In Conversation with Kate Cronin-Furman
17 October 2023
We recently sat down with Dr Kate Cronin-Furman to discuss her important new book Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities.
The book investigates the diverse ways in which repressive regimes respond to calls for justice and accountability and argues that although international pressure cannot elicit compliance in the absence of domestic motivations to comply, it can produce valuable results through indirect paths.
In your book, you explain why human rights pressures fail to ensure human rights enforcement in the international system. Repressive governments often succeed at pre-empting penalties for noncompliance without persuading anyone of their sincerity. Could you explain what you mean by this?
KC-F: When we think about international human rights pressure, we usually imagine a two-sided interaction, with some group of governments, probably Western, and/or international organisations on the one side pushing a rights-abusing state on the other side to change its behaviour. We assume that when a state changes its behaviour in response, that is because it is trying to convince those Western governments or international organisations that it no longer violates human rights. What I suggest in the book is that there is quite a lot of behavioural change by repressive states in response to international human rights pressure that is not meant to convince anyone they are fulfilling their human rights obligations. I call this “quasi-compliance” and describe it as an effort to do just enough to escape penalties for noncompliance.
It is basically a strategic effort to exploit the fact that human rights enforcement in the international system is costly and uncertain. In the absence of hierarchical enforcement mechanisms, a lot of human rights enforcement plays out in multilateral settings like the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), where passing resolutions requires the support of a majority of the 47 members. All of these members serve as potential veto points on human rights enforcement action. So, a rights-violating state facing international human rights pressure does not really have to convince the US or the UK not to sponsor a resolution against it; it only has to convince enough other states not to vote for that resolution. And that can be a much lower threshold regarding how much the state actually has to change its behaviour.
You argue that “repressive states may deploy quasi-compliance in a strategy calculated less to protect their own reputation than their audience’s”, and that this strategy is “intended to give a sympathetic audience cover to avoid appearing to be protecting a human rights violator”. Could you help us understand this?
KC-F: Lots of states in the international system have their own reasons to be hesitant about robust international human rights enforcement. For them, quasi-compliance can provide an excuse to push back against the Western human rights enforcement efforts. We see this pretty clearly in the UNHRC debates about accountability in Sri Lanka that I describe in the book.
Sri Lanka’s refusal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for mass atrocities has been a source of tension with the West since the end of the country’s civil war in 2009. Domestic political constraints made the provision of justice an extremely unappealing prospect for the government. But in the face of sustained pressure, the immediate post-war regime spent millions of dollars on a succession of weak accountability institutions, all of which met with a profoundly sceptical response from activist states and international NGOs. However, some of their peer states on the UN Human Rights Council had a very different reaction. These states would have known that Sri Lanka was not genuinely seeking accountability — its officials were openly and loudly antagonistic to domestic and international advocacy for justice. But many of them nevertheless picked up on Sri Lanka’s rhetoric about “home-grown institutions” to downvote or water down UNHRC resolutions.
This example suggests that rights-violating states can and do deploy quasi-compliance as coalition-blocking behaviour to prevent the mobilisation of cohesive international pressure and censure. And that one of the reasons this works is that quasi-compliance can act as a convenient fiction, giving peer states cover to avoid appearing to be protecting a human rights violator.
You mention that in Sri Lanka, demand for mass atrocity justice “is low... because [accused perpetrators] are members of the majority ethnic group and the alleged atrocities were committed against a minority perceived as a threat”. Is this a problem in more Indo-Pacific states, and are there any ways out of this for victimised minorities?
KC-F: Structurally, Sri Lanka is an incredibly tough case for accountability for atrocities. The fact that the violations were committed by state forces against a marginalised ethnic group in the context of an ethnic majoritarian democracy, and were justified by reference to counter-terrorism and national security rhetoric, means that there is very little politically relevant domestic demand for accountability. Members of the Tamil community have been unrelenting in their calls for justice, but their votes are not part of the ruling regime’s electoral coalition. The fact that many of the perpetrators remain in high-level positions of power in both the civilian and military leadership means that there is intense resistance to any internationally-led accountability efforts from both the government and the majority Sinhalese community.
But Sri Lanka is not unique in this regard. If we look at the atrocities committed against the Burmese Rohingya in 2016-2017, we see again, a majority population that was more than willing to cover up atrocities committed by the state military against a marginalised minority under the pretext of counter-terrorism and protection of national security. We hear similar rhetoric espoused by other governments throughout the region (notably in both India and China) to justify state violence and discrimination against vulnerable minorities.
You show that “accountability for mass atrocities is rare, that it is deeply beholden to domestic politics, and that international pressure is unlikely to achieve its aims”. As you note, this is a rather dispiriting message. Can you tell us what kind of pressure has the highest ‘success rate’ in ensuring accountability? What can survivors and activists do?
KC-F: Where domestic political dynamics are firmly set against accountability, the most international pressure can do is prompt the creation of quasi-compliant institutions. But that does not mean advocacy for justice is hopeless.
In these contexts, survivors’ calls for justice may not sway their governments, but they can still produce valuable results through indirect paths. Even if they go unmet, loud and cohesive demands for international recognition of a genocide, referral to the International Criminal Court, or sanctions on war criminals can increase third-party states’ potential reputational consequences for supporting atrocity perpetrators.
At the same time, some tactics can increase the chances of domestic political change. In contexts where the victim community is marginalised and the dominant group opposes justice, this isn’t work that survivors can or should have to do themselves. But allies from the majority community can take this up with their coethnics, and both domestic and international advocates can lobby for aid-granting governments to include education and sensitisation about atrocities as a priority in their funding and capacity-building for local civil society. Those engaged in advocacy with Western governments can also push those governments to support soft-liners in perpetrator-aligned regimes because we know from the study of transitional societies that it is usually in-group elites who are most able to affect change.
All of these efforts are facilitated by international human rights norms that are clear and strong. This means that even when accountability pressure does not “work”, it can still perform an important role by providing domestic activists with precise standards to appeal to as well as international networks of support.
Activists within victim communities know all of this and so their work tends to be multi-faceted: gathering and preserving evidence while working to chip away at international tolerance for impunity and pushing those actors who can affect domestic sentiment to commit to doing so.
Is it possible to say why some human rights crises receive extensive attention while others are hardly talked about?
KC-F: There are some obvious answers to this question. Namely, racism and Islamophobia operate to ensure that black and brown victims are treated as less deserving of our attention than white victims. But racism operates to minimise the humanity of these victims through less direct mechanisms, too. The distribution of international media resources and personnel reflects and reinforces beliefs about whose stories are worth telling. In Ukraine, for instance, international media was already present in the run-up to Russia’s invasion. This has made a tremendous difference in global audiences’ perception of the conflict. We saw Ukrainians before they were victims — shaken out of their daily lives and heroically preparing for what would come next.
This insight into the lives and emotions of a people under threat built empathy among even casual observers of the situation, heightening the horror of subsequent images and accounts of the aftermath of Russia’s aerial assaults on Ukrainian cities. Contrast that with the portrayal of victims of similar attacks in Yemen. We only ever see them when they are already bloody and broken, and because of the imperatives of the international news cycle, it is only the most brutalised bodies who make it onto our front pages and screens. Racism not only makes Western audiences systematically less likely to care about these victims, but it also continually reproduces dehumanising portrayals that further entrench this lack of solidarity.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Kate Cronin-Furman is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at University College London, as well as the Director of the Human Rights MA. She researches the politics of mass atrocities and is the author of Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities (Cornell University Press, 2022).