ordestroyed the evidence were promoted, such as Gina Haspel, former commander ofa black site in Thailand and current director of the CIA.
Ironically, the UN Rapporteur on Tortures report, towhich the US delegate was responding, explained that, the most rudimentary manner of avoiding or suppressing moral dilemmasis denial of factBest summarized in the slogan, what must not be, cannot be,denial of fact is a very common reaction of officials, journalists and citizensconfronted with unexpected or unwelcome allegations of serious systemicmisconduct.
Accordingly, in his official dialogue with States the report notes, the Special Rapporteur frequently receives official responses that divert attention through sweeping assurances of the Governments commitment to human rights.
After the US representative had finished divertingattention through sweeping assurances of the US Governments commitment tohuman rights (as did the representative of the UK Government, 1:03:45, i.e, the same Government that has refused toprosecute UK officials who participated in CIA torture and that just passed alaw granting British forces de facto impunityfor torture, murder and other serious crimes committed overseas), the USrepresentative turned his attention to the rest of the world. He admonished othernations to hold violators accountable, reserving special condemnation for threeUS adversaries: China, Belarus and Venezuela.
In his report, the UN Rapporteur noted that anothercommon denial tactic entails making sweepingaccusations against other stakeholders Perceiving torture as less morallywrong when perpetrated by ones own versus another nations security forcesis a documented phenomenon, driven by moral disengagement on group-based,us-versus-them, collectively self-glorifying grounds.
The US representative continued, While we appreciate theSpecial Rapporteurs work, we disagree with many of your reports conclusionsand recommendations, as they relate to lawful US practices that cannot reasonablybe considered torture.
In other words, You call it torture. We call it lawfulUS practices.
An alternative method of moral disengagement, as the Rapporteursreport notes, is to deny not the fact but the wrongfulness of abusive acts. Acommon method by which this is achieved is through trivialization, which begins with the use of euphemistic languageaimed at sanitizing torture and ill-treatment. Common euphemistic labelsinclude enhanced interrogation, deterrence, special administrativemeasures. And, in this case, lawful US practices.
Among the lawful US practices whose wrongfulness the USdelegate denied were the Assange and Manning cases.
Both Assange and Mannings treatment have been found toviolate the Convention Against Torture by various UN human rights mechanisms,including successive Special Rapporteurs on Torture and the Working Group onArbitrary Detention. In Julian Assanges case, that finding was based, in part,on a structured assessment protocol performed by two recognised medical expertsspecialised in the assessment and documentation of torture.
Several other medical experts having personally examinedAssange have independently come to the same conclusion.
Chelsea Manning attempted suicide in March 2020, precipitated by seven years of solitary confinement followed by re-arrest and indefinite coercive detention because of her conscientious objection to testifying against Assange in a Secret Grand Jury, the US equivalent of a political kangaroo court.
In order topreserve a false sense of reality, the UNGA report notes, processes ofself-deception and denial enable theconscious mind to pseudo-rationally dismiss even compelling evidence forserious misconduct. Compelling evidence, for example, such as the medical findingsof subject-matter experts in assessing and documenting torture.
Further evidence in Julian Assanges case includes thefact that the worlds leading rights organisations, from AmnestyInternational to HumanRights Watch to the HumanRights Commissioner (Dunja Mijatovic) and the ParliamentaryAssembly of the Council of Europe have denounced the US persecution ofJulian Assange. The International Bar Association Human Rights Institute has issueda statementcalling his treatment during his US extradition hearing reminiscent of the AbuGhraib prison scandal.
Denial of wrongfulness and dismissal of evidence is facilitatedin Julian Assange and Chelsea Mannings cases by the fact that both individualsrevealed systemic wrongdoing. As Melzers UNGA report notes, when ones societyor group is exposed as morally flawed, the unconscious psychological impulse isto shoot the messenger, known as derogation of moral advocates.
Psychologically, demonising moral advocates enables the confrontinginformation to be suppressed, discredited or denied. In other words, as long aswe regard Manning as a traitor and Assange as a spy and a hacker, rapist, andnarcissist, just to make sure he is well and truly demonised we can avoiddiscussing the crimes and corruption they have exposed. We can keep foolingourselves into thinking that our Government still loves and protects us, thatour militaries are still the good guys and that it was theRussians, not our ownpoliticians, who manipulated the 2016 (and now2020) presidential elections.
The Special Rapporteurs report notes that rather thanabsorb such evidence of moral failing, a human knee-jerk response is to instead, question the motivations andintegrity of moral advocates making, transmitting or investigating theincriminating allegations. Accordingly, another ubiquitous response to allegationsof torture and ill-treatment involves, discrediting,demonizing or blaming victims, witnesses, critics and other moral advocates.Such as human rights defenders, whistleblowers, journalists and publishers.
But it is at this point that those of us reading aboutthese matters must shift our focus from the UNGA to ourselves. As Nils Melzertold his UN colleagues, We are allsusceptible to these patterns in the face of unwelcome information regardlessof our education, our status or our morality.
Melzers report emphasises that bystander complacency caused by wilful ignorance represents a significant obstacle to the effective investigation, prosecution and punishment of torture and ill-treatment, as well as to redress and rehabilitation. And, crucially: Distorted perceptions of reality resulting from wilful ignorance also routinely render media organizations incapable of objectively detecting and exposing government involvement in torture and ill-treatment, and prevent ordinary citizens from addressing and correcting systemic shortcomings through their democratic rights.
The reality for us bystanders is that Julian Assange has been subjected to a decade-long smear campaign, designed to capitalise on the denialist human impulse to demonise the messenger, thereby fostering passive, silent, bystanding to his torture and abuse. It is our own self-deception and denial as citizens that has facilitated this, as well as the abuse of Chelsea Manning, such that Julian Assanges life now hangs in the balance, along with our own freedom of speech, our own right to know the truth, and our own ability to hold our governments to account.
The existentialrisks of denial
Throughout the UNGAmeeting, the human tendency towards denial of reality was furtherdemonstrated by the representatives of Denmark, the European Union and France,all of whom failed to even register the topic of the Special Rapporteursreport and UNGA address.
Instead, they each expressed their appreciation and askedquestions regarding Professor Melzers previous report on a differenttopic (psychological torture), submitted to a different UN body (the HumanRights Council) at a different time and place (March 2020). What must not be, cannot be so letsjust talk about the weather, shall we?
The Russian representative was the only delegate whoacknowledged having carefully read Melzers report. He dismissed the report,however, as too research based and too far removed from practice, which was interesting,given that the reports practical relevance had just been poignantlydemonstrated by the preceding speakers themselves.
More importantly, the Russian representative was effectively advocating an approach to human rights protection that is divorced from or blind to the empirical scientific research. In other words, he called for business as usual: complacency and impunity, worldwide.
In my official dialogue with states, Nils Melzer toldthe meeting, I routinely encounter all of these patterns of self-deception anddenial.
To learn more about those patterns, and how they obstructenforcement of human rights, you can read the Special Rapporteurs 75thUNGA report here, with recommendationsfor policy and governance reform on p.24.
In summarising his recommendations at the UNGA, Melzertold the delegates, Any global governance system seeking to fulfil thepromises of the universal declaration of human rights, the UN Charter and theSustainable Development Goals for 2030 must be based on a realistic, empiricaland science-based conception of human nature.
The international community, he said, must developframeworks and institutions specifically designed to mitigate the increasinglyexistential risks of human self-deception. Our distorted perceptions are aninherent part of human psychology, he stressed, and therefore should not becondemned, but must be fully acknowledged and appropriately managed, in orderto prevent the widespread corruption, destruction and cruelty which currentlyengulf the entire world.
This applies, he said, not only in the area of humanrights, but also of environmental protection, financial stability, and theprevention of pandemics.
Particularly to the prevention of pandemics. Nothingexacerbates blind spots, self-deception and denial like threat, trauma, panic, anxietyand fear. Such as that engendered by COVID-19.
Under conditions of fear and threat, human beings areprone to becoming particularly blinded, self-deceiving, conformist and obedient.A process called system justification comes into play, whereby the greater thethreats citizens face, and the greater the flaws in the social, political andeconomic systems upon which they depend, the greater their impulse to doubledown on those systems legitimacy, and defend the status quo, through denialand self-deception in all its forms.
So great is the need for certainty, belonging andstability during periods of societal upheaval that the more our social andpolitical systems fail us, the harder we work to preserve our faith in them.
When the pillars of our world wobble on already shaky footings as Antonio Guterreshas observed, reality can become too difficult, emotionally speaking, tosee. Such is the crux, and the challenge, of what he described as our 1945moment.
But is this moment truly akin to 1945? With psychologicaleyes wide open, I fear that we are nowhere near that cathartic turning point ofdisillusionment, truth and vision, from which the UN was born. We appear closerto a moment of 1914 or 1939, complacently sleepwalking into an abyss ofpolitical, economic and social destruction, devolution and cruelty.
Our only hope, it seems to me, is that those ringing the alarm bells, such as Professor Melzer, will be heard, and that they will prove me wrong.
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While We All Sleepwalk Into A Human Rights Vacuum, The United Nations Is Facing Its Moment Of Truth - New Matilda
