Refocusing our work at a time of upheaval for human rights

Paula Litvachky, Executive Director of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) in Argentina, talks here about the crisis in the international human rights protection system in a world that is reorganizing, and about what this entails for our organizations. On the national stage, President Javier Milei – a Libertarian who asserts that social justice is theft and an aberration – has made significant rollbacks to human rights. With little chance of influencing public policy for now, CELS seeks to mobilize people and accompany their efforts for change.

There is a perception that the international human rights system no longer works. What is happening? Is the system broken?

Many theorists and analysts argue that this is the end of an era regarding the post-WWII consensus and the building of the international order. This is related to geopolitical changes and the decline or weakening of Western hegemony, and especially of the United States. The rules-based order, which is the order that sustains the United Nations and that Western powers were willing to uphold, no longer has that support or the same strength as before. And the human rights infrastructure that was organized around that international order is necessarily affected, because those two things go hand in hand.

Saying that this international order is broken is a provocative way of saying that we are moving towards another kind of global agreement. We are still in transition and no one knows for sure what’s going to happen, it’s not settled yet. But those who set the rules and financed that infrastructure are no longer backing that order, or they are weaker themselves. Which means that the tool of international law that we have used to defend human rights within our countries, and for international activism, is at stake.

Did the crisis in that system begin recently, with geopolitical changes and the destruction in Gaza and Ukraine, for example? Or were there always problems?

This structure that is being questioned served to uphold a certain political hegemony, under rules that in some way reproduced the logic of power.

We were always very critical of how the international human rights protection system worked. It had problems in terms of efficacy, and the clear conditionality of being an order that was also ultimately imposed by the West – with all that entails. So everything we contended about the Global North’s oppression of the South, and the barriers making it impossible for the South to participate in decisions about how to organize that infrastructure and that international order, or to occupy spaces of relevance – on the Security Council, for example – all that is still valid.

But now, that tool that we have used to fight for certain rules linked to protecting human rights, is being questioned by states themselves and by the United States specifically. And today everything seems to be moving towards the acknowledgement that in reality, only force can give you legitimate power. So if the discussion today centres on force alone, where do we fit in? What place is there for those who are oppressed or suffer injustices? What tools and spaces do people and organizations – the movements that defend human rights – have to make demands and ask for rules that would ensure or promote certain levels of equality?

We don’t know how this is going to end. The issue is what to do in the meantime.

In this context of crisis, is it important to change the human rights narrative?

I think the change is political, and the discussion about the narrative and how to communicate comes later. I think a very potent political debate is taking place regarding how to defend human rights today, what the strategies are, and there is also debate about democracy.

Those of us who defend human rights must focus on building more from the margins, from the bottom up, trying to create alliances and forge a new human rights community. We have to engage in a discussion about the culture of human rights, about empathy, about the value of life, about the value of equality, about the value of the environment. And that discussion is not just a matter of narrative, it is a political discussion, in the sense of having a praxis and a conceptual framework that would define the problems and offer a proposal for transformation.

We have to think about how to use our tools for defending human rights to bolster the efforts of those who are fighting injustices. I think we have to make tactical use of the tools that are available. Is it worth going to the Inter-American System? Is it worth going to the international system? Why? How do we do it? How do we fight?

At a national level, it is also important to remove the state from the centre of the discussion. CELS is not focusing all its work on advocacy before the state, or public policy. Instead, the idea is to think once again about how to defend what is public, how to create community, how to mobilize for human rights. We are reviewing our history, thinking once again about how we organized ourselves at the end of the (1976-1983) dictatorship in order to politically and socially approach a conversation about the dignity of life and human rights.

Social processes of resistance and change take time, and we have to be attentive so we can join forces when they arise.

Download the complete series of interviews of Hard Conversations for the Future of Human Rights.