In 2006, the United Nations established the UN Human Rights Council in order to replace the previous UN Human Rights Commission, which had become a moral farce due to the participation of so many human rights abusers and dictatorships in its operations. The Council, however, was no better, and so the Bush administration chose not to participate. Not so the Obama administration.
Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the United States rejoin the council, but U.S. participation did not alter Council behavior. According to UN Watch data, between 2006 and 2015, there were 66 condemnations of Israel–more than those about the rest of the world combined. There were no resolutions condemning serial human rights abusers China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Turkey, and only five condemning Iran, though not singling it out for its leadership’s repeated incitement of genocide.
Genocide does not happen overnight. Whether in 1940s Germany, 1970s Cambodia, or 1990s Rwanda and Yugoslavia, there are always warnings signs; chief among them is incitement against ethnic, racial, or religious groups.
When President Obama announced his intention to create an Atrocity Prevention Board, he noted, “Sixty-six years since the Holocaust and 17 years after Rwanda, the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide.” In the end, however, the Atrocity Prevention Board turned into just another bureaucracy with little to show for its existence. In hindsight, it appears to have been more a placeholder for Samantha Power until the UN ambassadorship opened.
If symbolic bureaucracies don’t prevent mass-murder and State Department tweets don’t fill murderous dictators with fear, then what policy options, if any, exist?
In a new article in the Cornell International Law Journal, Henry Kopel, an assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, argue that the key is to sanction state sponsors of genocide incitement:
Historical studies also show that most of the actual killers do not exhibit unusually violent propensities or psychological pathologies, but rather are ordinary people from a cross-section of the population who have been transformed into mass killers… For drafting incitement sanctions legislation, the 1974 Jackson-Vanik trade sanctions law provides a useful model. A compelling target for such a statute is the prolific genocide incitement of the present Iranian regime. Statistical analyses of sanctions policies yield success rates falling in a range of about one-third to one-half of the pertinent cases studied, numbers which greatly exceed the success rate of existing genocide prevention efforts.
The entire article is an in-depth explanation of the law relating to genocide (its definition, the definition of incitement, case studies) and the potential application against countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran whose incitement conforms to a T to the international legal definition of incitement to genocide. He also tackles the usual opposition to sanctions, countering, for example, the argument that they hurt the wrong people. Kopel proposes legislation modeled on Jackson-Vanik and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as a remedy to Western inaction. The language he provides is longer, but the core of his proposed legislation is:
Any country or equivalent state actor that funds, facilitates, or otherwise encourages incitement to genocide as defined herein shall: (i) be barred from participation in any and all U.S. government programs that involve international economic or military assistance or that provide international economic or military benefits; and (ii) be designated as a country subject to the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act, 50 U.S.C. Appx. §§ 1 et seq. These sanctions shall become effective after the Presidential reporting deadline in section (c). All such sanctions against a country or equivalent state actor shall be lifted as of the date on which the President conveys to Congress a Presidential determination that such country or equivalent state actor is no longer funding, facilitating, or otherwise encouraging incitement to genocide as defined herein.
Obama and Power preferred symbolism and posturing to action. Let us hope that their successors, and Congress, do not. After all, Kopel’s proposal is practical and not partisan. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have said they will put partisanship aside to get things done in Washington. Countering incitement to genocide would be as good a place to start as anything.
