Rash: Minnesota, and the U, bring ‘a breath of energy’ on human rights

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A growing snowstorm didn’t deter attendees to the Dec. 9 Human Rights Day Symposium held at the Humphrey School on the University of Minnesota campus. Many were especially eager to hear from keynote speaker Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA.

But O’Brien seemed just as keen to listen — and learn — from the real-time classroom happening just blocks away in the Minneapolis Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and other areas particularly impacted by an ICE enforcement surge, presidential rhetoric on Somali immigrants and the targeting of elected leaders who support them.

In fact, O’Brien told the crowd that as he prepared his speech this thought occurred: “I shouldn’t be telling these folks anything; we should just be coming here and learning — fast.”

In an interview before his address, O’Brien indicated that it wouldn’t be the only insight and inspiration he’s gleaned from Minnesota’s vibrant human-rights community, in which he senses “a breath of energy.” There are nearly 200 students at the undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. level in the U’s Human Rights Program, which collaborates with the law school, the Humphrey School and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Noting the student involvement, O’Brien added that “there is a history here that I’ve always been familiar with. I mean, even working as a human rights activist in other contexts I knew about Minnesota and Minneapolis in particular.” Especially the U, which he put alongside Harvard University, Columbia University and New York University as “academic hubs of energy and excellence.”

The U’s human-rights reputation “has its own momentum,” O’Brien said, indicating that was “absolutely crucial now because we are in this period of massive human-rights disruption.” Things, he said, “are being torn apart and we need new solutions. We need it for resilience, because the scale and the depth and breadth of the human-rights attacks are so significant that we need centers of study to not just understand the nature of the threats, where they are coming from, and what they will lead to in terms of human-rights harm, but we also need a whole new set of thoughts around how we rebuild.”

The Trump administration, he continued, has learned some of the strategies and “has been an innovator in a bad way in terms of using new technologies, new communication tools, new ways of pulling populations apart.”

O’Brien noted two transcendent challenges: “authoritarian practices [that] seek more and more unaccountable power and less checks on their power” and “a strategy to build that power by appealing to popular sentiments, by marginalizing particular groups or seeking anti-rights outcomes against particular groups, whether it’s communities of color or migrant communities or the LGBTQIA community, whether it’s seeking identity-based politics to try to create a sense of zero-sum outcomes for the anti-rights supporters to thrive. The argument they’re hearing is others have to do badly.”

But it’s not just the present president responsible for America’s human-rights backsliding, O’Brien said. “The Biden administration did huge amounts of damage to both their own credibility but also to human rights as a set of standards that the United States would adhere to. And when the U.S. says it’s not interested in applying human-rights law consistently and evenly that sends a message to every authoritarian practitioner and everyone else who wants to advance the anti-rights agenda.”

O’Brien’s bipartisan criticism comes with his insistence that human rights should be nonpartisan. “I think it’s unfortunate when it’s characterized as either just a progressive cause or, in some cases, a conservative cause,” he said. “That’s not the way. The whole foundation of human rights is that it is a set of principles where all people, no matter where they come from, are entitled to the same basic rights wherever you live. They apply — all of them — to everyone, everywhere.”

Everyone, everywhere seems to be an apt description of the millions on the move worldwide. And the mass migration, which may not abate but accelerate due to unchecked conflict and climate change, is increasingly met by a global cold shoulder. The news narrative, noted O’Brien, often frames this dynamic in a North-South context, but what doesn’t make the headlines are “the number of Sudanese sitting in Uganda, a massive number of Afghans sitting in Pakistan, and displaced people from Bangladesh to across Colombia and Venezuela.”

And with characteristically American optimism, O’Brien concluded that “I believe we are reaching a point of people waking up to what is going on. I became an American in 2011, and I have been witness to the remarkable dignity, humanity, community spirit that seems to be part of this culture.”

Many, he added, “are waking up to the chaos and the cruelty that they’re seeing around them and they’re realizing that they as citizens can take action.”