Seeing reason or seeing costs? The United States, counterterrorism, and the human rights of foreigners

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406612110631
Author(s):  
Monika Heupel ◽  
Caiden Heaphy ◽  
Janina Heaphy

It is well known that in the wake of 9/11, the United States committed various extraterritorial human rights violations, that is, human rights violations against foreigners outside of its territory. What is less known is that the United States has gradually introduced safeguards that are, at least on paper, meant to prevent its counter-terrorism policies from causing harm to foreigners abroad or, at least, to mitigate such harm. Based on three case studies on the development of safeguards related to torture, targeted killing, and mass surveillance, we show that two mechanisms, coercion and strategic learning, deployed either on their own or in combination, can account for the development of such safeguards. By contrast, we found no evidence of a third mechanism, moral persuasion, having any direct effect. In other words, US policymakers opt to introduce such safeguards either when they face pressure from other states, courts, or civil society that makes immediate action necessary or when they anticipate that not introducing them will, at a later date, result in prohibitively high costs. We did not find evidence of US policymakers establishing safeguards because they deemed them morally appropriate. From this we conclude that, although the emerging norm that states have extraterritorial (and not just domestic) human rights obligations may not have been internalized by key US policymakers, it nevertheless has a regulative effect on them insofar as the fact that relevant others believe in the norm restricts their leeway and influences their cost–benefit calculations.

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  

Ethiopia is one of the oldest countries in the world. Except for a brief five year period of Italian occupation (1936-41), Ethiopia, in the span of its thousands of years of existence, was never conquered and administered by a foreign power. Therefore, the tradition of permanent emigration or seeking asylum in foreign countries is an alien concept to the Ethiopian people.Ancient and medieval Ethiopia is depicted as having existed in isolation from contemporaneous states and empires. This attribution of isolationism, compactly expressed by Edward Gibbon’s oft quoted statement that “the Ethiopians slept nearly a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten,” is not at all borne by historical facts.


Author(s):  
Gerald Horne

This chapter focuses on the Scottsboro campaign. Buoyed by massive global support, the Scottsboro campaign took black America and then the nation by storm. Patterson asserted accurately in early 1934 that Scottsboro “has raised the question of international working class solidarity to its highest level.” Thus, he said beamingly, “Every Negro worker and toiling slave on the land breathes freer because of the activities of the ILD,” while the “southern landlord lynchers have learned to curse its name and to dread the presence of its organizations.” The main point, he stressed, was “a new understanding of the term—international working class solidarity.” Moreover, as a result of this case, “The world began to act on the [mal]treatment of [the] Negro.” This was particularly true in the aftermath of 1945, when the United States found it necessary to more effectively charge Moscow with human-rights violations—in part to counter Moscow's charges about Washington's deficiencies in this crucial realm.


1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 99-112

I suppose the literally accurate answer to your question is we did not discuss that. But I have made it clear, and I believe we have made it clear between us, that, at least from my point of view, no option should be ruled out. We do not want another Bosnia in Kosovo. Too many people have died there already in indiscriminate violence. And of course, it happened very quickly. Neither, however, do we want to get in the position where Italy has to send troops to every one of its neighboring countries, and the United States has to send troops every time there's a dispute in that part of the world.


1990 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 33-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhoda E. Howard

The author highlights the different ways in which countries measure standards of human rights and social justice within their borders and in other countries. Rigorous reporting of internal human rights violations is crucial in monitoring and evaluating human rights conditions, according to Howard, even in such wealthy countries as the United States and Canada, where malnutrition and abuse of basic human rights also exist.


Worldview ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 35-36
Author(s):  
Tinley Nyandak Akar

A few months ago President Carter's human rights stature took a dive when the Department of State rejected the requests of a group of American citizens to have “Tibet,” instead of China, listed as their birthplace on their U.S. passports. The decision came on the heels of an announcement that Zbigniew Brzezinski would be visiting China a few weeks later.Despite the president's repeated assertions about his impartial application of human rights to all nations, the administration has been silent when it comes to human rights violations by the People's Republic of China. Evidently Washington does not want to offend Peking and thus lets China dictate, at least indirectly, an internal policy decision of the United States. The action by the State Department regarding American citizens of Tibetan origin has carried this unequal application of human rights principles to an absurd degree.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (10) ◽  
pp. 2020-2042 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam R. Bell ◽  
K. Chad Clay ◽  
Carla Martinez Machain

US noninvasion troops deployed abroad often try to promote greater respect for human rights in the host country. The host country, having an incentive to retain the troop presence, may choose to comply with these requests. We argue that this effect will not be at play in states with high security salience for the United States (US) (for which the US may not be able to credibly threaten to remove the troops). In these cases, US deployments will provide the leader with security from both internal and external threats that is independent of the local population’s support for the leader. Host state leaders thus become less reliant on (and potentially less responsive to) their local populations, which in turn may lead to increased human rights violations. In this article, we use data on both US troop deployments abroad and on human rights violations to test these arguments from 1982 to 2005.


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