Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines

2. International Norms and Their Contestation in Human Rights Dialogues

2 International Norms and Their Contestation in Human Rights Dialogues When states are accused of human rights violations by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or the governments of other states, they engage in continuous, and often bitter and divisive, debates about their practice. They also debate the norms that should regulate how they are being treated in an international community and how those norms express shared identities in the international realm. What human rights organizations describe as “violations” are highly sensitive security matters for some of these governments. When a government’s behavior becomes the target of an international human rights campaign to change its practice and this campaign triggers an extensive discussion about what norms should apply, I call it a public dialogue or discourse. At times since the early s, actions by the Philippine and Indonesian governments toward their citizens have caused ardent debates between representatives of those states and human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights (now Human Rights First), and Human Rights Watch. These dialogues about how a state should deal with its citizens and what are the acceptable limits frequently pulled in other actors, including representatives of domestic human rights organizations , members of the political opposition, other state governments and representatives of international organizations who made decisions based on the information they received from governments, and NGOs. These actors commented on domestic issues, such as the violent dispersion of peaceful demonstrations, the unlawful detention of opposition figures, the torture of suspected members of Communist or separatist organizations, or the International Norms 21 disappearance of students. Thus, they blurred the boundaries between domestic and international and challenged the most central norm in international relations, a state’s claim to sovereignty in the sense that it could unconditionally determine how to treat its citizens. Local human rights organizations that channeled information to international organizations had an immediate interest in drawing international attention to situations where they believed human rights were at stake. Sometimes, they operated under extra constraints because their government had blocked domestic conduits for influencing governmental politics or information about sensitive issues (Keck and Sikkink ). But the Southeast Asian rulers themselves also had reason to engage in dialogues with their critics and register their opinions. They leaned heavily on international norms of sovereignty to legitimate their rule and justify their actions. They wanted these norms to be honored. They wanted the approval and symbolic capital that comes from being identified by their societies and other state governments as rulers in good standing who care for their state and its citizens. Thus, their justifications were not only about their right to deal with these domestic situations without interference from other governments or international organizations. They also sought to make other states understand their specific situations as states that were seeking security (see Figure .). This chapter provides the theoretical framework I later use to analyze these dialogues and the influence of human rights norms. My main argument in this book is that, to understand the varying impact of human rights norms, one must first understand the arguments over those norms. To understand and explain why human rights pressures sometimes lead governments to change their practices drastically and why they are sometimes able to deflect these pressures, we have to look at the way actors strategically manipulate international norms and how they are creative in constructing Figure 2.1 International Norms, Path-dependency, and Outcomes of Transnational Advocacy International Norms Transnational Advocacy Path dependent discourse (“critical junctures”; “external confirmation”) Validity of norm Varying success of transnational human rights advocacy 22 Chapter 2 persuasive accounts. We must also consider the substantial content of the human rights debates between human rights organizations and state governments . This chapter provides the theoretical tool for thinking about these issues, normative contestation, the process I described above. I begin by considering existing approaches to the influence that international human rights norms have on states. Spurred by the end of the Cold War, international relations scholars have taken a keen interest in international norms and legal obligations as codified in international law. What these scholars try to grasp and explain is why and under what conditions states comply with international obligations. And in line with the major strands of social science, three perspectives can be identified: One perspective casts the terms of debate in terms of power (realism). The second casts it in terms of purposeful choice and...