The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse

In memory of Tom
alis grave nil

It has been claimed that the terrorist attack known as 9/11 changed geopolitical reality for the United States, making it aware of its vulnerability to paramilitary aggression and catching it in a web of fear and anger. The ensuing war against an enemy hard to locate and even more difficult to defeat gave rise to other, ominous practices that called into question fundamental national values. The invasion of Afghanistan resulted in the detention of captured paramilitary soldiers. Since they were not members of a national army, they were not treated as POWs. A new name, “illegal enemy combatants,” was invented to describe their status. They were held without charges in Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay and at several secret locations, where they were interrogated to gain military information. With in a short period of time, news media in the United States and the Arab world published pictures of Camp X-Ray detainees who were blindfolded, held in cages, and in forced positions that often appeared to be painful. Soon reports of torture surfaced, whose accuracy the military and the Bush administration denied. After the invasion of Iraq, two years later, the “Taguba Report” (Taguba 2004) detailed degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib. Its contents and images of trophy photos taken by the military guards there were made public on the television magazine 60 Minutes. They captured guards torturing prisoners with degradation, humiliation, and physical brutality. The nation was horrified, the Army conducted an investigation and brought criminal charges against several of the guards, and the Bush administration expressed strong disapproval of conduct it attributed to rogue soldiers who were acting without the administration’s approval. Two years later documents written by members of the administration regarding treatment of the detained illegal enemy combatants surfaced. They advised the president that these prisoners were not covered by the Geneva Accords and, therefore, were not exempt from torture. President Bush then issued a policy statement expressed in equivocal language that said illegal enemy combatants would be treated as if they were covered by the Geneva Accords but left room to treat them otherwise if circumstances warranted. ¹ For a nation that prides itself on its staunch advocacy of human rights and that historically has adhered to international covenants protecting human rights, these revelations challenged how U.S. citizens understood their government’s policies.

Human rights rhetoric is not easily classified as a specific genre. For most people in the West, abusive practices are removed from experience; rousing though their denunciation couched in national values and abstract legalisms may be, they lack a human face. But the pictures from Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib were of humans whose human rights had been violated. They were being abused by the U.S. military, whose actions raised questions of who knew about them, whether they were authorized, and if the answers lay in the Oval Office.

Human rights discourse mirrors this experience of abstract and concrete rhetoric. On one hand, there is official discourse about abuses and the abused conducted between governments and frequently involving ngos. Advocates for the abused, especially political prisoners, speak by deputy for those whose faces we do not see, whose voices we do not hear, and whose pain we do not witness. There is a second form of discourse that comes from the abused and, by showing us their human face, gives presence to their pain and immediacy to their plea for help.

In Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Michael Ignatieff (2001) makes the argument that human rights language cannot be “parsed” into nonindividualist or communitarian perspectives, that it is inexorably individualistic and “nonsensical outside that assumption.” From his perspective, the individualistic nature of human rights language accounts for why human rights is so attractive worldwide and has become a global movement. He states: “Human rights is the only universally available moral vernacular that validates the claims of women and children against the oppression they experience in patriarchal and tribal societies; it is the only vernacular that enables dependent persons...