The Colonialism of Human Rights. Colin Samson

The Colonialism of Human Rights - Colin Samson


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globalized, administered by governments and declared to apply equally to all. Many of those adhering to liberalism have refrained from insults to those regarded as their beneficiaries – now, these are only the preserve of populists – and have envisioned a world of rights scraped clean of slavery and colonialism. This perspective is displayed in human rights discussions, scholarly and official. According to Karima Bennoune, UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights, universal human rights are a ‘basic tenet of international law’. This is so fundamental that there can be ‘no second-class citizens’ she said.2

      While the UN is outwardly unambiguous about universal human rights, it has of course committed human rights offences, among them the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia causing 500 ‘second-class’ civilian deaths.3 By contrast, states that are charged with enforcing human rights are more equivocal, proclaiming rights that their actions often deny. American Defense Secretary General James Mattis spoke of ‘the unwavering respect for human rights’ of the USA and larger international community in relation to the state-authorized murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul.4 Mattis made these commitments in Bahrain where, a year earlier, the leading human rights advocate in the country had been jailed, the only independent newspaper was closed by the government, death penalties had been meted out after forced confessions, and access to the country had been denied to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture.5 A few months later, the President whom Mattis served reiterated his support for the Saudi regime that ordered the killing of Khashoggi, a US resident and critic of the Saudi autocracy, citing billions of dollars in Saudi investments in US companies as a rationale.6 Since this time, the US Congress has blocked the sending of arms to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf autocracies, but this was easily sidestepped through a Presidential veto in July 2019.

      Nevertheless, denial of human rights, and rationalizations of such denials based either in law or in exceptions to the law, often occur alongside assertions of virtues that are held to reside largely with, and derive from, Europe and its North American diaspora. This paradox – or, to use a harsh word, hypocrisy – is incarnated in the colonial dimensions of human rights pronunciations, and is a component of ongoing white privilege and asserted moral rectitude. A Janus-faced orientation to the world recalls European writers struggling with Empire, such as George Orwell. As an English person commenting on a world in which the British state and society had such profound influence, Orwell was exercised about the imperial subordination of others regarded as inferior. In Burmese Days, and essays such as ‘England Your England’, he illustrated how the British Empire was presented as a triumph of civilization, exposing contradictions between this and the numerous abominations committed in Britain’s name.14

      It is something of this that attaches to discussions of human rights. Rights which were rhetorically associated with Western civilization, and often held to be universally valid, were explicitly denied to colonial subjects, indigenous peoples and the enslaved. The denial of equal rights – or, sometimes, any rights – to these populations was justified by their imputed savagery, backwardness and inferiority. Indeed, the claim to be acting on behalf of humanity was a convenient justification for colonialism. General Mattis and Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon are emblematic of a longer history in which the practice and endorsement of non-universal human rights corresponds with claims to allegiance to universal human rights. This tension is now manifold, as the exceptions, exclusions and denials of human rights that occurred simultaneously with colonialism and enslavement metastasized into new realms of de facto non-universality.

      Contemporary human rights conflicts are layered onto this uncompleted history of racial domination. Consequently, my focus is on past and ongoing practices of Western colonial powers and settler colonial states and their relevance to selectivity and differentiation in human rights today. My task is not to follow the footsteps of numerous human rights scholars who trace genealogies of international human rights, or to advocate a system of apolitical and fully universal human rights. This is not so much a study of human rights, but of uncompleted histories of exception, differentiation and rightlessness which cannot be entirely extricated from the study of human rights.


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