World Forum on Democracy

Panel discussion

"Human Rights and the Right to Democracy in International Relations"

Aryeh Neier noted that the promotion of human rights and democracy are essential for international relations. Democratic governments who respect human rights do not fight wars. The principles are also essential to economic development: the major agencies have come to recognise that democracy and accountability are critical to avoiding the corruption that can ruin development. The establishment of international organisations - such as the Tribunal for Yugoslavia, and the embryonic International Criminal Court - plus military interventions on the grounds of the protection of human rights in the last decade, from the protection of the Kurds of Iraq in 1991, to the intervention in Kosovo in 1999 - demonstrate a growing sense of global responsibility. However, this should not be elevated to the point at which we forget that states ultimately have the main responsibility for the protection of human rights: sovereignty means taking responsibility, and this responsibility should be nurtured where it appears under threat.

Sergei Kovalyov stated that he does not trust sovereign states to safeguard the protection of human rights: supra-national organisations have more hope of achieving it. The WFD should come up with proposals to form global institutions to guard democracy and human rights, and to transform existing institutions to enable them to respond better and prevent political considerations overruling human rights violations.

John Bolton's angle is that human rights are one sub-set of individual liberty. The framers of the American constitution understood that it was safeguarding the separation of power that is the best means of protecting the individual rights of Americans. In the international sphere there must be recognition that international relations is a process of trade-offs: Taiwan may have had a recent peaceful transition to democracy, but it is still excluded from the UN, and no government will seriously consider intervening in Chechnya, nor in Tibet, since Russia and China are major powers. The international community cannot intervene in the process of other countries' nation-building. In his opinion, the US has no obligation to intervene in what is currently happening in Afghanistan, for example; the assistance that the US originally provided was justified at the time as a matter of legitimate national interest, and what has happened since is the responsibility of the Afghans.