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SUMMARY

The United Nations Security Council has the international stature and resources necessary to exercise farsighted global leadership in the campaign against terrorism. To date, it has largely failed to fully realize this potential.  An important reason has been its failure to take seriously the protection of human rights in the context of counter-terrorism.

Counter-terrorism measures pose dangers to established human rights protections. As numerous recent cases attest, those dangers are not hypothetical and not limited to minor players or issues.  Rights violations in turn are threatening to undermine the success of counter-terrorism efforts in many countries. 

There is mounting evidence, for instance, that the U.S. detainee abuse scandal epitomized by practices at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison in part reflects decisions by the United States to turn its back on well-established principles of international human rights law and commonly held understandings of human rights principles.¹ Treating human rights standards as an inconvenient obstacle that can be brushed aside violates international law and can make governments more vulnerable to terrorism.  Each photograph of American soldiers humiliating a detainee in Iraq could be considered a recruiting poster for al-Qaeda.  Indeed, counter-terrorism measures anywhere that are accompanied by systematic or egregious rights abuse risk provoking, in reaction, increased support for violent extremism.

Current controversies in the United Kingdom over its discriminatory anti-terrorism law,² and in Sweden over the rendition of suspects to Egypt where they were allegedly tortured,³ also show the damage that can be done to the legitimacy of counter-terrorism efforts when states accept lower human rights standards. As this briefing paper shows, drawing on examples from Egypt, Morocco, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, and Sweden, the problem is a global one.

True global leadership by the Security Council in the effort against terrorism would require that the council not only press governments to take decisive and concerted action to block the financing of terror, and promote improved cross-border information sharing, among other steps that the council is taking, but also that it play a prominent role in ensuring that counter-terrorism measures not erode pillars of the human rights framework—pillars which have taken decades to erect.  Instead of asserting such leadership, the Security Council all too often has allowed itself to be a forum where governments offer no more than self-serving accounts of aggressive steps they have taken to combat and prevent terrorism. 

The Security Council is currently restructuring its work on counter-terrorism, bolstering the efforts of its Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) with the establishment of a fully staffed Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED). Although the CTC has unequalled power to compel governments to explain their actions and has set up a mandatory counter-terrorism reporting system for all UN member states, that reporting system currently includes no human rights component

This briefing paper analyzes the work of the CTC to date, reviewing in detail a number of country reports submitted to the CTC and other CTC documents.  Because CTC communications to governments are not made public, it is impossible to fully know the CTC’s response to a particular state report. Based on publicly available information, however, Human Rights Watch’s review of the CTC reporting system found the following:

• When governments describe new draft anti-terror or security laws containing provisions that rights-trained experts would readily recognize as inviting abuse, the CTC says nothing;
• When governments trumpet repressive laws currently being used for crackdown against nonviolent political opponents as part of their contribution to counter-terrorism efforts, the CTC says nothing;
• When governments promote repressive laws used in the past for transparently political ends as part of their contribution to counter-terrorism efforts, the CTC says nothing;
• When governments make demonstrably inaccurate statements about actions that implicate fundamental human rights, the CTC says nothing; and
• When governments describe actions with major rights implications, the CTC does not even raise the issue.

The illustrations in this paper show more generally that the CTC has focused largely on steps that governments have taken on paper (passing new laws, setting up new bureaucratic departments, and so on), not what they are actually doing in practice.  The illustrations also show that, in some cases, the CTC may actually be indirectly encouraging abuses, as when it pushes governments to show results without at the same time explicitly raising relevant and empirically well-founded human rights concerns.

To date, the strongest rights measure taken by the Security Council was its commitment when establishing the CTED to ensure regular liaison between the CTED and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).  This is an important step because, at present, information already available in the U.N. human rights system is not regularly heeded or being used effectively by the CTC.  It is an insufficient step, however, because the Security Council has resources and authority that the OHCHR does not have, and needs its own dedicated human rights staff if its counter-terrorism initiatives are to take human rights seriously.

The Security Council’s disregard for the human rights implications of counter-terrorism has been particularly disappointing because, given the stature of the council, any effort could have far-reaching effects.

As detailed in the concluding section of this paper, HRW believes the work of the Security Council could be substantially improved if it were to take two straightforward steps:

(1) Appoint at least one human rights expert to fill the new senior staff positions on the CTED, with the responsibility to review counter-terrorism measures for their compliance with states’ rights obligations, to ensure more effective “cross-referencing” between the CTC and U.N. human rights bodies and other rights monitors, and to offer forward-looking proposals for making rights an important tool in the counter-terrorism effort;

(2) Require that governments include in their reports to the CTC an accounting of the human rights implications of their counter-terrorism measures.

The Security Council is uniquely placed to play a leading role in reversing the global trend in which rights are viewed as an inconvenient obstacle to progress in the campaign against terrorism. The council should be leading the effort to show in concrete ways that rights are an essential ally.