- Thank you, all.
Many of you have been here
through the entire two days.
Welcome to the latest
edition of Egil Live.
My name is Joseph, oh no sorry.
That's not the right situation is it?
Sorry, got that all wrong.
Welcome to the final
session of the Philip Fest,
as we've come to affectionately call it
over two years of planning,
hashtag Philip Fest.
The first thing I'd
actually like to do is thank
not only my co-editors who
are substantially easier
than Philip to work with, actually
on this publication, which is impressive.
But particularly in the
last days and hours,
all of the administrative
and faculty staff
at the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice
who not only kept it from you,
but brought this whole together, so--
- [Philip] They've all been fired since.
(audience laughs)
- It's been particularly fantastic,
as well as even the dean's office at NYU,
but Lauren and Meg as well
really made this all possible,
and of course we very much
thank the dean's office
for providing us with the venue
and the vittles over the last two days
to have this wonderful event.
So, we've heard a lot in the last two days
about, how as Cesar rather
affectionately put it,
our various origin stories
and the connection with Philip,
intellectual working
connections and so on,
and we've also heard a lot about
what many of us think is distinctive,
exceptional, remarkable
about your approach
to human rights, to politics, to law,
and which for many of us has really
marked your contribution
and also what's been
so edifying and important
in working with you.
So one of the things I'd like to do
in this conversation is
talk about, first of all some
of the origins of all of that.
So, the second thing I'd like to do
is perhaps bring us towards
the end of the conversation
to the present, and to
maybe try and draw you out
on some of your thoughts
about the present and the
future of human rights.
I think a very interesting
`question came through
across this entire conference is
not only the kinds of
human rights scholarship
and legal activism that you stand for,
but the continuous challenge
that you yourself have posed
to human rights law and activism
and how to grapple with
the present and the future,
and I think you yourself
have been somebody
who has taken that challenge seriously,
but we live in particularly
difficult and perilous times
for the human rights enterprise.
And many of us have indirectly
I think grappled with that,
so it'd be wonderful to
talk about that as well.
So let's start.
So you were born in Melbourne, Australia.
Just in case anybody missed the fact
that Philip here is Australian.
- I hope understanding his accent, but.
(audience laughs)
- But one of the things that
Theo van Boven mentioned
but which many people may not know,
first of all you went to
he University of Melbourne
and as a law student,
I mean intellectually what was going on.
Some people come here to NYU
and they're formed by their engagement
with their professors,
with people like you
and that shapes their career,
and that's been the story
that some people have told
over the last two days,
but Philip Alston, 1968, '69,
goes to Melbourne University.
- I should ask my two sons
to leave the room at this stage, because--
(audience laughs)
The awful truth is that
I was not a serious student.
(audience laughs)
In those days, it was
and this really is shameful,
but I have to admit it.
It was cool to attend no lectures.
And I excelled at that.
Among the few friends I lost were those
whose notes I borrowed
a week before the exams
and then did far better than they did,
and so most of my time
was actually spent on
extracurricular stuff.
Well, there were two
magazines at the law school.
One was a thing that came out every week
which was a terrible scandal rag,
and when I look back
sexist beyond anyone's
imagination in this room.
But we did that every week,
and then there was an annual journal
which was very sophisticated
and interviews with chief justices
and all that sort of stuff.
And again, I was the editor of that.
I became the president of
the Law Students Association
which in a context like
NYU is hard to understand
because people would say well,
so what the hell was that about?
Why did you build it?
But the Law Students
Association was very active
on a whole range of things.
It was a serious political body.
I was on what was called the
Union Board of Directors,
which ran all the facilities and amenities
for the university, and
they were the sort of things
that I threw myself into.
The only thing that I really
got out of it intellectually
was that I was taught by,
barely taught, but got
to know Gareth Evans
who you would know who subsequently became
the Australian foreign
minister for a long time.
But when I graduated from law school,
he was then about to be
elected to the senate,
but he was still a,
a candidate basically.
But it was he who essentially got me
my first job out of law
school, which was in politics.
- So I just wanted to paint
a little bit of a picture
about the political climate
in the 1970s in Australia.
- Well it was 1968, it was
Vietnam War demonstrations,
it was SDS, it was large
quantities of marijuana
and free sex for everyone except me.
(audience laughs)
Yes, that was the era.
- So two interesting features of that era
which I'm curious to know whether
they had an impact on you.
One was the rise of the
Aboriginal rights movement.
So from the mid 1960s,
for those of you who maybe
don't know this aspect of
Australian culture and history,
Aboriginal Australians
became citizens only in 1965.
Until that time, they
were not full citizens.
- '67.
- '67, sorry, '67.
And until that time they were subject
to the jurisdiction of the
superintendent of Aborigines
who could control their movement.
It was also the beginning of the
Aboriginal land rights movement,
and one of the watersheds of
that was the Gurindji walk-off.
Now the person that you've just mentioned
that your first job was in politics,
but the first person you worked for
was Australia's first ever
minister of Aboriginal affairs,
Gordon Bryant who was a white Australian
who had been very active in the
Aboriginal affairs movement.
Just, was that an influence on you,
that experience of working
for him in that situation?
- Well it was,
this may be rather boring for most people,
but it was a very particular context.
I was 24 years old.
Just graduated from,
or in fact I was doing a masters degree
but my thesis, I was actually
at Melbourne University.
The only masters student in the law school
because they didn't
have what they now have
which is a vast program.
The man you describe who
was the first minister
and who'd been one of the great activists
in all of these events early on
was dismissed from his job
as minister for Aboriginal affairs
by the prime minister,
because he had violated
various rules, et cetera,
relating to ministerial conduct.
And so what happened was
because he was elected
by the political party
as a member of the cabinet,
he couldn't be fired from the cabinet.
So he was fired from that job.
The minister then gave him about
the lowest profile job
in the federal cabinet
and told him to hire
a completely new staff
who would not threaten in any
way the existing bureaucracy.
And so he hired me, age 24,
as his principle private
secretary to use the term,
so his chief of staff.
But the job started off
precisely defending him
in his previous role,
because what he'd been fired for,
the classic example was going up
to an Aboriginal settlement
in the far north.
The people that he met were saying
we freeze to death every night.
You know, it's just terrible here
and we've got nothing,
and the minister turning
to the civil servant
who his with him saying right,
I want 5,000 blankets here by next week.
And the civil servant would
turn and tell minister sorry,
for an order of that
magnitude you need to tender
and that requires
advertising for three months
and then we'd be able to
launch a purchase order,
and the minister said
I want 5,000 blankets
here by next week or you're fired,
and so the blankets were bought,
but then all the financial
rules were violated,
and I think for political reasons
that was then used to get rid of him.
But the very first thing that I did
was then to work with various people
to defend the minister and to work
with the various Aboriginal groups
who were very upset
that he'd been moved on.
So there was a pretty solid engagement
with all of those people.
And that did have a
pretty significant effect.
- So I know from Aboriginal
activists that I've spoken to
remember that period.
That minister is remembered
with incredible affection
precisely for this reason.
That he was ostensibly a political figure,
but was simply willing to act directly
in order to try to do
something about the situation.
And so the context was
the Whitlam Government,
the most radical government
Australia has ever had, then and now.
Responsible for introducing
single payer healthcare
in Australia or free university
education in Australia.
The political principles
of this government--
- [Philip] And ending the
White Australia policy.
- Ending the White Australia policy and--
- [Philip] People like you
were not welcome in my country.
- My parents came out a year after
the White Australia policy--
- Yeah, yeah.
- The climate was,
was radical if not revolutionary
and did you feel a strong
affinity with these principles?
With the project, with this government?
What's your recollection of all that?
- Well, there were 23
years of conservative rule,
and it was a very comfortable, white,
upper class government
which was not responding
to any of the real currents
which was all the way with
LBJ was the big slogan
in terms of Australia in the Vietnam War
throughout that period.
I think I became much
more politically active
because although I never joined
a political party as such,
but I followed all these things
very comprehensively.
I lived in the electorate in Melbourne,
which was once held by the prime minister,
the conservative prime
minister, Sir Robert Menzies,
and it was then fought by
a man named Andrew Peacock,
who ironically really was a peacock.
But he fought it over the Vietnam War,
and we had the images
of the dominoes falling.
The red hordes or the
yellow hordes, I suppose.
The yellow hordes who were always in red
because they were communists
coming down to Australia
and that was the sort of rhetoric
that I was brought up on.
That was 1965, I was 15,
and from then on I was
pretty highly politicized.
So I think it did have a
pretty big impact on me.
- So you mentioned I think yesterday
that the Whitlam Government was dismissed
after a constitutional crisis that had
a lot to do with large amounts
of international opposition
to some of its policies,
and essentially a financial blockade
that resulted in a government crisis
that led to his dismissal.
You say at that point
you leave the country,
you move to Berkeley, and that's,
so here's another figure
that was mentioned yesterday,
which is the figure of Frank Newman.
And you mentioned in passing yesterday
that you sort of just decided
to take one of his classes
'cause the guy teaching property law
and environment law was rather dull.
But it turns out that Newman
was a very significant figure
both in Berkeley, subsequently
became dean I think
and then a Supreme Court
judge there in California.
And he would take groups of
students to Geneva every year.
They called them the Berkeley crew.
Were you a part of the Berkeley crew?
- Not in the fully paid up sense,
because I wasn't a JD.
I was just an LM and stayed
on to do a doctorate.
So I wasn't, I didn't go over with Frank.
I mean it would be nice,
and I think Theo van
Boven who spoke yesterday
sort of presented me
as one of Frank's boys.
It's funny, I should be much more grateful
particularly in the context
of something like this
to Frank, but he was a very odd character
because he was utterly
committed to human rights.
He represented the struggle
against the Greek colonels
starting in '65 and so on.
He took up very quickly the
whole Chile cause, et cetera.
But he was a complete formalist
in every respect.
There was no subtlety, no nuance.
He was really, he came out of a
sort of strict interpretation
US administrative law background.
I mean I remember going to his class,
I think I fled his class
actually on administrative law
when he said so we're
dealing this semester
with the administrative law act,
so let's begin at the beginning.
What does the word the mean?
(audience laughs)
And I kid you not, I think the first class
was devoted to what the word the means,
and that was,
that was enough for me, I'm outta here.
So Frank was a wonderful opening
and he taught a class and
brought in a lot of people
and got me interested in human rights.
But he wasn't a figure who
whose actual day to day work
I could draw a lot of inspiration from,
if I could put it that way.
- So once you started in the
human rights world in Geneva,
we heard also yesterday
that one of the things
that you started working on for van Boven,
and also which attracted
Georges Abi-Saab's attention
was the idea of development
and human rights.
So I'm really interested to know
how you came to that question.
There's nothing obvious in
what you've described so far
that you would pick up first
human rights in itself,
but that you would immediately
turn your attention
to the questions of economic
social rights and development.
- It's a very prosaic
intellectual evolution, I'm afraid
because I had gone to Berkeley to study
in environmental law.
That was my real interest.
Because the environmental law
professor was on sabbatical,
because the guy who was teaching it
had no interest whatsoever in the subject
and just did pollution law,
which didn't interest me,
I then developed my own project
which ended up being on the
international regulation
of toxic chemicals.
And I had not really done
international law seriously until then,
and I knew nothing much about toxics
but I was interested in environmental law.
I ended up writing that
up in the first semester
and in fact it was eventually published
in the Ecology Law Quarterly,
as I'm sure all of you know.
(audience laughs)
God knows what it would be like
to go back and read that now,
but fortunately I haven't
done that for 40 years.
And so then when I took human rights
in the next semester, I very
simplistically linked the two
and looked at where environmental issues
fitted into the human rights framework.
And that got, that with
the toxic chemicals thing
because in the toxic area
there was already back then
a lot of dumping in developing
countries and so on.
Plus I had studied economics at Melbourne
and I did do economic development
and I took a course in
economic development
at Berkeley as well.
So I was always interested
in development issues,
having spent as we said last night
six weeks living in a
very isolated village
in Papua New Guinea at
the end of my law degree,
which also put me into that setting
although I couldn't
then have articulated it
as a development experience.
But those two things just came together.
And what actually happened in terms of
what Theo described yesterday
was that the,
the Global South Coalition
decided to launch this concept
of a right to development.
They had no idea what it meant,
and no articulation of what it involved,
and so the way out was to ask
the UN secretary general to do a study
on what it meant.
And van Boven and his colleagues
had no one who could do it,
and when I came along they said
would you please write this?
And so what I did for
nine months was simply
to write that study, which
I did entirely on my own.
And the great bureaucratic
experience I had
because bureaucracy's a
terrible place to work
when you're junior
was that I started doing drafts
and they had to go up
first, where did they go?
They went through,
they were supposed to
go through a Frenchman
who'd joined the UN in 1952,
then up to an Englishman
who joined the UN in 1947,
and then up to a Haitian
who was not quite that old.
And that's a nightmare for anything,
but the Frenchman was the
real problem, the first level.
And he kept, I mean you know
what Frenchmen are like.
He kept saying to me,
but you've used different
language from the resolution.
And you can't do that, and I'd say
but this is a report I'm writing
and he'd say it doesn't matter.
You can't diverge.
And so every line would be
crossed out and et cetera.
And I somehow drew this to
the attention of van Boven
who was the Dutch director
of the whole outfit,
and he was a rule-breaker
in bureaucratic terms,
and so when the three
of us met the next time
he said oh and incidentally Maxim,
I would like Philip to send his draft
directly to me and you at the same time
and then the three of us can meet
and you don't need to go
through them in advance,
which basically excluded the Frenchman
and I was then writing
directly for the director
which was just a perfect situation.
But that then led, I mean just to give,
sorry I shouldn't go on too much,
but the irony which Theo didn't,
he was being diplomatic yesterday.
What then happened was that the Soviets
developed a real phobia about me.
That they thought that I was
really going to cause problems
and so when I was then
nominated for a regular job,
the guy who was known, and this
was how it was in those days
as the KGB representative
on the personnel committee,
simply said there is no
room in the UN for this man.
And they basically had a veto over it,
and Theo then got around it by saying
well in that case, I'll
set up a trust fund
and hire him as a consultant.
- So what was your experience in Geneva
in the late '70s, early '80s?
It's a period, so sort of the evolution
of the human rights institutions,
you know the commission has become
slightly more than an
elaborate wastepaper basket
as it was famously described.
There's the quite
relatively significant
development of procedures
concerning systematic violations
under the sort of shadow
of the dictatorships
in Chile and Argentina and so on.
I mean what was the sense of
being part of that machinery?
What was your perception of it
when you first encountered it?
As you're somebody who seems to know
how to use it very well.
- I was very privileged and very lucky
as I really have been
throughout my career.
Fortune has shone upon me.
And so I arrived in Geneva
to work in 1978.
The previous year, this man van Boven
had been appointed.
Up until then the UN human rights program
had been run by John Humphrey, a Canadian,
and then by Mark Schrieber, a Belgian.
And both of them were pretty bureaucratic
and not really prepared
to challenge very much.
They were just drifting along
and doing what was easy enough.
Van Boven came in as a,
I shouldn't use the word
because it sounds pejorative,
but sort of crusading Dutchman
who really felt very
strongly about human rights.
Knew the whole scene backwards
because he'd been working
in it for a long time,
and was not naive
but just prepared to do
what needed to be done.
And that created a whole new atmosphere.
There was a sense that we could do things,
and so a UN that had done
almost nothing in terms of
responding to violations
in a whole range of countries,
except for what we called
the unholy trinity.
The unholy trinity was South Africa,
Chile, and the occupied territories.
They were the only three situations
that anything was done about.
There was movement immediately
on the genocide in Campuchia.
Pol Pot government.
Finally we managed, or we,
I had nothing to do with it.
They managed to get
movement so that there was
a study initiated of what was going on.
Van Boven then was
instrumental in getting the UN
to set up a working group to study
what was going on in Chile,
and to get the working group
to actually go down and visit
and to set terms for the first sort of
on country or place visits.
And then there was the
Argentine dictatorship
where the inter-American system
had moved already in 1978
and done a really damning report,
but nothing could be done at the UN
because the Argentines were too clever
and they blocked everything,
and again van Boven which is
why he means so much to me
and why it was so lovely
to see him there yesterday,
was the one who really made a huge effort.
And I remember it was 1979.
We were at the Human Rights Commission.
It met late at night in those days.
It would just sort of keep going through
until I don't know what time.
I suspect nine or 10 at night.
And I remember Theo crying
out the back, behind the podium.
Just around the corner here,
because the Argentines had just succeeded
in defeating the resolution
to appoint someone to look at
the disappearances in Argentina.
And he was you know personally
just devastated by that,
and then began the process
of launching a comeback,
and the comeback was this idea of saying
well we're gonna set
up a thematic mechanism
which has nothing to do with Argentina.
It's going to look at disappearances.
Disappearances in Canada,
disappearances in Sweden.
Oh yes, and maybe Argentina
and Brazil, why not?
And that got through,
because it didn't have
quite the same political toxicity.
But they were great times in a way
because there was a can do determination
to try to change what had been
a very stifled bureaucratic mechanism
around the commission into
something more serious.
- I mean is it fair to
say that that's a context
that influences I think a
strong theme in your work,
at least since I've known you,
which is you're very realistic
about these frameworks.
The Human Rights Council,
the special rapporteurship,
but you've never really stopped
believing that they have
some possibility of making a contribution.
- Well I think that, I mean I think
you have to work with what you've got.
No, I don't think there's
any point in saying
a certain person is now president.
I'm walking away, it's a lost cause
it's going to be tough.
It's going to be frustrating,
but you've got to hang in
there and do what you can
and I think that's
certainly true with the UN.
I don't think there's
alternative to the UN
in terms of multilateral efforts
to try to promote this
conception of human rights.
I think there's huge frustration.
It's a big bureaucracy
and big bureaucracies
are awful in many respects,
but you simply have to do what you can,
and I've always believed that individuals
can do a lot if they really want to.
It doesn't mean in a dramatic way,
but just if you're sitting in your office
you can just write a report differently.
You can prod a supervisor.
You can prod a political actor
to move something along,
and that's what I've
always been guided by.
- [Interviewer] So why did you
decide to go into academia?
(chuckles)
- Well, that's ironic in
light of what I've just said,
because I decided that I couldn't bear
to remain in the bureaucracy,
because in the bureaucracy
you're always doing
someone else's bidding.
You're sitting there taking notes.
I mean I decided to go,
or to try my hand at academia at a time
when I was about to
take off in bureaucratic terms
because I set a lunch with the Austrian
who Bruno Simma described earlier
who was Kurt Waldheim's right hand man
and had been sent over from New York
to put a lid on what
was happening in Geneva.
A man named Kurt Hurndell
who turned out to be a nicer guy
and a man of better faith
than his background would have suggested,
but I asked his office if I
could have lunch with him,
and my agenda was to say
that I had been invited to
Harvard Law School for a year,
and I would like to take leave.
But he got in first, and he said
Philip, this is a big moment you know?
I've been mulling this for a long time.
I've decided to make you secretary
of the Human Rights Committee,
which was a job that was
a couple of levels above
where I should be in the bureaucracy.
But there'd been pressure
from various members
of the committee who weren't happy
with what they were
getting and who knew me
and really wanted to work with me.
So that would've been a great moment,
but it was very clear
you know being secretary of a committee
means that you have the
opportunity to say to members
why don't you think about doing X?
But you're not allowed to say, you know,
the way you're doing it
now is just a disaster.
This is ludicrous.
You have to do X, whereas
if you're a member of
the committee you can.
And so the prospect of being
a member of the secretariat
for another however many years
was one that horrified me.
- So you begin your academic life.
- In fact there was a,
a very bizarre moment in
the middle of all this
that I've sort of blocked out of my mind,
but it was a pretty dramatic moment
when the
secretary general of Amnesty International
who I'm delighted to say is apparently
a contributor to this
volume, Thomas Hammarberg,
came to me and said
Philip, we have a vacancy
for deputy secretary general,
and I'd really like you to apply.
And I was then 31 years old,
which was very junior still.
But I applied for it, and
I went to London and so
on and was interviewed,
and then at the last moment
another candidate appeared
who was far superior
named Jose Zalaquett who was a Chilean
former prisoner of conscience,
leader of the (speaks foreign language).
Was actually probably either
the chair or the vice-chair
of the International Executive
Committee of Amnesty,
and knew it all.
And he of course got the job, and I didn't
which you know, you
look back in retrospect,
life would have been very different
if I'd ended up going to Amnesty
International at that age,
my career trajectory would have been
totally different, I'm sure.
But it didn't happen, but I knew
that I didn't want to remain a bureaucrat.
I wanted to be able to make a difference.
So when you begin in your academic career,
so you'd expressed a
kind of dissatisfaction
with a kind of strict legalism
which characterized perhaps also
your university education at Melbourne.
What did you understand
yourself to be doing
as an academic?
How did you conceive, you're there,
for the first time Harvard
has a human rights program
which was created by Henry
and to which you're now
one of the originating contributors.
Did you see yourself as well,
my job is to explain the law
or how did you understand your function?
- Well, the truth is,
and I think this is very
common to a lot of people
who come to US academia in particular,
that I had no idea what
US academia was all about.
I had assumed it wasn't very
different from Australia
where you know, you do a bit of writing,
you do a bit of teaching,
you do whatever you want to do.
There's no great hierarchy.
There's no, I had no idea of the,
the elements of the career ladder
to become a US academic,
which is very strong, you know.
There's a set list of criteria
that one is supposed to meet
in order to break through
to the ranks of becoming an academic.
It's a highly privileged,
highly sought after position.
But I waltzed into this with
no real sense of any of that.
So I just sort of kept
doing what I was doing,
which was combining involvement
with a range of different
human rights groups and issues
with writing about them
in what in retrospect
is a very naive and simple sort of way.
None of the complexity, none
of the theorizing and so on
that US academia expects.
And it took me I think
quite a while before I,
and in fact I spent one
full year at Harvard,
and then moved to the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy
and kept teaching for
one semester every year
at Harvard Law School, but
the Fletcher School was also,
was a great experience for me
because there were again,
people who were all
practically engaged in one way or another.
But it was again very far from
being an American law school,
and so no particular pressure
to publish anything in particular.
And none of the sort of
criteria that law schools apply,
but I wasn't particularly career-minded
in a sense at that stage.
I wasn't saying I desperately needed
to get an appointment at a
law school or anywhere else.
I was happy doing what I was doing,
which was combining
teaching with practice,
and writing.
- So around this time you
play a very important role
in the drafting of the Convention
on the Rights of the Child
as a legal adviser to UNICEF.
I guess my first question is really,
the impulse towards the creation
of a specific convention
for the rights of children.
Was that something that you'd
always had an interest in
or was it something that
came on your plate because?
- No, again it's serendipity.
I mean I think that's one of the things
that stands out for me,
at least in my own career.
These things just happen,
and I didn't plan them well.
The reality, this is terrible.
I was actually asked to write something
on the rights of children.
I think it was for the early, I think,
The Max Planck Encyclopedia
of International Law,
if I remember,
and that was back in 1984 or '85.
Up until then it was a subject
about which I knew nothing.
I was then however,
I had been active long before that
in what's now called
Anti-Slavery International,
the Anti-Slavery society in the UK.
And they were big on children,
particularly in the
context of slave labor,
of sexual abuse, child
marriage, and so on.
So I did do some work for them
I think maybe on child
labor at a certain point.
And that was enough for maybe them
to draw me to the attention of a,
of three people in UNICEF
who were engaged in a subversive exercise
to persuade UNICEF to start
looking at rights issues,
but UNICEF was resistant.
UNICEF's position was that it
had nothing to do with rights.
They were all dealt with in Geneva
by the UN rights people,
and that would only politicize them.
So I was hired as a consultant
by this group which was called the group
working on children in exceptionally
difficult circumstances
and that basically meant children in war,
children in sexual exploitation,
children in trafficking I guess.
And child labor, that was all.
And they were sort of seen as exceptions,
and what they said to me was look,
we want you to persuade UNICEF to get into
the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The drafting of which had begun in 1979,
sponsored entirely by Poland
as a communist exercise
because it was all focused
on the fact that children had
economic and social rights.
They didn't have any other rights.
And of course, we all,
well outside the communist
world had misgivings about that,
but my job in UNICEF, as a consultant,
then became to persuade the
executive director of UNICEF
that they should make this big move,
and the director,
I mean I've told this
story a number of times
at least in private, never in public,
but was a charismatic American
named James P. Grant, Jim Grant.
And he really was a great
reformer, very dedicated guy,
but at a certain stage
we had a private meeting
and he said, listen Philip.
You teach at Harvard Law
School, I understand.
Yes Jim?
You probably don't know this
but I'm a graduate of Harvard Law School.
Yes Jim.
So you and I should know
that when lawyers get involved
in things like children,
all they do is screw them up.
Doesn't help to get bound
up in legalism and so on.
That's not what I want for
this organization, Philip.
And the conversation then had to move on
and eventually the only card
that I could play,
I mean I guess this is consistent
with some of the things that
were said earlier today,
that in the discussion
I had to think to myself
well how do I convince him?
How do I bring him around,
what's in his interest?
And the trump card ended up
being me saying Jim look,
the bad news for you is that this exercise
has now been going for seven years.
It's got up a lot of steam.
It's got a lot of support from states,
and it's gonna happen.
You've got two choices.
You can stay on the sidelines
and try to pretend it's not there,
or you can get in now
and you can shape it,
and if you want to you can
try and own it at the end.
It's up to you.
I know what I would do.
And very quickly he said, okay.
Let's see what we can do with this,
and so I then became the
legal adviser to UNICEF.
I was in the delegations
for the rest of the
drafting process and so on.
And stayed quite close to him
at least in the first period
of having to sell it to states,
which we did in the final
year, 1989, et cetera.
There were lots of
meetings up at New York,
up at the headquarters here.
I mean it was sort of
symptomatic of Jim Grant.
I shouldn't, I'm going
down memory lane now,
but and it's almost a silly story,
but it was Halloween
so it would've been October 1989,
and the convention was
adopted in November of 1989.
And we had a meeting
with a dozen ambassadors
and it was just Jim and me,
and the guy who was hosting
was the Norwegian ambassador,
and Jim comes into the room and says,
here Philip, make these.
And what he gave me were cardboard
Halloween money collection boxes
that I had to get together.
And the Norwegian ambassador looks over,
and now I'm gonna do something
that I know is politically incorrect,
but says Philip I don't
think it would be a good idea
for you to be making those money boxes.
The ambassadors don't like this,
and it's not a good way to
be able to persuade them.
And Jim Grant looks at him
and says ah, don't be silly.
Come on, this is ridiculous.
It's important.
These people have got to put their money
where their mouth is, you know?
This is children matter,
not just in the convention
but they've got to contribute.
And the ambassador was adamant saying
no Jim, we want to persuade them.
You can't do that.
And Jim just sort of turns
around and says to me.
(chuckles)
And of course the money boxes were made
and a collection was duly taken up,
but it was just an example
of what sort of person he was
in terms of just, you know,
roaring ahead with these things
and he then became a great
champion of the convention.
And UNICEF then ensured very quickly
that it got close to universal acceptance.
Again, in a very pragmatic exercise
that I was quite heavily involved in.
They decided they didn't really care
what terms countries ratified on,
and so one of the roles that I played,
I was back out in Australia at that stage
and I'd get a fax in the morning saying
the UNICEF adviser has a meeting
with the Malaysian
minister of foreign affairs
in two days from now.
Here are their reasons why
they don't want to ratify.
Give us answers.
And so I then had to go
through and say look,
you can tell them they can
make a reservation on that
if that's how they feel.
Tell them that that's not gonna be
interpreted in this way, et cetera.
And that again was an
amazingly successful campaign.
Albeit questionable in the
sense that if you're a purist
you'd say but look at
all these reservations.
It's not a good foundation,
but just to get the convention
up to universal ratification
in a very short period of
time seemed to be a good goal.
- So let's look back on social rights,
'cause that's one area
where I think in many ways
you're most closely associated with
as an academic and to which
your contribution has been enormous.
I guess the first question
I really want to ask you is
when you join the committee,
and in the nine years that you sat on it.
- 12.
- 12.
What were you trying to achieve?
What did you see as the
point of this exercise?
- Well I saw it all about,
I mean the social rights
were completely untheorized, basically.
No one had a good sense of what exactly
was meant by the terms
used in the covenant.
No governments were taking them seriously.
There was almost no real practice,
and the committee that I was elected to
which was brand new inherited
abysmal procedures from its predecessor
which were totally
bureaucratic and meaningless.
And so the challenge was to
do something on those two fronts,
both substantive and procedural.
I had as someone mentioned,
maybe Georges mentioned it yesterday,
actually written twin articles on those
which were published the year
before the committee first met.
One on procedures and
the other on substance.
And so that gave me an agenda, basically.
What happened, Bruno described
it at lunchtime today.
We met a solid communist bloc
led by the Soviet expert, so-called
but backed up by a Pole and a Romanian,
and they made it absolutely clear
that there ought to be no
innovations of any sort,
and they blocked almost everything.
I was elected as the first
rapporteur of the committee,
essentially at the insistence
of these three guys
from the communist bloc,
which was very puzzling to
Bruno and to a Frenchman
who were much
senior to me, and was explained to me
by the Romanian about five years later
when we'd become good friends,
and he said well Philip,
I hate to tell you this
but we looked at the various
western representatives
or western experts and we decided
that you would be by
far the least effective.
(audience laughs)
And junior, and that's why we chose you.
- [Interviewer] Never
underestimate underestimation.
- Right.
Yeah, so.
- So we're exceeding
our time a little bit,
but I want not talk about two more issues
which in a way kind of
bring us to the present.
So one is
by the '90s,
the complexion of human
rights law and politics
has changed a lot in some ways.
All of this normative investment,
all of this cautious legalism
has paid a huge dividend in some sense.
There's mainstreaming in multiple
international institutions
and in addition there's some sense
in which the language of human rights
and law and politics has
become a lingua franca
for all sorts of claims.
Certainly someone who
grew up in that period,
it was very visible and tangible.
You're by that stage an already
a very established scholar.
You've led institutions,
you've led committees.
When you looked back
at the end of the '90s,
one might say we'd had our first
war under the auspices
of a human rights claim,
humanitarian intervention in Kosovo.
We'd had 10 years of
sanctions against Iraq
by the end of the '90s, almost 10 years.
What was your reflection
on where the human rights,
where human rights law was,
but I mean were you worried?
Were you worried about overage,
or did you think well,
we're basically going
in the right direction.
We've got to fix a few things.
- I always had a,
a rather different perspective in a sense.
I was not someone who
was working primarily
on the standard issues.
So if I'd been working on torture,
I think I could have been triumphalist
in the sense that in the mid 1970s
you couldn't talk about torture
because governments
said this is an outrage.
You're not suggesting that any
government tortures, I hope.
And you know, Amnesty had to
fight that tooth and nail.
They eventually got a convention
which even the United States
was blocking towards the end,
and then finally Argentina
of all countries,
the new government Alfonsin comes in
and makes a plea to the United States
saying if there's one thing we need,
it's a torture convention.
History has shown us that, for God's sake.
So the Americans surrender,
let the torture convention go through.
It's very progressive in
a whole range of ways.
Amnesty then keeps chalking up countries
that have promised never to do it,
have started to legislate,
and torture is genuinely
looking as though it's
a thing of the past.
I think from those sort of
perspectives, huge progress.
I was still working in the twin minefields
of economic and social rights, as such,
but also what we called
mainstreaming which was trying
to get a non-human rights organizations
to take up human rights.
And among those was the World
Bank, for example, or UNDP,
or others, and I knew full well
that those organizations were
not taking up human rights.
An organization like UNDP today even
will tell you that it's
got human rights in there
and blah blah blah, it doesn't.
You know, these are marginal.
They are not appreciated by
the great majority of staff.
There's terrific resistance,
and I'm not talking
about even social rights.
I'm talking about,
so I was always working in places
where I was constantly aware
of the opposition and the resistance.
And I resigned from the
economic rights committee
at the end of 1998
on the grounds that I'd
been there too long.
That I realized that it needed new blood,
and I needed new challenges.
I needed to get out and do something else,
but I was genuinely
tired of banging my head
against a brick wall.
I was for all those years,
I was the token
participant in conferences.
I was like women were
for quite a long time.
You know there'd be 10 panels
or whatever at a conference.
Nine panels would be dealing with men,
and then the final panel they'd say
and now we have a panel on women.
Where are the girls, huh?
Come on girls, and I was instead
the social rights boy.
You know, so we'd have nine
panels on serious civil
and political rights issue,
and then they'd say so ah, now
we'll do the social rights.
Where's Philip, Philip?
And at a certain point I got sick of that
and so I decided I would go
on and work on other issues,
but so I wasn't,
there was never any likelihood
of triumphalism on my side.
- So in a way this brings us
in some respects to the present.
So one way of telling the
story of the last 20 years
is an enormous rise in the
confidence and self-confidence
of human rights groups.
Some considerable
success of mainstreaming,
and apparent state a number
of relative victories
when one thinks of accountability
through international criminal law,
the proliferation of norms
against certain kinds
of human rights norms.
And yet the last three or four years
have suggested that those achievements
even as legal achievements
are incredibly fragile.
That in some ways they inhabited a space
that was not of their own making,
and could be taken away
from them very quickly.
So I'm curious to know
your own reflections
on the durability of not just your legacy,
because of course we're very happy
to announce your retirement today.
(laughs)
- Is this a message from the dean or?
(audience laughs)
- Couldn't be here to tell you himself.
But indeed, of that enormous
amount of activity
of the investment of hopes and energies
of anyone who understood themselves
as having some sort of
progressive vision in politics
and where could you locate that desire
to improve the world.
For at least two generations
I think human rights
has been an answer.
And it's interesting to
think about the present
as to whether that is and continues to be
the object to which one
would direct one's energies.
- Well, lots of things to say about that.
First I mean you mentioned the ICC
and all that sort of stuff.
I was always very conscious that
what you had in terms of institutional
and other achievements if
the starting point is here
and the end point is here
in a total human rights respect,
the institutions down here
had reached about this far
and then suddenly we jumped to the ICC
which is really almost
right at the other end,
and so there's nothing in between.
There's these incredibly weak institutions
where you come in and report a genocide
and they say oh my god that's disgusting.
We're going to adopt a resolution,
and then you say that's really gonna do it
and they'll say well, we can
have a followup resolution
if you really want.
(audience laughs)
And you know you might play with sanctions
or whatever, but nothing serious
and then suddenly the
ICC where you're actually
hauling people off and charging them
and heads of state and so on.
So I don't think it was ever
a particularly sustainable spectrum.
You've got to build up to these things.
I think however,
because I've usually been down
involved in fights of one sort
with governments and others,
I've always been acutely aware
of how fragile the commitment
of most governments is to human rights.
And one thing that those of us
who have been in the human rights movement
for decades know of course
is that you take someone
who is utterly exemplary,
Cesar,
and you say Cesar, you've been so good
we're gonna make you foreign minister.
The chances of Cesar remaining Cesar
as foreign minister
are depressingly slight,
despite what you know
as a man of huge integrity, commitment,
involvement, and all
these different things,
and so you see over the years
these wonderful people
who just have moved on.
They think they can do something else.
They then behave like normal governments
and say well, sorry Philip.
We've gotta take some shortcuts here.
We can't let these people get in our way.
We've got a vision.
And I think it is just a continuing
struggle, and always will be
that those of us who are in power
are never going to have human rights
as our principle preoccupation.
We very quickly convince ourselves
that there's a range of other
objectives that need to,
if necessary, trump rights.
And I don't have a problem with that.
I mean I think that's the challenge
for human rights proponents.
They've gotta constantly
be battling from behind.
It's constantly pushing uphill.
But I think it is an illusion to think
that you're ever going to
quote win that struggle,
because there will always
be new battlefields,
and I don't think that's changed.
So I'm not pessimistic right now.
I mean these are certainly
grim times for human rights,
but I think to the extent that we believe
in these fundamental values
and they have stood the test of time
in a great many ways,
whatever we say about them,
I think they are of enduring relevance.
I think the problem is
that over the 20 years
of glory, if that's what it is,
most, and Cesar has written
most compellingly about this,
most human rights people
have become complacent,
have become very
stuck in a particular
routine of how they promote
and talk about rights.
And I think that's what
we're all realizing
has to change.
The human rights movement also has been
very much about top down.
And top down is not to be dismissed.
There would be no torture convention,
there would be no LGBT
recognition formally of rights
were it not for a certain
top down movement,
but that cannot survive,
cannot get anywhere in the
absence then of bottom up
which has to be a key part of it,
and I think we've ignored that.
We've had all the victories.
We set up this committee
and that committee
and we adopted this
treaty and that treaty,
but didn't then I guess take my
analogy with the ICC,
you know, that we're back here.
We've set up a treaty,
we've set up a committee,
but then there's all this way to go
and you can't just assume then
that the rights of
peoples with disabilities,
the rights of LGBTI people, et cetera,
are simply gonna be respected.
This fight has to begin the struggle,
and I don't think those of us
at the international level have wanted to
acknowledge the extent to
which that fight needs to be
hand to hand, door to door,
local sort of struggle to
transform understandings.
- So Philip with that I
think we've reached the end
of this very--
- Solved the world's problems.
- Solved the world's problems,
but we've also, I think it's
been absolutely tremendous
to have you with us for two days.
- Let me have the last word just to say
thank you ever so much,
particularly to the
principle co-conspirators
who I think the three
of you, Sarah Knuckey
and Meg Satterthwaite for
having organized all this
and brought it together.
It was a genuine surprise.
I never thought that I would get tired
of talking about myself for two days.
(audience laughs)
I've almost had enough.
But it was wonderful,
and I'm very appreciative
of all the friends who
have come here today
and yesterday and talked about such,
so many things that I found fascinating.
And seemed to keep most
of the rest of you awake,
but thank you again.
And thanks particularly to my family
who are at the back there
and who put up with a
huge amount of absences
and other burdens in order
to make all of this possible.
So thanks to you all.
(audience applauds)
