The First Amendment; International Civil Liberties

The First Amendment and a free people a weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in the United States and around the world. The program is produced cooperatively by WGBH Boston and the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University the host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Reuben. Human rights is our subject today and I'm delighted to have as my guest Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School who has been very active in human rights and civil rights both at home and abroad. Many of you know his important work in defending some of the notable Soviet dissidents. He's also been active on the domestic front in many cases involving freedom of the press or alleged ups energy cases and so on. Usually coming out on a pretty strict I thought that the First Amendment is not to be contested that it's invaluable and so on. I want to just quote a couple of things Alan before we we go into the discussion

of human rights. We like we would like to think of human rights as our right to be our full persons. But so often we are taken on the negative side because we're concerned about the absence of human rights you know. Committee report of the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives in 1976. A statement by Eddie Kaufman of the Latin American research department of Amnesty International in London had this to say about torture in hearings held about human rights in Oregon Pereg why torture may be used as a means of persuading other opponents of the regime not to get involved in political activities. It has been argued that torture is applied as a form of punishment and thus seems confirmed by the fact that after interrogation after transfer of the prisoner to a long term detention cell regular maltreatment and torture continues to occur. The extent of torture depends upon the social status of the political prisoner prisoner and the political inclinations of the jailer

methods of torture that I mention to us include a particularly bizarre one beating with the so-called Sergeant L. Hince which is a cat of nine tails with lead balls at the tip of each Tong also submersion to the point of near drowning etc. etc.. Alan Dershowitz that is the horrible side of human rights. I'd like to start with this terribly repressive. Have we made any progress in the last couple of years in persuading governments or in forcing governments somehow to desist from these practices. Yes I think we've made substantial progress particularly in South America and in other parts of the world as well. I think in Africa and parts of the Middle East I think particularly in eliminating the most heinous forms of torture torture of course is a very general word. I was at a trial not too long ago where torture was alleged by a prisoner. And when he was pressed

very hard as to what it meant he said well his mustache had been pulled once he had been hit with an open hand across the chest and he had been insulted. Well that's very bad and I could never justify doing that to a prisoner. But that's a far cry from the lead ended cat of nine tails or the submissions and drowning. I'm working on now a continuum of torture in fact trying to list and catalogue the various forms of torture and to divide them into several categories because I think the best way to approach a problem like that is to. Define it so that exactly we know what we're talking about the word torture comes with a lot of baggage and it carries a lot of implications. And yet it means a great many things none of them is good but some are much much worse than others. That's right. Now in regard to this kind of repression obviously we are concerned that there is no possibility for a free exchange of ideas. If the threat of being incarcerated if the threat of losing one's life if the threat of being submitted to such bodily pain

screaming pain all the time is there or threats to family. Let's turn the coin over to the other side the brighter side. What human rights advances have we made in such places as the Philippines or in such places as the Soviet Union where you have been. Trying to create impressions of our ideas with them. I think the most important progress is that everybody in the world now understands that any allegation of substantial violations of human rights has become an international issue. The Soviets may deny it politically but they know that if they can find a dissident if they torture somebody if they subject a sane person to a mental hospital it will appear in London it will appear in The New York Times it will appear around the world and there claims to be insulated from criticism because it's a domestic concern will fall on deaf years. They know that the United States State Department now we're talking about the Philippines and other countries more dependent on the United

States. They know the State Department will release an annual report evaluating human rights compliance by all countries which receive aid from this country and that it will be taken seriously. Chile understands that it can have some of its aid cut off and it has been you know we broke off all effective diplomatic relations with Chile in December of 1999 because they refused to go ahead with the investigation and to seize people we suspect of being involved in the Italian affair the right of a foreign minister who was assassinated state. I myself was not terribly happy with that because we used our most extreme form of leverage was something which was a little bit self-serving. That is a trial in our own country I would have preferred to see the cut off of human. Of eight respond to alleged torture and other massive violations against the rights of their own citizens. But it's a beginning and it's very important so I think there are two things one people take seriously people who receive aid from the United States take more

seriously. The threat of having their rate cut off and second countries which do not have any dependence on the United States take seriously I think the international voices that are now heard mostly private international voices mostly organizations like Amnesty individuals and other other groups of non-governmental organizations. The great tragedy of course is that nobody takes seriously the United Nations when it comes to human rights that is probably the single greatest human rights tragedy of our age. It is the exemplar of the double standard. It never investigates a left wing socialist a third world countries no matter how massive the human rights violations it never condemned them in and never condemn the Central African empire it never condemned violations of human rights when they occur on the left or in third world and they have a super scrutiny over human rights for anything Western whether it be the United States whether it be Israel whether it be South Africa.

That's not to deny that South Africa deserves a very substantial condemnation nor is it to deny that the United States on occasion in Israel on occasion warrants criticism for their civil or human rights record. But if you were to present a university student with all the documents of the United Nations and ask him to read that. He would come away thinking the only human rights violators in the world are Western democracies or Western countries in general. And there were no human rights violations in the Third World and it's because of that that the United Nations and its constituent organizations have lost unfortunately and tragically all credibility in the area of human rights it's been relegated to non-governmental organizations into a few countries. Some people feel that this is also a blind spot with some of our observers in the United States who comment on international affairs and who are very opposed to some of the activities of the United States around the world that

they just do not comment on the leftist regimes. Sure. Well at least with William Kunstler who's prominent among them at least he's an open honest hypocrite. He will tell you that he does not criticize socialist regimes. On the other hand he is very quick to criticize all other regimes and yet he claims to do it under the mantle of human rights and civil rights. I don't think he is entitled to that mantle. I think what he's doing is just what any mouthpiece for a corporation would be doing defending his client's perspective his clients in this case are leftwing regimes and his opponents in this case are Western regimes he is unwilling to make any comparative perspective. To a lesser degree the same can be said about Jane Fonda and others who refused to become involved in the Cambodian criticism and tragically I think the same can be said unfortunately of some of the black leaders in

this country. We have been trying for a long time to get black leaders in this country involved in the work of international human rights and Amnesty International and other organizations and in individual instances just in supporting Soviet dissidents and for the most part they have been unwilling. And that's a tragedy. They have however found one human rights issue at least some of them the Jesse Jacksons and others like them. And that is the cause of the Palestinians and I think that they have lost some credibility in selectively viewing one particular issue out of a context of human rights violations their voice has been particularly Jesse Jacksons and other such leaders has been conspicuously absent for example in the Cambodian situation in the Central African situations and what's going on today in Ethiopia in the destruction for example of the Falasha community which is a black community in Ethiopia. And you know we've been trying to get the voice of blacks to be heard on that and the silence has been deafening in many incidents.

Tell me a little more about that situation and actually I'm not. Well there are a group that numbered at one point rather large 25 30 40 thousand. Falasha and sewer black have been living in Ethiopia for since the time of King Solomon. They regard themselves and are still regarded as as religiously Jewish. They have been involved in tribal warfare and are in the process literally of being decimated. Israel has not been at its best in this issue either. There was some dispute as to whether they are Jews in the traditional sense of the word and whether there should be a full fledged attempt to import and allow them to settle in Israel. Finally the Israelis have taken the position to their credit that they should be rescued without regard to what their religious background is and in fact they are now regarded as Jews but putting that issue aside they are human beings they are people who are being destroyed because of their religion. They are black people. And

it's crucial for the world to come to their rescue their numbers are not as large as the numbers in Cambodia or other parts of the world a morality has never been a question of numbers in regard to Cambodia. There has been such destruction there. And yet people look upon it in a political sense. The people who have been destroyed obviously don't have the luxury of looking at it from a left or a right wing perspective they have just been decimated starve to death beaten driven out on the open roads we don't know how many there are. In regard to that in regard to Bangladesh in the time of the war with Pakistan in regard to to the B offer a situation in the time of the civil war of Nigeria is there a basic curse of the twentieth century that as we make much progress for freedom of the press and democratic ideals that there overhangs

this miasma of the possibility that whole groups can be wiped out without the world effectively raising its arms some who say Stop. Well yes I'm not sure it relates to the expansion of the freedom of the press I think it does not I think every group today in the world needs its political champion. Unfortunately human rights has become very politicized and if a group gets a champion then there will be substantial efforts to rescue it but once it gets their champion it politicizes the issue considerably. Does the Soviet Union regard it as a human rights violation. Yes. If the victims are of a certain. Perspective does the United States view it as a human rights violation. More often they will if the victims there of a particular perspective it's been very difficult to de politicize the whole issue and of course whenever a genocide or massive suffering has been caused it's always been cold by the people responsible for a political.

When the Nazis destroyed the Jews there are memoranda all talked about of the commissar as in Rip men and communists. When the Soviet Union has gone after its dissidents it has labeled them a fascist. And when Jane Fonda and William Kunstler refused to enter into the Cambodian thing they put a political perspective on the whole thing. The crucial important thing in the great failure of the United Nations in this in this decade particularly. Has been that we have not been able to de politicize human suffering and to understand that some six year old starving in Cambodia is not right or left or black or white. It's a human being suffering and all the resources of the world communities right or left have to be brought to bear on that problem. I was relating it to freedom of the press in one sense in the back of my mind and that was that if there is freedom of the press then public discussion can be on the subject matter at hand from all points of view. But where there is central control of the press as there is in the Soviet Union they label it as such and you cannot have any further public

discussion so those people in the Soviet Union who might be just as inclined to sympathise to empathise to take direct action on behalf of the suffering people of Cambodia. Won't. Well that's right and the great danger of the third world now becoming interested in further repressing free press in the name of third world interests. They claim that the Western press does not report on human rights from a perspective of third world countries and of course they have a point and I'll get to that in a minute. But to give any government whether it be third world governments or groups of third world governments the power to censor is to invite the kind of situation that you describe so well and that is that the people simply won't know about the suffering unless the government chooses for its political purposes to let them know about the suffering. Now turning just to the issue the point that the Third World has about human rights and you touched on it in the beginning of the hour is one can look at human rights from many perspectives the negative of human rights no torture no

beating no imprisonment without due process. And yet there's another equally plausible way of looking at it. You know the right to a job the right to health the right to education. Unfortunately there's been a dichotomy created socialists talk about socialist human rights in terms of the right to a job and when they debate Americans as I was fortunate enough to be able to debate some Russians a couple of years ago a national television on the issue of human rights they came back and said Of course we support human rights the right to a job you don't have that in your country the right to education you don't have that the right to health that's what we have. The other human rights we call that they say. But to our human rights they have some importance but they're not nearly as important. Well I support all kinds of human rights I think the right to a job. The freedoms that Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about several decades ago are all human rights. My own feeling is you can't get to the human rights involving the right to a job in the right education unless you have the most basic and fundamental human right the right meaningfully to participate in governmental decision making that need to be by the right to form a vote you can be

by the right to participate in union activities the right to freely communicate one's ideas. But tragically in many of the Third World countries even the most basic right doesn't exist and nobody has ever shown to my satisfaction. A relationship between the absence of more fundamental basic human rights and the presence of these other rights like the right to a job the right to food in the western world sort of digging back into my mind. But in Retiro own in regard to the Irish rebel in which the basic question was maybe it's corpus if we don't have the the body we don't have anything or was it X party merriment in American history. We look at it on both sides from both points of view. But today there is a tendency in the world and especially in the present Iranian crisis which is raging as we talk today. In December of 1999. This seems to be an attitude that the whole concept of western democracy about human rights at least from the

Ayatollah Khomeini's point of view is a smashed image he's not interested in that the third will is picking that up as kind of a slogan. Do they realize how dangerous that is this opposition to Democratic values. Well didn't they say denies deep down you scratch most people deep enough and you will find a resistance to the implications of democracy view. The Iranian situation is produced in this country. Some hysteria among some groups calling for the suspension of democratic rights when it comes to Iranian students as well. So it's not ethnic or regional or geographic. I think the great tragedy is that we may find ourselves going back to the Middle Ages and the kind of religious fervor and fanaticism which by the way is being capitalized on I think by left wing politically astute people. Whether or not the takeover in Tehran was really generated solely by religious fanatics or whether there weren't some

nationalists with political interests in mind is an issue that remains to be seen but I think we have to be uncompromising on that issue. There is no such thing as third world human rights as distinguished from first world human rights. The taking of hostages is simply not justified under any circumstances the killing of innocent people is not justified under any circumstances. The kinds of trials that Khomeini has suggested with the students sitting in judgment wouldn't be justified whether it would be done by a Western lynch mob in the United States by Fidel Castro in 1060 by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. Or by any other group for any other interest it's simply wrong and we should not be embarrassed about imposing our views because our views or their views mean the Koran whose legal system I'm somewhat familiar with provides for a wonderful system of criminal justice much like that provided for in the Old Testament in the Talmud. In fact if you do work on comparative criminal procedures I've done you find that legal systems throughout the world

are much more similar than they are different. They provide different forms of due process but due process is the same. It's people like Khomeini who want to deny his own people and our people the basic human rights not institutions and you know the Koran will survive Khomeini will not. Well Khomeini is to be understood in and of his own history. He's consumed he's a martyr he is. Some people use the word fanatic. Some people may use the word great patriot I don't know. I don't even want to get into that except that he's a very controversial figure to the nth degree. But the so called students. And this is what disturbs me even more who are pushing these themes that you have been criticizing a middle class people. Yes how do we handle that phenomenon that the middle class has learned enough about the technological world and not enough about the humane values. Well and again you don't have to go to Iran to see that one sees that in this country during the

1980s and early 70s on college campuses and I see beginning of that today a lack of appreciation of human rights and basic dignities you find even today in this country students on the extreme left talking about a lynch mob for the Shah. I'm no supporter of the Shah. I've criticized them as long as any of these students have and I would like to see justice done in his instance but the idea of sending him back to be tried by that kind of a lynch mob which is already declared him to be guilty. Something advocated by many leftists in this country and the equivalent. Trials for the Iranian students advocated by many rightists in this country is a middle class phenomenon and it goes back to the position that our concept of human rights and due process is extremely fragile and very thin. Sometimes I think it's you me and a half dozen other people out there who really believe deep down in human rights and would go to the barriers to fight for that that many of the rest of the people just opportunistically seizing

on to human rights to pursue their own political aims Well I'm being unduly pessimistic there is a large corps out there who support it. But it's never been in a majority in any country and it's our job to keep that spirit alive. Well I wonder if a little of your cynicism doesn't come because you have been grappling so deeply with these issues the deeper done you go into an issue the the more you feel that you are not being supported. But actually I wonder if the. My own feeling is that the American people take great pride in their in their democratic system. But we have to upgrade their understanding of it all the time. And the polemic so over the Iranian thing especially in a presidential campaign year. May serve a candidate but doesn't serve the public. I think that's right although I have to commend Benjamin civility the attorney general who I think has handled this with extreme delicacy. I understand he was against the original. If this is true against the original order for asking them to register the Iranian students well I don't know what his position was but I can tell

you what his public statements have been since and they have been excellent. They have reminded the American public of the tradition of due process and remaining within the law. And I think he has performed a great service to this country in the politicizing the issue and he deserves great credit for that. Reminds me of years ago when we study constitutional law they always brought up two cases together find a versus New York and terminate all of us to Chicago where Fina was was trying to say something a New York University Washington Square quite innocently and was condemned in the court of the Supreme Court upheld it. Terminal yellow was really rabid in trying to incite the mobs in Chicago and the court sustained the court's direction reversed his conviction and sustained his point of view. There's always this bizarre factor about freedom of communication as regards human rights. We must push it to The Nth Degree in this country and yet this is also not understood overseas where they see it as something very clear and very fundamental and it has parameters. Oh

sure they want it put out in blocks for them. When I debate again with Soviet scholars on Human Rights the first thing they point to is you mean to say that you would allow Nazis and point OG refers are people just don't want that kind of human right. You anybody. Does anybody ever ask you whether you would want a Nazi pornography. Some people think that Nazi ism is pornography in fact it's interesting that when our graffiti is cold fascist literature by communists and it's called Communist literature by fascists which only supports the fact that it's probably protected by the Constitution because one thing we do know is that fascist and communist propaganda is protected by the Constitution. The Carter administration I think earns our cudos for coming in on a platform of human rights and by and large they have expressed a great deal of our attitude. But I don't think that they have taken advantage of certain opportunities. For example when

the change of Government took place in Korea South Korea Mr. Pak was assassinated one believe that that would have been the time when the United States would have been most expressive from private parts and from the public sector in expressing what it wanted. I feel we sort of let that go a little bit to hoping for the best. I agree with you completely I think the Carter administration did a great service in coming in with the human rights platform. It was attacked literally by some of our allies and by people within the State Department and it undoubtedly pulled back. In doing so it may have left some individuals out on a limb. I feel that somewhat about my client Anatoly Sharansky who in reliance on quarter of promises of human rights became a more vocal and more active. Now the administration has tried to help by Sharansky may be tried as hard as they could. Nonetheless he still languishing in a prison and has many many more years to go to serve on his sentence. I think there's been a pullback in implementation and I

hope whoever is elected in the next go around we can see a more vigorous implementation of human rights not withstanding State Department and allied opposition. Is the nature of the democratic process that these things go in spurts. Yes but spurts in the human rights area can be very dangerous. What we need is consistency and we need to communicate a message to friend and foe alike that we take this seriously and we will push human rights even if they do not serve our short term political interest to do so. We've not yet communicated that message and. Are we developing people who are less concerned about the immediate crisis than they are about the overall goal of the United States or are people getting hung up on the crisis to crises to which we are almost incessantly know subjected to a little bit of both. I think the law schools and other universities are now training a civil rights a human rights bar at least in the law school perspective in 20 years we will have more people out there who are concerned neutrally in a politically about human rights that can't help but filter into the government. The person who is now in

charge of the Human Rights Division of the State Department has not been an extremely powerful voice in policy that's not been her fault she's tried as hard as she can to not be personally referring to that and the State Department has been has been excellent. My hope is that as this develops even further we will find that part of the State Department having even more influence and having its own constituency other than the few hundred professional human rights advocates in this country. Alan Dershowitz as always good to talk to you and always good to end on a beat if we can. Our guest has been Alan Dershowitz professor of law at Harvard Law School. Thank you very much for thank you for this edition. Bernard Reuben. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in the United States and around the world. The engineer for this broadcast was Barry Carter. And the program is produced by Greg Fitzgerald. This broadcast is produced cooperatively by WGBH Boston and the Institute for

democratic communication at Boston University which are solely responsible for its content. This is the station program exchange.