European leaders failed to fill a vacuum on human rights during the Trump years and adopted policies that violate human rights standards, according to Agnès Callamard, one of the world’s leading authorities on the issue.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, the French investigator, who will begin a new role as secretary general of Amnesty International later this month, paints a dire picture of the state of human rights globally, and singles out European leaders for criticism.
“They always find something more important. Whether it’s in Germany, whether it is in France, or in the United Kingdom. Give me one European country whose government is known for taking a principled vocal position on human rights?” she said. “The examples are too few and far between.”
The remarks reflect Callamard’s penchant for making bold assertions, without fear of whom she might offend.
Since 2016, the 57-year-old has served as special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings at the United Nations, a voluntary and independent role that she used to investigate and draw conclusions about high-profile state-sanctioned killings, from the Trump administration’s drone strike that killed the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, to the alleged involvement of the Kremlin in the poisoning of critic Alexei Navalny, to arbitrary killings by the government of the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte.
Callamard’s most high-profile investigation was into the journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing at the hands of Saudi Arabian agents in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a brutal attack that Callamard declared in 2019 was probably sanctioned by the state.
Her role, she said, always required her to fight, in part because she faced obstacles “at every turn” at the United Nations, which she said did not provide adequate support for human rights work.
“I approached my mandate with a sense of defiance and a sense of stubborn determination and super hard work, so that I could do what I wanted to do,” she said. “They don’t want to give me resources? I will do it anyway. They don’t want to help me do my research on Jamal Khashoggi? Well, I will do it, and I will pay for it myself, which I did, by the way.”
The dearth of funding on human rights issues was coupled, Callamard said, with challenges created by an “institutional mindset” at the UN that she felt had “gotten worse” under the current secretary general, António Guterres.
“You know, it is a mindset that does not encourage, as it should, taking a strong position. It is a mindset that is concerned about bothering the powerful,” she said. “So for all those factors, we can sometimes feel that we [special rapporteurs] are a bother and something that needs to be controlled, rather than a tool and a voice that needs to be amplified.”
Callamard added that she was not pointing a finger of blame at any particular individuals, but rather at a “system” that was not designed to empower people like her, and was at times paralysed by fear of risk.
The office of the secretary general did not immediately respond to Callamard’s claims.
As she enters a new role as a London-based head of Amnesty International on 29 March, Callamard presented a troubling picture of the state of human rights across the world.
While human rights were obviously violated in the past, Callamard said the world was confronting a relatively new phenomenon in that the very notion that human rights matter was under assault – a fact exemplified by Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as actions of China and Russia.
“I think China is a very clear model of a country that is absolutely committed to undo – or to displace – human rights as a central feature of the multilateral system,” she said. “You have Russia insisting on so-called traditional values, with the help of Hungary and Poland and others. So all in all we are in a context where human rights are contested as an objective. And I think that is quite new.”
Facing those strains, Callamard faulted countries that have traditionally promoted the principles of human rights for falling short, particularly during the Trump years. She pointed to Europe’s response to human rights violations by Saudi Arabia as an example, saying neither Germany, nor France, nor the UK had offered up a sustained or critical response to Saudi violations.
“None of the European states were prepared to see a cosy relationship challenged or questioned or weakened by any kind of human rights stance. So Saudi Arabia is an extremely good example. Egypt is a good example,” she said.
“In the absence of the US, on the human rights front, I think the EU had a weak voice and did not rise to the challenge,” she said.
Callamard pointed to a debate over an EU-China trade deal as one example, in which she said Chinese human rights violations did not play a central role in the considerations.
The EU and the UK, she added, had consistently been criticised by human rights advocates on the treatment of migrants, with both adopting positions that were in “complete rejection of international human rights standards at many levels”.
She also pointed to the problematic adoption and “normalising” of emergency laws taken in the name of national security as well as the alleged abandonment of children of citizens who joined Isis and are still in camps in northern Syria, which Callamard noted had not been taken back although their lives were at risk.
“The EU is not only in those cases failing to rise to the challenge but is in fact adopting policies and positions that stand in violation of human rights protection,” she said.
Amnesty International itself has faced questions about a recent decision to strip Navalny, the critic of Vladimir Putin who was poisoned and then imprisoned in Russia, of his “prisoner of conscience” status. The decision followed pressure to condemn anti-migrant statements he made in the 2000s as hate speech.
Employees of Amnesty International said the group had received messages about Navalny’s past remarks that they felt “were part of a coordinated campaign to discredit him abroad”, but nonetheless felt compelled to change his designation.
Asked whether she would revisit the decision, Callamard told the Guardian that such designations – including marking differences between prisoners of conscience and political prisoners – had not been relevant to her work as a special rapporteur.
Navalny’s right to not be poisoned, arbitrarily detained and silenced had been violated, no matter what his designation was, she said.
“What he uttered in 2011 has no bearing on the fact that he should not be detained where he is, he should not have been charged, and certainly not have been [poisoned],” she said.
“So, for my work and my standpoint, Amnesty’s position has no impact [and] had no influence on the way I think of Alexei or how I think about his work. When I start at Amnesty I intend to read through the report that has been done and to take it from there. And, you know, work with them to decide how we’re going to address the next step.”
This article was amended on 25 March 2021. Amnesty International faced questions about Alexei Navalny’s “prisoner of conscience” status, not a “conscientious objector” status as an earlier version said.
