As is commonly recognised, there are two ways in which compliance with human rights norms can be enforced. One approach is the enforcement of economic sanctions or military invasion. This is only possible in the case of powerful nations. The other strategy is through forceful condemnation which can be undertaken by non-governmental organisations or smaller nations, irrespective of their military or economic power or their lack of adequate international clout.
Though the practice of state sovereignty puts up barriers to the implementation of international human rights standards, moral pressure against the governments guilty of violating human rights sometimes succeeds in nudging them to step back. But mostly, it is seen that authoritarian regimes such as the dispensation of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China or Kim Jong-un in North Korea completely ignore the pleadings of various governments, many of whom, in reality, have their own political and economic agenda in disingenuously taking the moral high ground of an anti-war or a liberal narrative.
Impact of naming and shaming
However, Rochelle Terman, a scholar on human rights, in her recent study, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works’ — and When It Backfires (Princeton 2024), places the idea of locating shaming in strategic contexts, thereby exploring the success of publicly identifying and condemning those guilty of human abuse. Naming and shaming, as well as the genuine intentions of lending full support to the victims have, in many instances, worked out positively as a deterrence to further violations.
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Innumerable political occasions across the world corroborate the impact of naming and shaming in endorsing human rights accountability and reforms. Such campaigns, it was seen, resulted in exerting significant pressure on governments to improve their human rights records — as in the case of Myanmar and Ethiopia — leading to the release of political prisoners.
Similarly, in Columbia and Argentina, naming and shaming had a tangible impact on policy deviations to address human rights apprehensions. Dictators such as Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Slobodan Milošević from Serbia, Charles Taylor from Liberia, and Alberto Fujimori from Peru have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity after a worldwide censure of their tyranny was established. Across cultures, both traditional and modern, the violence against marginalised ethnic groups or LGBTQ individuals have led to augmented safeguards and appreciation of basic human rights. Campaigns against such perpetrators have visibly led to increased access to justice and reparations for victims of human rights abuses.
Though naming and shaming efforts often fail, with some guilty governments resisting or denying allegations, or making only cosmetic changes, unrelenting pressure and activism does contribute to greater culpability over time. For example, in the case of Israel, universal endorsements have had negligible impact on the leadership to comply with the demands of recognised human rights institutions which promote and monitor violations. But student agitations across the world against the genocide in Palestine or, more recently, against the dictatorship in Bangladesh are indisputably acts of dissent resulting in exerting moral pressure on the Zionist lobby or on the idea of religious nationalism that often leads to authoritarianism. Such campaigns have often led to increased international scrutiny and demands for human rights improvements. It is disheartening that many nations remain bystanders, or disallow student agitations to suit their right-wing affiliations.
Conundrum in international law
The moot question, therefore, before us is to interrogate if the strategy of using “naming and shaming” is effective. Though a powerful tool of moral pressure that puts a country such as China, Russia, Israel or Syria in the spotlight, and condemns violations and urges reform, a conundrum in international law continues to smoulder. For example, when Amnesty International asks you to endorse a petition on behalf of a political dissident in China, or the United Nations issues a resolution convicting state violence in Syria, it amounts to shaming. Or when Russia is banned from participating in the Olympics, it becomes an international act of humiliating the violator. But what can such moral sanctions achieve when in many cases even military invasion or economic sanctions do not work?
Rather than merely exposing the violator on the global stage, one way out of the conundrum would be to ensure that human rights emerge from the inherent social and democratic institutions as well as from the innate national psyche. Human rights advocates must urge governments to build a bridge between power and law, concentrating steadfastly on popular appeals and democratic politics. The success of such an approach will depend on the intensity with which the illiberal forces are challenged by disallowing liberal ideas to be subverted.
Forces fighting for human rights must come to grips with the tendency to co-opt the forces of liberalism through a false rhetoric based on propaganda and deceptions used as trappings of manipulation for the furtherance of power, and buttressed by a sort of unconstitutional politics. Such a brand of hubris will stand vanquished when the impetus given to the growth of human rights and the furtherance of economic and social reforms disempowers the tyranny of the state.
Understandably, we live in a world beleaguered by prejudice and fanaticism, where authoritarian governments tyrannise their people, where free speech is denied with utmost insensitivity. The very dignity of the people is repudiated and their fundamental freedoms cramped.
The state and human rights
To restore the personal liberty of all and bring the guilty to justice within the ambit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, becomes the responsibility of the state. Such a call for the scrutiny of the various functions and policies of the state would hasten the advent of the question of human rights to the centre stage and usher in an environment of peace, tolerance and understanding. To achieve this, it is pragmatic that the state takes this task as binding and sacred. In case the state shows reluctance in patronising the cause of human rights, any kind of resistance activism would gain in its legitimacy, especially as a process of a critical, reflective and alert defence of the general public against state persecution or indifference.
Achievements and disappointments of implementing human rights are better understood within the context of liberal modernity where a repression-free state respects human rights without any bias or partiality so that rules of equal treatment stand at the forefront of its crucial concerns. This is possible when the interests of the prevailing parties in power cohere with the question of seeking human rights as fundamental to their political ideology and a zeitgeist underpinned by a conscience of a deep-rooted moral concern. The state would, therefore, need to establish stronger institutions that keep abreast of the democratic norms of protecting basic human rights, a moral and legal position based on ideologically-centered proclamations of norms and expositions.
It is imperative, therefore, to establish the undeniable centrality of human rights amidst the ever-increasing human-rights violations in a rapidly changing world, particularly in liberal systems which help to sustain full stability through generating public welfare in an egalitarian environment. To achieve this, a consolidation of the plausible foundation for human rights, of political coalitions, institutional arrangements, and political ideologies has to be mobilised as a strategy for achieving compliance and justice through holding culprits responsible. This centrality remains absent in North Korea or China, and now in many countries with right-wing governments across the world where the success of a political system depends not on purposeful prerequisite for rights, open-minded legality, or democratic culpability, but on the authoritarian ideological state apparatus geared to attain maximum power over the people.
Shelley Walia has taught Cultural Theory at Punjab University
