Interview: David Mepham, Human Rights Watch
Freya Berry challenges the HRW director on the importance of the group’s work and whether its focuses are too subject to American influence
Human Rights Watch has been going for the past thirty years. If you start typing it into Google, it’s up there in auto-fill with ‘human rights’, and ‘human rights act’. David Mepham has been their UK director (the group is based in the US but insistent that it does not have any ties with the US government) since April 2011, and found time to talk to Varsity between pressuring the government on Syria and other issues.
What exactly do they do, then? "We carry out research into human rights of violation," says Mepham. HRW aims to lobby governments into acting on various international rule-breaking. "Syria is obviously very dramatic, but that’s not only the kind of research we do. We do work for example on rights of domestic workers, which talks about the 100 million people around the world, mostly women, who work in people’s houses, and how most of them don’t have human rights – there’s an awful lot of repression going on, and that’s a significant issue."
Human Rights Watch was also awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for its work in pressuring for an end to the use of land mines, and has been campaigning for many years against female genital mutilation: "We push very hard with the authorities…I’m not saying it doesn’t go on anymore but they’ve just passed some legislation and it has made an impact."
In the light of the case of the domestic workers, does he think the recession has brought along more human rights abuses? "Yes I do think there’s a risk," says Mepham. "Minority groups and migrants tend to suffer more extremely when circumstances are more constrained." Interestingly, he cites Europe as a particular hotbed for this kind of abuse.
"One of the things that didn’t get covered in the case of Libya was the significant numbers of Libyans trying to cross into Europe by boat, and actually many of them were turned away, and actually died at sea – I mean, a really untold story of terrible suffering and human rights abuse, that governments were really unwilling to show any generosity to."
Do they tend to focus more on poorer countries? "It’s certainly the case that better-off places, Europe and the US, are involved in human rights abuses, both within their own borders and internationally." HRW has done a lot of work on torture and rendition, where the suspect is transferred to countries where they are likely to be subjected to torture and abuse.
"We recently published a report saying that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld ought to face criminal prosecution because of their involvement in authorizing torture," he says, referring to the recent poor US conduct in this field including Bush’s acknowledged approval of waterboarding. He recognizes it’s a long shot: "[But] we are not afraid to hold Western governments to account," he says firmly.
He gets defensive when I talk about the organisation’s link to the US, and points out quite reasonably that they have offices all over the world, although their headquarters are in New York. The Times has accused it of not always practising "the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others," whilst others have said it focuses too much on Israel – it has produced 5 papers on the country in the past 14 months, whilst abuse-ridden Kashmir, for example, has seen 4 in the past 20 years.
"We are very independent," he says.
Ultimately, there’s no doubt Human Rights Watch is A Good Thing. When I watch Mepham talking at Trinity Politics Society later that evening, he’s a fluent and persuasive speaker, highlighting the importance of human rights as just as necessary a part of achieving a stable country as the more obvious economic and social factors. As he says of China: "You can’t say, we’ll sort all this out now, and hope human rights can come later."
And as Cameron and Theresa May try to undermine the 1998 Human Rights Convention – May claimed, falsely, that an immigrant’s possession of a cat prevented him being deported – they continue to be relevant, both in the UK and elsewhere.
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