The Seventh Value – Episode Six: Human Rights

Maciej Nowicki:
It's the moment when Judge Igor Tuleya, in Poland, has just learned that he's being suspended and that his immunity has been lifted. So he will be prosecuted criminally for one of his judgments that was critical towards the government. And at this very moment, it like was immediate. So, imagine a guy who's there and who is in the middle of a case and who has to just simply stop. And he goes out of the room to the waiting parties, to the proceedings, the prosecutor, the defendant, the accused and also the victim of the crime. And he just apologises that, unfortunately, there will be a delay because he cannot continue with the case. And he goes to his room and then he finds out that actually his computer's already off, he can't do anything.

Maciej Nowicki:
Before the court, there's a group of people who's protesting. So they knew that he's being suspended and they protest. And the police is taking them off, very violently. The judges are someone who are usually very far away and they are not very active in the public discourse and so on. But here we've got this understanding of who needs whom, meaning we need someone to protect us. And those who protect us, need us to protect them from the political power who would like to abuse the rights of everybody.

Juli Simond:
Europe is built around six different values that make up the fabric and face of the European Union: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Over 70 years ago, these founding pillars were written into the Treaty of the European Union, but how have they withstood the test of time?

Guest:
The six European values. That's interesting. Six, right?

Guest:
I don't know which ones? I can guess.

Juli Simond:
From deconstructing the original meaning to re imagining the future.

Guest:
Security, integrity, and then ...

Guest:
Democracy.

Guest:
Oh no, I feel embarrassed.

Juli Simond:
This is The Seventh Value.

Guest:
I am really ashamed I don't know. No, I don't know the other ones.

Juli Simond:
Today we're talking to Maciej Nowicki, from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

Maciej Nowicki:
My name is Maciej Nowicki, and I'm President of the board of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. And for many years, for 21 years, I've been running Watch Docs. Human Rights in Film International Film Festival. That is one of the oldest human rights film festivals in the world. And it's like something that I'm very much connected to emotionally, still.

Juli Simond:
Together, we look at our attention span for the EU's sixth and last value, respect for human rights. So I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions, relatively quickly, and you can give me a short answer, usually one or two words. How does that sound?

Maciej Nowicki:
That's great.

Juli Simond:
Where do you live?

Maciej Nowicki:
I live in Warsaw, Poland.

Juli Simond:
Where do you work?

Maciej Nowicki:
Also in Warsaw, Poland, though my work is focused on the whole region in Europe and Eastern Europe.

Juli Simond:
What motivates you to work hard?

Maciej Nowicki:
Currently, the crisis of human rights, rule of law and equality.

Juli Simond:
What did you want to be when you were small?

Maciej Nowicki:
A scholar, not an activist. So it's not really what I thought I would do.

Juli Simond:
Respect for human rights seems like a given in modern day societies, but what do you consider to be human rights?

Maciej Nowicki:
Well, the core concept of human rights is that these are shields against the power, shields of individuals against the power. So the basic rights that individuals have in their relation with power, mainly with public authorities. The right is something that you can claim, and it is something that you don't have to justify. There should be a mechanism of enforcing this right, so you can go to the court and claim the right to be enforced. And in this sense, we shouldn't think about the victims as powerless. People that deserve our compassion and pity, they deserve simply what they deserve, meaning the legal remedies for their abuses.

Juli Simond:
So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has existed for over 70 years. Do you believe we'd made any progress in those years?

Maciej Nowicki:
Actually, yes. I believe that there are a lot of achievements. The Declaration was a basis, for example, for the European Convention's regional Human Rights Convention that established a really effective international system of the protection of human rights that has not existed before. We witnessed it, that it is possible for an individual, like a small person without any power, to challenge his own government. There is a system of really enforcing the rights. It's important because rights without the system of enforcement are just declarations and they are just simply ideas, which is sometimes a lot, but it's absolutely not enough.

Juli Simond:
It's easy for the average European citizen to see human rights issues as things that happen outside of the European Union, but is that perception correct?

Maciej Nowicki:
Of course not. Really, the rights are very different. We've got this first generation of civil and political rights, and then there are social economic rights, but there are rights of this third generation too. So those rights of, for example, living in a healthy environment.

Juli Simond:
Can you give examples of humanitarian issues currently at play in Europe?

Maciej Nowicki:
I would say this climate crisis is something very, very crucial as everybody knows. And I think it's something really important that this environmental crisis is addressed in the language of human rights. We've got really a right that we can enforce, to live in a healthy environment and the sustainable environment, so that we can enforce our rights against the politicians who are sometimes too slow, or very often too slow, in actually protecting these rights. So these are cases, for example, in the Netherlands, this very controversial and famous Urgenda case, where the organizations went to court to actually protect their environmental rights, meaning they challenging the government for not, for example, implementing policies to actually decrease the emissions, and so on. And then let's speak about the right to asylum. This is something that's super important. And what we are focused on now is the huge humanitarian and human rights crisis on the border of Poland and Belarus. So this is something that's absolutely, I would say, new for us.

Maciej Nowicki:
We have been going through very, very many difficult situations, but this one is a situation when our volunteers and volunteers of other organizations and simply volunteers who are like people not associated with any organizations are those that grant the very basic humanitarian aid to the people who are stranded, who are trapped on the border between Poles and Belarusians, who are multiple times pushing them back and forth through the border. And so the people need very basic assistance - medical, humanitarian. But in this situation, I see that people that are moved by the very different motivations and ideas, but who believe that simply we cannot let those people die, that's something that unifies people so different, as anarchists from one side and Catholics from the others side. And they can talk and they can cooperate on a daily basis very well because simply there is something that still unifies them in this very polarised society, which is, this care about people's life.

Juli Simond:
Stories about migrants and refugee have been used and abused at large, in both the media and the political sphere for years now. How does the language around human rights' victims influence our perception of reality?

Maciej Nowicki:
Language really determines a lot. There is this culture of victimhood, and then we tend to kind of feel empathy towards the people who are actually different because they are those like poor ones that we can help, because we are so good persons, so we do care. And this is like this important for our self image, before our own eyes. And in these terms, it's really like this stereotypical pictures of immigrants who are poor, and so on, and other people. These are like the usual images that evoke this kind of feelings, compassion, let's say. On the other side, there is of course, this well described phenomenon of the compassion fatigue, because this culture really consumes itself. And people are tired with this, that they are like bombed with the new and new pictures of suffering.

Maciej Nowicki:
There are those stereotypes that, for example, are used by both sides where the migrants are well dressed, and so on. The perception is, okay, they are well off. What they are looking for here? But if they are badly dressed and they are already dirty, because they had to go through very difficult journey, then the perception is, oh, they are really very different from us. They cannot integrate in our societies, and so on and so on. So this is very difficult actually to use the images and to speak about the migrant and refugees in this sense, that acknowledges their humanity and not manipulating it anyhow.

Maciej Nowicki:
I believe that this images of refugees and immigrants are very much politically manipulated, first of all. And they are very much used to instill fear in societies. Some apprehension about the newcomers is a normal thing, but you can build a fear, a real fear on this, and then simply govern via this tool. And we can see it in Poland very, very clearly because actually the perception of Poles towards asylum seekers and migrants was positive before the massive, massive campaign of hatred that has been launched by, actually, the government. And now the whole perception, the general perception is very, very different. And it's below 50% of those who are for asylum seekers. I don't mean migrants, but asylum seekers, those who are entitled to international protection.

Juli Simond:
If we are so quick to dismiss the struggles of others, what does that say about our values?

Maciej Nowicki:
Generally, the pattern of our culture is this hyper competitiveness. And this has got nothing to do with human rights, for example, because it's about seeing the others as potential competitors, not as our like brothers, let's say, and sisters. Of course, we can be critical about this pattern of culture, and there are so many like subcultures that simply contest this pattern. If we create the space for the values and we stand by the values, and especially when we are acknowledging the people who are acting upon them, and we are giving more spotlight to them, more spotlight to, for example, to those judges in Poland that are being prosecuted because they are not consenting to this dismantling of judicial independence. And if we support them, there is this possibility that those values that are declared, like human rights, are simply a little bit more real drivers of our culture. And that's something that we can work for.

Ursula von der Leyen (recording):
Human rights are not for sale, at any price. And honorable members, human beings are not bargaining chips. But as long as we do not find common ground on how to manage migration, our opponents will continue to target this.

Juli Simond:
You just listen to a part of the 2021 State of the Union by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. Whenever a big disaster happens, such as a boat with hundreds of migrants that capsizes in the middle of the Mediterranean, it dominates the news, but only for a short while. A few days later, it seems like nothing even happened. What's up with our attention span for human rights issues?

Maciej Nowicki:
I believe it's our attention span with everything, basically. So also human rights' issues. It's an infrastructure of our communication now. And so probably those processes are beyond our, let's say, control. So I believe that there still must be a lot of thinking about the direction in which civilization goes. And particularly about technology, because I believe it's technology in the end, in this basic sense of the word, meaning the way that we do think, communicate in this case, that is determining our short attention span. We've been witnessing, for years, those thousands of people who died on the Mediterranean sea and we didn't help them. So I believe that all in all these images of suffering are something that traumatised us and our conscience is so, so unclear that we will live for long time with it and will digest it for a long time.

Maciej Nowicki:
The question is how, what use we will do with it? Will we be constructive and human, simply in this? I believe that we need to create a space for a real meeting, even if it's local, but it should be offline. I believe that people are very much looking for such spaces and it will grow with time.

Juli Simond:
How we address these issues isn't only related to speech and text, but also photography, video images, and even art. What power do these media hold in order to influence the debate?

Maciej Nowicki:
The problem of short attention span, that this just simply the result of our communication, let's say infrastructure, and the way we communicate it nowadays. And because of that, we shouldn't really rely on the news because the news is something that's just a snapshot and this does not have a follow-up, this does not have a context. But first of all, it does not have a human story, the real human story behind it. And so if we use in a deeper way, for example, a documentary film that we are working with, then you can see something beyond this news and we can see a person. I mean, this goes in pair, meaning this does not change as a magic tool, anything, but this changes those who are watching their films. And those people sometimes act later on, and it is really important what they have in their minds and in their hearts.

Juli Simond:
And can these alternative forms of storytelling bring people together around the concept of human rights, regardless of their personal backgrounds?

Maciej Nowicki:
People who are not already very strongly committed to certain viewpoints, and there are quite a lot of those people, let's say, in the middle, they can get somehow more sensitive towards the human rights via this storytelling. The documentary cinema in general, and human rights' documentary cinema, which is simply a mainstream of documentary cinema now, which I actually am very happy about, is a cinema of victims. It's very, very rarely a cinema of perpetrators or a cinema of, I would say, objective view on the issue. So it really gives the voice to the victims, very much so. There is a lot of empathy in the documentary cinema.

Juli Simond:
In the last years, social media has exponentially shed a light on police brutality, Amazon fires and sexual harassment. A critical component of social media is the ability for any individual to capture and share human rights' violations in real time. What does this mean for the ability of civil society to monitor these human rights violations?

Maciej Nowicki:
Yes, it creates new opportunities, or maybe not very new, but more accessible tools of monitoring. Even in the Nineties and at the beginning of our century, there were those important scientific research that showed that when there is a audio visual testimony of a human rights' abuse, the chance for the perpetrator to escape responsibility was way, way lower than if there was no audio visual material. There are many nice, good examples of using the internet and new media as innovative tools for, for example, human rights' monitoring. So there are those initiatives, like Bellingcat, like Forensic Architecture, that use big data for monitoring. And sometimes they can provide compelling evidence of human rights' abuses without actually going out from their desks. And this is something that has been also in Donbass.

Juli Simond:
How can technology shape the future of human rights and its defenders?

Maciej Nowicki:
It's created this immediacy of communication, so this possibility of organizing protests very quickly, but on the other hand, of course, there are many, many security issues with this. For example, Turkey can just simply switch off Facebook, just being afraid of a mass protest and so on, not to mention China and their control over their social media. So there is this huge issue that people are living more and more online and are more simply surveilled than ever before. And it's also a huge threat to human rights' defenders and to the network of collaborators, people whom they cooperate with.

Juli Simond:
Human rights' defenders are often targets of intimidation, abuse, and violence, even in Europe. How can we ensure their safety, and how can we make sure that their messages are heard?

Maciej Nowicki:
We should think about human rights' defenders in very broad terms, meaning that journalists also are in a worse and worse situation, actually worldwide. It's a very alarming phenomenon. And also the lawyers, those who defend people at courts. Even under communism, they were not very much attacked, I would say. But now this new practice of attacking them, sometimes even physically, or simply putting them in jail, is spreading.

Juli Simond:
Today, we've only discussed one of the six values of the European Union. Human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. If you could add anything to the mix, what would be your seventh value?

Maciej Nowicki:
Well, I'm from Poland. So I actually very much like the word, solidarity. If I would add something, probably it would be solidarity.

Juli Simond:
Thank you for listening to The Seventh Value, a podcast in collaboration between Are We Europe and the Evans Foundation. I am Juli Simond, your host, and with me in the studio, our producer Anneleen Ophoff and sound designer Wederik de Bakker.