A panel of experts at Yale Law School Thursday, including professor and former dean Harold Koh, said governments and other institutions have been unable to keep up with the dizzying pace of social media in promoting human rights.
“We’ve got, right now, Dissent 5.0. Everybody can get their message out. The world knows and sees stuff that was invisible before,” Koh said. “But we only have Democracy 2.0 and Politics 1.0.”
The panel was part of a two-day symposium at Yale on “Human Rights in the Streets,” organized by the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship program. Other panelists included Jeri Laber, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch; Michael Posner and Jerome Cohen of New York University; and James Silk, a law professor at Yale.
Koh said while social media has sparked dissent movements and human rights efforts throughout the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, traditional political means to address those issues have lagged.
For the U.S. in particular, Koh noted, it has become a cycle of movement after movement calling on the American government for help, and the U.S. struggling to respond with diplomacy, sanctions or military support. Such responses require time, patience and sometimes a great deal of money.
“The hardware just cannot sustain the software,” Koh said. “This exceeds the capacity of the system to respond, in many respects.”
Posner stressed the global nature of today’s human rights efforts. “There are people in every society now, condemning bad behavior by their own government,” he said.
What is missing is a set of political tools that allow dissident movements to translate into effective leadership. In Egypt and other areas of upheaval, the leadership void is filled with representatives from the military or religious establishments.
It becomes increasingly hard to sell patience and voter education in a world dominated by the 24-hour news cycle, he added.
This was not the case for previous generations of human rights movements, Laber explained. From Lech Walesa in Poland and Andrei Sakharov in Russia to Nelson Mandela in South Africa, dissident movements rallied around compelling personalities.
“When uprisings arose in the streets, they were truly spontaneous,” Laber said.
Cohen agreed that personal charisma fueled many past movements. He also pointed out that in China and other countries that squelch dissent, governments adopt the terminology of human rights groups to justify their actions. They claim to support economic and judicial freedom while clamping down on individuals who are critical of the regime, Cohen said.
The panel said universities, lawyers, nonprofit groups and democratic governments must become more nimble and imaginative in their support for human rights, amid a new generation of dissenters who want change quickly.
“I don’t think technology creates political change, but it’s a powerful tool,” Posner said. “It’s making repressive governments crazy. The government of Turkey shut down Twitter last week. It’s crazy.”
©2014 the New Haven Register (New Haven, Conn.)
