CPU Events

Kenneth Roth

Transcript of Opening Remarks

Thank you very much. It’s good to see you all. It’s a pleasure to be here at Columbia. I just live down the street so I feel like I’m sort of talking at home almost.

But anyway, I thought I would talk today about, and as and as my remarks are entitled, three challenges that we’re facing in the human rights movement. These are three quite different challenges but I thought it kind of made sense to put them all together.

One, the situation in Darfur is really the classic, massive human rights abuse. There are huge atrocities taking place and there the challenge is, can we mobilize the international community to stop the killing? Is humanitarian intervention or some kind of meaningful action possible today?

The second challenge is very different in nature. And that is the one that perhaps is symbolized by Abu Grahib but you could talk more broadly about U.S. interrogation tactics. And here, I’m not pretending that the U.S. government is the worst human rights abuser in the world, but it is the most powerful, the most influential, human rights abuser in the world. And what does that do when you have the superpower openly flouting some of the most basic human rights norms such as the prohibition on torture and inhumane treatment? So that’s the second challenge.

And then third, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the United Nations. Because the UN is often the institution to which we look to try to address these human rights problems. But the UN is in a moment of crisis right now. It’s being attacked by the right wing in this country, it has a corruption scandal, and it’s not clearly set up the ideal way you want to, in order to make it an effective body to promote human rights. This is a moment when there has been, recently released, a high level panel report on UN reform. And so it’s an opportunity to sit back and say, well, how do we restructure the United Nations in order to make it a more effective body to promote human rights?