While human rights defenders from around the world gathered in Washington for the Human Rights Summit hosted by Human Rights First and Freedom House Kazak human rights defender Yevgeniy Zhovtis addressed the summit from his prison cell.

Further Information

During the summit the participants had a meeting with United States President Obama during which they raised the issue of how "The rights of individuals to share information and to express their opinions are being threatened by a broad array of legal and political forces as well as by violence from state and non-state actors, creating increasingly hostile conditions for human rights defenders and democracy activists everywhere". Human Rights Summit

Text of Comments by Yevgeniy Zhovtis to the Human Rights Summit

Dear summit participants!

Unfortunately, for well-known reasons I cannot personally participate in this important human rights forum. Nevertheless, I would like to share with you my thoughts on the human rights situation in the world.

I believe we can speak not just of a deterioration of the human rights situation in many countries of the world, but of a crisis in the very concept of human rights.

International law in the field of human rights, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Covenants, hundreds of United Nations and International Labor Organization conventions that legally obligate the member states are treaties of a “second category.” If obligations contained in security or economic cooperation treaties must be implemented, the failure to carry out obligations in human rights treaties has become normal practice. And this is as regards legal obligations, to say nothing of political obligations!

Several years ago, at a hearing of the Constitutional Council of the Republic of Kazakhstan where I appeared as an expert and referred to a number of provisions of OSCE documents, one of the members of the Council asked if the provisions of OSCE documents are legally binding. I responded that OSCE documents do not have legal force, to which he noted with satisfaction “well, then there will be no consequences if they are not implemented.”

One gets the impression that democratic states and international organizations are playing a game of hide-and-seek with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. You pretend that you agree with us on the issue of guaranteeing human rights, democracy and the rule of law, and we will pretend that we don’t see you violating your obligations.

A unique, diplomatically-correct language has even grown up for documents of international organizations and presentations by official representatives of the UN, the OSCE and other organizations on the issue of human rights. First they speak of “gratitude for cooperation,” then of “positive signs of steady development,” and then of “individual shortcomings,” which should in no way be taken as spoiling the generally positive impression.

Every report of the OSCE, which has monitored elections in Kazakhstan for almost 15 years, begins with the words that our country had taken an “important step” on the path to reaching international standards for free and fair elections. And every report eventually concludes that elections in Kazakhstan still fail to meet international standards, but steps have been taken.

How many?

I’ve counted. According to the OSCE reports, our country has taken at a minimum seven important steps.

And so it’s difficult to understand why then we haven’t moved off of square one and why in 2010, the year of Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the OSCE, we have a one-party parliament. I would venture to say that there are many such examples involving different countries around the world.

Either international human rights treaties are legally binding in a practical sense and their implementation carries with them some practical legal consequences, or we need to admit that international law regarding human rights simply does not exist.

One particularly glaring issue is seen in the legislation of post-Soviet states. Here legislation clearly demonstrates the priority of the government’s interests over the rights and freedoms of individuals. In practice, the principle that citizens are permitted anything that is not forbidden by law and that the authorities are forbidden everything not expressly allowed by the law, is turned on its head. The citizen must prove each time that he has the right and must find the citation in the law that confirms that the authorities are not allowed to act in a way that violates this right.

Even in authoritarian political systems with legislation that is theoretically strong from the point of view of human rights and freedoms, it is hard to count on real judicial independence. And, of course, it’s hard to count on practical implementation of the law in a way that is favorable for human rights.

But it seems to me that we still need to resist, that we cannot give authoritarian regimes the ability to undermine how things are understood, to violate ideals, or wash away the idea and concept of human rights that has been won through so much human suffering.

Sometimes it seems to me that we need to go back and start nearly everything over from the beginning.

But then I think that we don’t need to start, we need to continue. To continue to call black – black, and to call white – white, to maintain that two times two is four, that either there is freedom or that there is is not freedom; to speak in simple, understandable phrases, and to talk and act with a belief in what we say.

From my point of view, there is simply no alternative for human rights defenders.