Failure To Protect Human Rights By Non-Failed States
Author: LawSphereX
Category: Constitutional & Human Rights
Published:
Updated:
FAILURE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS BY NON-FAILED
STATES
Shruti Patel, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat
ABSTRACT
The United States, despite its status as a global superpower, is shown to violate the human rights of individuals detained under suspicion of terrorism. This is exemplified in the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years without evidence, as depicted in the film "The Mauritanian." The film highlights the systemic flaws in the US justice system's treatment of detainees, the use of torture, and the erosion of fundamental rights in the name of national security. The ambiguity in international laws and treaties is identified as a key factor enabling these human rights abuses.
The United States of America, an established super power and an enduring state, fails to protect and uphold the right of a citizen it has taken into custody, questioning and eventually jeopardizing the delicate yet crucial structure of human rights within and across borders. In an attempt to further their national security post a terrorist attack, the United States of America ends up embodying the modus operandi of those organizations. It threatens the right to life and liberty of an individual without due process and reason. The failure to provide constitutional remedies in time deepens the blow inflicted on the human rights of these accused making them additional victims of the 9/11 attacks. The failed states who were unable to protect their citizens from being detained without reason and due process are also an accomplice to the crime.
The Mauritanian by Kevin Macdonald is a reality based enactment of gross injustice revolving around the story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was detained by the government of United States of America on mere suspicion of his involvement in the 9/11 attack. Slahi faces fourteen years of solitary confinement, and continuous torture with hardly any evidence against him. Nancy Hollander is being called a terrorist supporter while defending her but the unwavering support makes him get his basic right. The movie highlights the flaws of the non-failed states and the devastating effect of violation of human rights through the story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi which exists due to unchecked government power in the name of national security. The human rights violations is strongly promoted because of the ambiguity provided by the government in unequal enforcement of rules and treaties.
Fourteen years of wrongful detention, torture to an individual caught in the effects of 9/11 attack, Slahi is imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay with no record of past crimes. “At a moment of great solemnity, when the world's attention was riveted upon the president, Obama championed previous generations of American rights. ” (Hitchcock 2015). “He addressed gay rights, women rights convention etc, and perhaps the developed world has come a long way like the united states as well, in placing rights just at the centre of our political discourse. Yet, as Obama spoke people around the world were victims of the after effects of 9/11 attack, 160 people continued to languish in the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under American control (though not on American soil), where they were being denied the most basic rights of due process and habeas corpus. ” (Hitchcock 2015).
Just like these 160 people Slahi was one of them, who had the will to fight the climate of foster and hopelessness but even the rest of the people, who were detained with no charge against them. “The same president who offered such a rousing endorsement of the achievements of human rights also approved the 2012 National Defence Authorization Act, which for the first time in US history authorised the president to place captured belligerents into indefinite military without charge or trial. ” (Hitchcock 2015) Even after so many conventions and treaties imposed by organisations such as United Nations, states fail to protect the basic rights of an individual. The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives.
“Vladimir Putin cited the rights of ethnic minorities in Ukraine in order to justify his military intervention there, just as the United States cited Saddam Hussein’s suppression of human rights in order to build support for the Iraq war. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. The ambiguity, which allows governments to rationalise almost anything they do, is not a result of sloppy draftsmanship but of the deliberate choice to overload the treaties with hundreds of poorly defined obligations. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist.
Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. ” (Posner 2014) The failed states are indeed an accomplice to crimes such as terrorism and there exists a constant need or an understanding to uphold the law. Denial of basic rights, request to information, representation by a lawyer, habeas corpus by as non-failed state or rather an enduring one sets a bad precedence. There exists a world of political paradox in which violation and protection go hand in hand. “Human rights have tended to be drawn closer to the centre of world affairs when great powers, at specific moments, desire to co-opt the legitimating effect that human rights language provides, or when states are briefly vulnerable to exogenous events (defeat in wartime, economic turmoil, ideological shifts, etc.
) that tend to undermine their sovereignty. In these times of crisis or swift global change, human rights are often useful as a moral vocabulary that can lend credibility to a new structure of world affairs. ” (Hitchcock
2015) Further to substantiate, Mauritania suffering politically, economically, corruption, and
weak governing body is considered as a failed state, who ceased to protect the citizens of their own country and handed over Slahi to the America, exploiting their weaknesses for the same. Weak and unstable governments can provide a gateway to other countries to exploit them in a way that even basic rights are taken away. The protagonist himself tries to defy stereotypes and fight for against exploitation and his basic rights, who is wrongly accused by an enduring or powerful state. “For one thing, social scientists argued that state failure was a process by which the state lost some or all of the capacity to govern, and that there were gradations of Failure. The authority of the state rests upon the implicit or explicit consent of the governed to accept the legitimacy of that authority and the set of rules that accompany.
In both of these different conceptions of state failure, the critical element of failure therefore becomes the erosion, loss, or absence of legitimacy. (Dorff 2005) Detention in the Guantanamo bay makes it easier for the U. S. government to retrieve information they want and moreover considering that the law of their land does not apply to places outside their jurisdiction. The Bush government faced immense pressure after 9/11 to give a strong and a powerful response and to not be restricted by the domestic laws, the bay was served to be the best, “Around the world, Guantánamo remains one of the most enduring symbols of the injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law that the US unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks. Since January 11, 2002, the US has held at least 780 foreign Muslim males there, 15 of them boys at the time of their capture.
” (Anonymous work 2022) In the name of national security, the information was highly redacted in search of the “twentieth hijacker” and even kept away from the lawyers representing these detainees. Similarly, Hollander had to file a request to information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get documents but worthless considering the fact that they were all redacted. Defence lawyers would file motions to get information, later were argued in the court for months making a long procedure. “More than six years passed between Slahi’s writing of his diary and the US government’s release of the heavily redacted, now-declassified, document that would become Guantánamo Diary of the thousands of redactions, many seem to be names, places, and dates. The longest redaction is almost six full pages, and, based on contextual clues, is Slahi’s account of a polygraph examination.
Another multi-page redaction excises the entirety of a poem Slahi wrote; these are markedly different, not just for the extent of redaction, but for the kind of material hidden. ” (Papplardo 2019) The ambiguity in setting up and enforcing laws by such states and organisation gives space for subjective interpretation by authorities based on political influence and individual biasness. The story of Slahi starks a reminder between national security, failed states and the failed states unable to upheld basic rights such as the right to information and human rights. The core justification of dominance was the idea of finding the 20th hijacker, rose anti American sentiment abroad resulting in breeding ground for extremism. The controversial interrogation methods in the Guantanamo Bay marked the “war on terror” drawing international disapprobation.
Human Rights law has failed not only in failed states likes Afghanistan, Africa etc. but also in such enduring states or moreover super powers like America. The fight for justice by Slahi and his lawyer Nancy Hollander offers a glimmer of hope and ground reality, despite the hurdles of redacted information, bureaucratic hurdles and throwing light on the importance of due process, legal representation and the ability to resist oppression.
References:
1. Kevin Macdonald, 2021. The Mauritanian
2. Hitchcock, William I. 2015. “The Rise and Fall of Human Rights? Searching for a Narrative
from the Cold War to the 9/11 Era.” Human Rights Quarterly 37 (1):80-106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24518275
3. Posner, Eric. 2014. “The case against human rights”. The Guardian, December 4.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights
4 Dorff, Robert H. 2005. “Failed States After 9/11
What Did We Know and What Have We Learned?.” International Studies Perspective 6 (1): 20-34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44218350
5. Anonymous work. 2022. “2o years of US torture- and counting.” Human Rights Watch ,
January 9. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/09/20-years-us-torture-and-counting
6 Pappalardo, Mary. 2019. “Writing from the New Colony
Place, Subjectivity, and Textual Production in Guantánamo Diary.” Research in African Literature 50(1): 20-35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.1.02