Interview
Interview with Morten Kjaerum
Director at the Raul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights
We brought up some of todays emerging challenges to Human rights (Post-covid, China and Hong Kong, mining in Africa, western neo-colonialism, economic arguments) and although Morten did seem troubled at some points, he had answers to most of our worries and he seemed confident that some of these challenges would perhaps even help strengthen Human rights in the future.
Morten, you have done some work on the human rights issues of the Covid crisis. We do not have that many of them here in the west, but Covid did truly bring a crisis upon us. Edward Snowden famously said that “A crisis is like a mirror for society, reflecting back it’s weaknesses and inequalities”. What weaknesses did this reveal of our system?
I think it revealed a number of issues. First of all it demonstrated a need for institutions, that can protect and fulfill human rights. Especially is the US you have the notion of freedom as the absence of the state, while we in Europe can see the need for institutions that can guarantee the rights to education, health and so on. Offcourse, to prevent any misuse these need a good Human rights framework, and one of the things covid showed us is how weak this framework is for an emergency situations is, especially in protecting those that where left behind during the crisis. Persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, children and others.
Do you have any concrete examples of what and when human rights were violated during the crisis, that stand out to you?
The right to health and the right to life. How do you reach out to the vulnerable groups? Do you even know who they are? That brings not only the individual in high risk due to lack of information but also the entire community since they unknowingly may spread the the virus.
So the problem was in communication of important information?
Yes, but also just taking it seriously! Seeing those groups! I mean, when the prime minister in Denmark was asked “What will you do with the ethnic minorities?” she basically looked at the journalist and said “When you live in Denmark you speak Danish”. That is simply not very helpful. I mean as a society, it is not very sound, since practically if they do not know, they may then spread the virus, simply because they where not sufficiently informed.
Another one has to do with what is called “triage”, when a doctor has to say “Ok, now we will treat you, but not you”. When you suddenly have a major influx of patients, what can you do? There are some court cases in the US and Germany arguing that the staff and doctors where simply not equipped for this situation; the legislation was weak and they where not trained to do this from a human rights perspective. So who where the ones left out? Well, off course the ones with disabilities. They have a worse life expectancy. But that is not the sort of judgement that you should do in that situation.
We also saw a lot of immigrants living in slave like conditions in Europe, where you had massive outbreaks of covid, because they where not protected. So the whole issue of workers exploitation in the labor market became apparent.
And then off course the built in racism in our societies. Who is being treated? Who is on the front lines?
And then finally I will also point out the global inequality when it came to rights to the covid vaccinations. The roll out did not respect the right to health for people in the global south to the same extent. But I could go on and on… I made a whole book about it.
In some countries more than others, but across the board, the information about the virus and it’s response where heavily moderated. The flow of information was not extended down to the public and the public debate. Most people where not privy to participate. Even some professionals where threatened for merely asking questions. It made it hard to find and discuss certain information as citizens. Is this not troublesome in a human rights perspective, considering the rights to information, freedom of expression and these sorts of things?
Yes definitely, we saw cases of this across the globe, also in Europe. You had medical doctors and others with diverting views, who were laid off, basically lost their jobs. Journalists who were asked to not write certain things. It became a very narrow discourse of only certain health-specialists. Economists, political scientists etc. had great difficulties entering into that space. There was a big discussion in the European parliament that took part on exactly that issue of freedom of expression during a crisis. It’s enormously important that when you are confronted with something you do not really know, that you do not tie yourself into a narrow perspective. Then you may actually miss some very important things. Yes, you may not want to hear it. Yes, it may divert from the main gospel, but maybe there is something anyway that you need to consider.
With all crisis usually, afterwards, we see major improvements and initiatives take place. What sort of improvements and initiatives do you see after covid?
It’s a completely different discourse now, than before covid. There is a completely different understanding. Before there was the sort of “ What kind of planet do you come from?” when raising these sorts of issues. There is now an acceptance that the human rights based approach in the health sector, emergencies and education actually has a lot to contribute. An example is the interest in how education can be secured to all, not just the well of kids, during a crisis like this.
Also there is an interest in how we roll back initiatives, legislation and policies that where put in place during crisis. How do we avoid that they actually remain, like they have in some countries like China. I was in China in November and it was quite obvious that a lot of the emergency legislation was still in place there and there are no plans to roll it back because it adds another layer of control. We need to be aware of this and have mechanisms in place that registers what things need to be rolled back.
The Raul Wallenberg Institute had successful Human rights programs in China before, but today you are not active in the country anymore. What exactly brought this on and how do you view working in difficult countries such as China, where perhaps your work is needed the most?
We where in China for about 20 years or so, so we have a lot of good relations there, but increasingly we did not get permissions to have certain programs etc. there. When we had to stop our programs there then we sort of knew that “now it is time”. At that point we where the last human rights organization left in China. The lessons learned depends on what sort of organization you are, but if possible, stay as long as possible. You are so sort of a lifeline, the oxygen for all the people that want to work with human rights there.
Continuing with China, Hong Kong recently has and is still going through a major democratic slide back where a large part of the citizens took it upon themselves to stand up for their human rights. What started as a peaceful student protest quickly escalated into ever more desperate and violent attempts to move the Chinese authorities. When defending ones human rights, what means are legitimate and do you think the students had better means at their disposal?
It’s difficult to see these days. When the system is massively closing down on the student environments, their organizations and so on. The means available to actually control this… I don’t know, honestly I don’t know. It is not easy to organize. That is what we see over in Russia too. I speak weekly with a friend in Russia and we very often come back to statements made here in the west like: “Why don’t they just do X or do Y”, “Why don’t they demonstrate” I mean come on, look. Off course we can demonstrate, but then we will be in prison two minutes later. What are the other means? We saw what happened to Navalny. I mean the totalitarian states of today have very powerful means we have to recognize. We saw what happened in Iran. They where able to quell the demonstrations. So honestly, I don’t have the magic powder. But we have to keep up the interaction and the constant dialogue. We have a big program in Afghanistan here with a lot of Afghanistan scholars, where we try to mobile this way of thinking. To the future.
When you have a lot of states like even the US, that take a lot of liberties, in the name of liberty, how does an organization stand in relation to that? How do you actively work against big states trespassing of human rights?
There are 3 incidents that has created a lot of cynicism about human rights. The first one being the Iraq-war, the other one is covid and the vaccination roll-out and now the third, Gaza. These three incidents alone have an enormous impact on the support or lack of support for human rights. Because they see as what they perceive as the west working with double standards. Our counter argument to this is that just because the United States with Bush, the covid masters, some big industries, Israel or Europe misuse human rights or do not live up to human rights in the way we think they should, does not mean that human rights are bad! This is a conflation of the two. “Now the US, in the name of human rights, invade Iraq so now we don’t like neither the US nor human rights. I mean that is clearly a misuse of Human rights, so please don’t undermine it. Human rights can still be extremely helpful. Then we have to address these issues as they occur as a lot of organizations and certain institutions also do. I think we are making progress here. Human rights are not just western values, that they are there as a value for everybody, and that is more understood now.
You have a mission in sub-Saharan Africa where there are companies such as Glencore in Zambia that are accused of exploiting natural resources and workers there in the mining industry. What can you as an organization do there? Are there any economic policies of accountability to adhere to?
We started that discussion already back in the 90’s, about human rights in business. People then sort of looked at us and said “C’mon this is ridiculous. Human rights is all about states and nothing to do with business”. We kept on pushing and today this is a very big area. Today we have for example the UN principles of due diligence and so called “soft laws”; EU has a lot of legislation that unfortunately is not yet on print, but we will get there and it will have a global impact on companies.
We have a very close collaboration with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights where we work on what we call “Human rights economy”. There we try to open he ears of the economists, the world bank, IMF and finance ministers of the world to take human rights seriously. The growing economic inequalities in the world will create more crime, conflicts, wars and other instabilities after all.
So to get them to take human rights seriously you strictly use consequential arguments then?
Yes, you could say so. We have actually worked towards having better economic arguments. It is something we have lacked. Together with the Islandic government we worked out economic arguments like “What does it cost to invest more in children, in schools, kindergardens etc.? What is the return rate? Businesses know the return rate of building a bridge. There are methods to calculate that for the coming thirty years. However there are hardly any methods of calculating value invested in children and the profits of that for society. But our work has shown that if you want to put your money where there is good interest rates, then you should put it on the children. But today we see bridges as investments and children as tax burdens.
Is this not a diversion from ethical motivations that Human rights are founded on?
Well, we are not saying that if there are no economical gains, you should not invest in education etc. some of it will cost the society, but that is the society we want, is it not? Sure if we don’t then yes, we can live in gated communities with vastly unequal societies, where we bus our children around because they can not walk around safely, but is that what we want? That is not the model we have developed in the Nordic countries or Europe for that matter.
If we should look at a place to inspire, very often we look at the nordic countries. The problem is that we may very well be eroding it.
The Raul Wallenberg institute celebrates it’s 40 years anniversary this year. It is an institute that was opened during the cold war, to address the human rights discussion at the time. It started with research and education about human rights. After the fall of the wall, when dramatic changes happened in the area of human rights it found its place in the process of democratization of many eastern and central European nations. People called the institute in need for help with more than just the usual foundations of democracy with elections, institutions etc. What is the value base in democracy? Is it just a recipe for how to make decisions? It is surely much more to it in a modern state. The institution basically helped in advice and support to new democracies who wanted to take human rights onboard. As it grew it continued on this path and now it has opened several offices globally with three regional offices, in which Lund is the headquarter of Europe.
Interview: Matilda Lowegren and Benjamin Bengtsson
