Even-handedness and Human Rights: A Legitimacy Test for States, NGOs, IGOs and Public Debate
Abstract
The concept of even-handedness is central to human rights law. In an article of March 2007, The Economist asks whether leading organisations like Amnesty International are right to devote as much attention to the isolated abuses of democratic governments as they devote to such massively oppressive regimes as China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Zimbabwe. Similarly, in the 1980s, Reagan supporters criticised Amnesty International for equating the abuses committed by democratic governments with those of communist dictatorships. Meanwhile, Reagan’s foes did the opposite: they accused the US of singling out the horrors of communist regimes but overlooking those of the US and its allies.
Problems of even-handedness are usually discussed within those highly polarised political contexts. To date, there has been no systematic attempt to examine the concepts of even-handedness and political bias within human rights law. Nor is that an easy task. Whenever a state, organisation or individual (‘Accuser’) condemns some state or responsible actor (‘Perpetrator’) for violations of human rights, questions may arise as to whether the Accuser is biased in failing to condemn other, equally bad or worse Perpetrators.
In this article, I argue that perfect even-handedness in human rights advocacy is neither possible nor desirable: certain choices to focus only on specific territories, issues, victims or time-frames, to the exclusion of others, are generally legitimate. However, the Accuser’s legitimacy becomes suspect when lack of even-handedness does result from an ascertainable political bias, which is defined as a political objective that is extraneous to the specific content of the human rights norm the Accuser purports to be applying. Both a general legitimacy thesis, and a more detailed legitimacy test are introduced to identify instances where lack of even-handedness results from political bias.