JAMIL F. KHAN | Human rights last on the list for global leadership agenda

The discourse around global governance and diplomacy has more recently revolved largely around trade relations, resource ownership, and dealmaking.

The urgency of this direction has mostly been a response to the United States’ trade wars that have, in turn, propped up nationalistic sentiments across the world, which are framed as standing up to the West.

Here, in Africa, many countries such as Botswana and Burkina Faso are leading conversations on African resource ownership and reversing power dynamics.

As Duma Boko, President of Botswana, recently noted in response to an invitation from the White House to discuss mineral trade with the US: “Buyers must come to sellers.”

This refusal is echoed in the positions of various countries that have sought out new trade and diplomatic alliances, hoping to find more beneficial terms and more stable relations.

Alongside this, or perhaps on top of, the most egregious human rights violations are playing out, while we are being told that saving the integrity of the international system is the main priority for global security.

It seems human rights atrocities are a fair price to pay for favourable trade terms.

India’s President, Narendra Modi, this week met with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to “strengthen ties”. Modi, a Hindu supremacist and Netanyahu, a white supremacist running an apartheid state, represent both a foe and friend of South Africa.

As the “I” in BRICS, India under Modi is one of South Africa’s greatest trade partners, while also seeking to strengthen its relationship with an apartheid state that we have taken to the ICJ.

This meeting did not need to happen to raise any red flags about Modi or India, since Modi has already presided over increasingly systemic discrimination and oppression of Muslim Indians.

As a country so indelibly scarred by apartheid and various histories of discrimination and oppression, vowing never to allow that to happen again, we should not be bedfellows with oppressive regimes with policies rooted in supremacy.

However, the reality is that if South Africa, or any nation, sought to make trade and other deals only with countries that respect human rights, there would be such a small pool of options. No place on earth currently respects human rights in practice.

The most important matter facing all countries in the world now is the quality of human life under the systems and institutions we’ve built. Here, in a country that vocally rejects apartheid and discrimination, people still suffer its effects.

The most liberal and democratic societies continue to oppress their indigenous communities. Every country in the world has some form of entrenched queerphobia, whether in policy or societal attitudes.

Women are oppressed everywhere in the world. Disabled people are barely recognised as people. Children are possibly the most disempowered and abused social group in the world, and millions of people are suffering war and genocide across continents.

Of all these horrifying realities, which have been realities for a long time, the most important course of action states can think up is stabilising trade relations.

Some might argue that trade is central to economic activity and investment, which will inevitably benefit the people and lead to more equitable social relations through commerce and economic mobility. That argument is almost as old as commerce itself, and is designed to distract us from seeing that not only have trade and investment under exploitative capitalist economic systems not brought freedom to most, but they are also actively involved in maintaining oppressive economic conditions that people need saving from.

At this stage of capitalism, even those who are now taking back power from Western influence in the interests of sovereignty and control of their economies are using that power to further oppress those they designate deviance to. There is a relationship between economic prosperity under capitalism and the creation of stigmatised groups.

Under conditions of competition and exploitation, an inferior social group must exist to maintain divisions that can be disguised in economic terms.

Our economic systems rely on the idea of hierarchy, which normalises distance between people through class.

Human rights and human diversity remain at the bottom of the priority list in this economic agenda that still values the borders that separated people in the first place.

For many, an “economy first” approach is pragmatic since economics are such an integral part of a quality life, but without a true culture of respect for human dignity, it will never achieve the liberation it promises, except for a select few.

What is the sovereignty and power of a nation worth when its people are suffering for who they are? What kind of independence inspires more legislation criminalising human diversity?

We must become louder in our demands for prioritising human rights in every negotiation, deal and accord that is meant to secure a better future for people. Right now, we have most leaders negotiating for a better future for governments, not people, while actively ignoring or designing oppressive practices that reinscribe inequalities.

There are no economic systems that run without the influence of human intervention. The people who run those systems, which quite literally control people’s lives, have the power to make decisions that are informed by their belief systems.

If the people they affect are not protected by principles of equality, the reclamation of power will always be used to target the most vulnerable in society. While we often applaud economic progress in developing nations as a positive sign, we must ask who is left out of this progress.

Economic systems that disregard human rights and equality for all do not signal progress, but maintenance of old systems by new faces.

Our participation in the current international system led by the West lulled us into a false sense of security about the fragility of our human rights, and while we see the more obvious violations, we must also monitor the content of the alternatives we are being sold as revolutionary. If the same people continue to suffer under these alternatives, then they are not the alternatives we need.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.