On Inside Geneva this week: part five of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Imogen Foulkes talks to Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2014 to 2018.
He became the first Asian, Muslim and Arab to hold the position. But did he plan a career in human rights from an early age?
"No, I was far too immature and delinquent to be thinking lofty ideas and profound thoughts," he said.
But two years in the former Yugoslavia during the conflict there focused his mind.
"The senselessness of it all, there’s nothing that can justify killing, or destruction like that. Nothing at all," he thinks.
When he took the job as UN human rights commissioner, he became famous for his tough approach.
"I knew from my experience in the former Yugoslavia, that if the UN secretariat believed, I think mistakenly, that it’s in the friends business, it produces catastrophic results. The UN is not there to become friendly with the member states."
He spoke out wherever he saw injustice or abuse, from Myanmar, to Libya, or ISIS, and even world leaders.
"Someone asked me, possibly you, asked me about Donald Trump, and I said ‘yes, I think he’s dangerous.' And that became the headline out of the press conference," he said.
Today, his commitment to universal human rights remains firm.
"What we’re aiming at is to create a better human being. That’s what we’re trying to do with the human rights agenda, to improve ourselves and our conduct. To speak out and use non-violent means to protest conditions which are fundamentally unjust and unfair, and who can argue with that?"
Listen to the full episode to find out more about Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein's life and career.
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
On Inside Geneva this week: part five of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Imogen Foulkes talks to Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2014 to 2018.
He became the first Asian, Muslim and Arab to hold the position. But did he plan a career in human rights from an early age?
"No, I was far too immature and delinquent to be thinking lofty ideas and profound thoughts," he said.
But two years in the former Yugoslavia during the conflict there focused his mind.
"The senselessness of it all, there’s nothing that can justify killing, or destruction like that. Nothing at all," he thinks.
When he took the job as UN human rights commissioner, he became famous for his tough approach.
"I knew from my experience in the former Yugoslavia, that if the UN secretariat believed, I think mistakenly, that it’s in the friends business, it produces catastrophic results. The UN is not there to become friendly with the member states."
He spoke out wherever he saw injustice or abuse, from Myanmar, to Libya, or ISIS, and even world leaders.
"Someone asked me, possibly you, asked me about Donald Trump, and I said ‘yes, I think he’s dangerous.' And that became the headline out of the press conference," he said.
Today, his commitment to universal human rights remains firm.
"What we’re aiming at is to create a better human being. That’s what we’re trying to do with the human rights agenda, to improve ourselves and our conduct. To speak out and use non-violent means to protest conditions which are fundamentally unjust and unfair, and who can argue with that?"
Listen to the full episode to find out more about Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein's life and career.
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host Image Folks, and this is a Swiss info production In today's programme, what we're aiming at is to create a better human being.
Speaker 2:That's what we're trying to do with the human rights agenda. It's just to better improve ourselves and our conduct. Someone asked me about Donald Trump and I said, yes, I think he's dangerous, and that became the headline out of the press conference. If the UN secretariat believes that it's in the friends business, it produces catastrophic results. The UN is not there to become friendly with the member states.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Image Folks In today's programme. It's time again for our special series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and our guest today is Zaid Radal Hussein. He became UN Human Rights Commissioner in 2014, the first person from the Middle East and the first Muslim to hold the job. He had already spent time with the UN in former Yugoslavia, moving on to work setting up the International Criminal Court, then to UN peacekeeping, and he represented his native Jordan as ambassador to the United Nations. I began by asking him whether a job defending human rights had always been his goal.
Speaker 2:No, I was far too immature and delinquent to be thinking lofty ideas and profound thoughts. It really was my first proper working experience after I did my military service in Jordan, which took me to UN peacekeeping, and two years of service in the Balkans, from early 1994 to early 1996, that first exposed me to the enormity of atrocity crimes, the overwhelming emotional response. One feels the revulsion, one experiences the senselessness of it all. From the hills above you can hear the war going on between former allies in a town that was the epitome of ethnic togetherness. Central Bosnia has been gripped by a madness, apparently without end. The battle for the wider area goes on village by village, with no mercy being shown on either side. There's nothing that can justify killing or destruction like that, nothing at all.
Speaker 2:And I think all of us who were young UN officials serving in that mission came away understanding what hypocrisy means at a global level, what fecklessness produces, what fear produces. And I think many of us felt that if we were ever in a position of responsibility we'd try our best not to rerun that early experience that we all had. And I think that was where I began to think about these issues. But I wasn't thinking human rights writ large. I was very much looking at atrocity crimes and then later on I sort of almost also stumbled into the job of UN High Commission for Human Rights. I didn't want the job in the beginning.
Speaker 1:I remember you said that if you'd have taken time to think about it, you might have actually turned it down.
Speaker 2:Yes, my intention at the start of 2014 was to leave the UN but still live with my family in the United States, and in the end, I ended up joining the UN and leaving the United States. It was completely the opposite of what I was hoping for, so one doesn't know where fate can take you.
Speaker 1:Prince Zaid Al Hussein of Jordan is poised to become the United Nations first Muslim and Arab High Commissioner for Human Rights. When you got to Geneva, was it the job that you expected?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a job that's really quite complex in many different respects and it took me three and a half years of doing the job to really feel that I knew it and I could master it, and I understood where the strengths were, where the weaknesses were.
Speaker 2:Prior to my joining the office, I was tipped off by a highly regarded former employee at OHCHR who said to me that this is a leader-resistant office. They will go about doing their own thing and good luck to you, which is almost true. There is work that the office does irrespective of who the High Commissioner is, and then there's the individual signature that each High Commissioner would apply to the office and the extra that is brought or sort of removed from the office's work. But there's much that will happen irrespective of who the High Commissioner is the supporting functions that the office gives to the treaty bodies, the UN treaty bodies, the special procedures, the special rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council and supporting the Human Rights Council All of that happens irrespective of who's holding the office, and then it's whatever else one adds to the office that separates each High Commissioner from the other.
Speaker 1:You were quite outspoken. Not every human rights commissioner is. They'll have different views about it. Louise Arbor said she was told me she wasn't convinced it was always the best move. She said. Sometimes she felt if you do it too often you just reveal the impotence of the office.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I knew from my experience in the former Yugoslavia that if the UN secretariat believed and I think mistakenly that it's in the friends business, it produces catastrophic results. The UN is not there to become friendly with the member states. The UN is there. I'm talking about the secretariat of which I was a part when I was High Commissioner. The UN is there. It's a principal organ of the UN, the secretariat that is. It's on equal footing with the Security Council and with the General Assembly.
Speaker 2:And we were in the respect business, not in the friends business. And for me it mattered little whether they hated me or they disliked me or so forth. I think the point was, were they wary of me enough to take me seriously and to respond in kind? And I think that's what matters. And if you're concerned about maintaining easy relationships or being comfortable, then that's not the job for you. I'm sorry. I match my view of it and I think it's because I was a former diplomat and a former ambassador for many years. Having served in the Security Council, in the Peace Building Commission, having been a peacekeeper on the ground, I sort of felt I knew I could push and the governments could take it, and in many respects. Ambassadors would come after the telling off that I would give them, would come up to me privately and say you know, my government deserved it. And thank you for saying it and I'm going to oppose you publicly, but it was the right thing to say.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting point.
Speaker 2:You very famously made a speech about xenophobes, populists and racist are we going to continue to stand by and watch this banalization of bigotry until it reaches its logical conclusion? Stop. We will not be bullied by you the bully, nor fooled by you the deceiver.
Speaker 1:Not again and you were talking about political leaders Victor or ban in Hungary, nigel Farage UK and notably Donald Trump in the United States.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was halfway through my term as high commissioner, and I thought, well, it's individuals who had these governments who pour this poison into their societies, and it's a well known poison, it's not a new poison what they're doing. And so I felt, when I had the occasion to speak in the hay, I felt it was the right time to, and I think I was, yes, the first, if not the only, un official to go after these leaders, or so called leaders, because they may be leaders in official sense, in official sense, but there's nothing about them that you know, the opposite of someone like Nelson Mandela, who's a real leader. You know someone who you deeply respect.
Speaker 1:In response to Donald Trump on the campaign trail saying that he would torture, would you allow US interrogators to waterboard terrorist prisoners in order to extract information? Absolutely, and don't tell me it doesn't work to what your works. Ok, folks, believe me, it works. Ok. You suggested that his election could be dangerous. Do you think that prediction is proven right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I mean, I remember the occasion. You may even have been there. It was a press conference and I think I spoke for about an hour and a half about everything else, and then someone asked me possibly even you asked me about Donald Trump, and I said, yes, I think he is dangerous.
Speaker 2:If Donald Trump is elected on the basis of what he has said already, and unless that changes, I think it's without any doubt that he would be dangerous. And that became the headline out of the press conference. I mean, how could you not think that any thinking person that is, in the first four years, I mean almost proved the point of the damage that someone like him can do? And then, if he were to return to power in 2024 again it's the world is already so fragile how could it withstand the shocks that he could deliver to it? So I think it almost goes without saying that that's the case.
Speaker 2:And again, you know, I think when you look at the human rights agenda and the work of human rights, the real heroes are those who have forfeited their freedoms, are in detention for speaking their minds and haven't committed any wrong beyond just stating what needs to be stated. And I thought well, you know I'm not going to be put in prison for speaking out as high commissioner for human rights, so what am I worried about? Okay, I may not serve a second term, but it's hardly. You know, I'm not doing it, for you know my pension in the UN. I'm doing it because it's a huge responsibility and in the end, you have to your primary audience or your primary stakeholder, human rights defenders, civil society. That's very much working in the human rights field and I think that's that's what matters most. It's easier to withstand the so-called pressure from governments than pressure from civil society. I think if civil society feels you fail, you really have failed.
Speaker 1:Do you count that as one of your successes then, when you look back at your time in office now?
Speaker 2:Well, I think what I was I'm proud about is pushing where my predecessors also broke new ground. We didn't wait for a mandate from the Human Rights Council to commission an investigation and a report on what was happening in Kashmir or what was happening in Venezuela, or what was happening in Ethiopia or what was happening in Turkey, and all of that was something that my senior staff and I drove. And I'm proud that we did that, because in the UN, especially in New York, there are all these areas of the world which are untouched by the UN secretariat for fear of a sort of whiplash, sort of response, and I felt that if the occasion was given to us, that we should not shy away from it. And I was proud that we proceeded on that basis. And I would like to think that if I was still in that position, we would have done an investigation on Xinjiang and the Uighurs as well.
Speaker 1:You bring me neatly to a couple of other questions which are we're almost certainly present during your time. Well, they were, I know they were your time in office and still there now. And these are these ideological divides between among member states.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's not new really they were there. They were present in the earliest negotiations on the formulation of the Universal Declaration and, more particularly, once the Universal Declaration was adopted, principally because of the ideological divisions that persisted post the Second World War and the prevalence of the Cold War, the Western powers, led by the US, were very much focused on civil and political rights and you had many key provisions, including Article 14, the right to a fair trial, for example, and then the right to freedom of expression, association, assembly, freedom of opinion and, of course, the incitement to hatred provision. And the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc very much focused on economic, social and cultural rights and you know the dress never considered joining the International Covenant on Economic, social and Cultural Rights, and so it's not a new division. I think the critical point for OHCHR, the Office of Human Rights, is that all of it's important, all of it must be worked upon, all of it matters and it's not a case of subordinating one to the other.
Speaker 1:Can I ask you about the recent resolution on religious hatred passed at the Human Rights Council, which is in response to Quran burning in Sweden? Our proposal is therefore adopted.
Speaker 2:The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted a motion condemning the burning of the Quran by an Iraqi man in Sweden late last month.
Speaker 1:Western countries either abstained or a lot of them voted against it. They said that it challenged freedom of expression. The Muslim countries, led by Pakistan, were very upset about this.
Speaker 2:When the first cartoons emerged in the Danish newspaper in 2005 and there was a fierce reaction by the Islamic countries, the Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen asked of the Danish government for that to be an apology and the Danish government basically said well, I mean, this is the law that exists in Denmark and Muslims understand that the applicable law is the applicable law. They understand that what we should have said at the time is okay. So if freedom of expression in your country is part of the legal tradition it's very much a constitutional provision then why don't you exercise it and condemn the cartoons? Basically because you already have a population, a community inside of Denmark that is in potentially a vulnerable situation. So exercise your freedom of expression and condemn what it is that's happening. Don't stay silent, which is what was happening. I think.
Speaker 2:If Muslim countries see a ferocious response, verbally speaking, from those governments concerned, then I think they would be largely satisfied. But if it's silent, then are you inciting? Are you, by your silence, basically inciting hatred toward a minority? But you're just. You're tacitly just standing by and letting it happen. So if you believe in freedom of expression, then exercise your right as a government to denounce what you see as provocative or distasteful or unpleasant or hurtful. It may be legal within your country, but you can take a position on it. But if you stay silent on it, then I think there's a problem.
Speaker 1:A parting shot from the UN's human rights chief, Zed Rad Al Hussein, on what he has learned in four years in the job and where he believes the world has gone wrong.
Speaker 2:The UN is symptomatic of the wider global picture. It is only as great or as pathetic as the prevailing state of the international scene at the time.
Speaker 1:Looking back on your time as High Commissioner, would you, would you change anything? Would you have done it if you'd have known beforehand what it was like?
Speaker 2:Probably so. I think my wife was always of the opinion that I was sort of destined to do it because I'd always been a little bit of an independent ambassador or spoke my mind when I had been represented. But I felt that if I had another four years I would have done a much better job in my second term than in my first, simply because I understood what I was capable of doing in that position. But it only came in the last six to seven months of being in that position that I firmly understood how to do it. I really felt I understood every detail of it. So I think I mean my preference would be that that post be a single term, six year post, because you could spend your first three years getting to grips with the vast agenda that exists and the best way and best method by which you approach all the different issues, and then three years to really put it into best effect.
Speaker 2:It's not without reason that they choose four years. You only have a year in pension when you serve five years, so they put give you four years and then dangle the prospect. But I don't think I think that's the wrong motivation. It's a hard enough job. I believe you either do it properly or you don't do it. It's not if you'd seem to be like any other. You know you and job and the many of them that one can do. I don't think. I think the motivation has to be in the right place for this.
Speaker 1:The reason for this interview is, of course, we are marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the current High Commissioner of Falkirk has called a transformative document. Do you think we're rowing away from the understanding of what we needed to transform that we maybe had in 1948?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it's an extraordinary document because one at the same time establishes the ceiling and sets the floor, and it's the floor and the ceiling together. It can seem to be unattainable in part. You know the point that I raise with my students and I ask them the question every time I teach a course at university. I ask them is human rights a strong and powerful force or is it a weak force? Is it weak or is it strong? You can easily make the argument it's weak because human rights the two words hardly ever figure in business literature. It's practically non-existent in many of the social sciences. You just don't see it there. And outside of a few centers littered around, in a few universities, in the law faculties, it just isn't present.
Speaker 2:And yet, if it's that weak, why are dissidents shot and imprisoned? Long terms of imprisonment? You know, look at Vladimir Karamurts in Russia. If it's so weak, why is he in prison? Why are authoritarian leaders so terrified of it? Why would the member states prefer to have a weak high commissioner rather than a strong one? You know, there is a reason for it because it is potent. And I think it wasn't me who said this, it was Louis Arbor who said this that the office of the High Commission for Human Rights works in a space between the government and its people and strikes at the very heart of the legitimacy of that government. Is that government serving its people according to its own obligations toward them? It's immensely powerful and I think the lesson to be learned is that, if used wisely, you can apply enormous pressure. And it's an immensely powerful tool if used effectively, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:How would you like to see us perhaps rededicate ourselves to the values and principles in the Declaration?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's. You know it's recalling how the Declaration came about. It was an extraordinary effort by, principally, five people, and the words they used to push the document through all the different stages, I think it was very powerful. I mean, pc Chen, the Chinese philosopher and the very direct contributor to the wording of the Universal Declaration, fundamentally got it right when he said what we're aiming at is to create a better human being. And that's what we're trying to do with the human rights agenda is just to better improve ourselves and our conduct and try and remove the avarice and the malevolence that exists deep within the human condition and to separate the extremists, who themselves believe that they're defending the rights of their people, from the human rights defender who believes in the rights of everyone, but Certainly not in the right to take up violence in defence of a cause but to speak out and use non-violent means to protest conditions which are fundamentally unjust and unfair. And who can argue with that?
Speaker 1:Who, indeed, those wise words bring us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. My thanks to Zaid Radhaal Hussein for sharing his thoughts with us. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss info podcast. We come out every two weeks on a Tuesday and coming up over the next few weeks we'll be looking at human rights in Russia, at the hopes and fears for COP28, and we'll be continuing our special series on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it marks its 75th anniversary. Feel free to write to us at Inside Geneva, at Swissinfoch, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Swiss Info is the international public media company of Switzerland, available in many languages as well as English. Check out our other content at wwwswissinfoch. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening and do join us next time on Inside Geneva.