Law professor defends human rights
BY SALLY ACHARYA
Robert Goldman’s career in human rights began with phone calls from friends.
Robert Goldman serves as U.N. expert.
In 1973, he was an assistant professor at Washington College of Law when a military coup ousted the civilian government of Uruguay. Few people knew much about the small South American country, whose record of tortures and disappearances were overshadowed in the news by similarly horrific tales from Chile and Argentina.
But Goldman had been a Fulbright scholar in Uruguay only a few years before. “Many of my former friends were being arrested and tortured,” he says. “I knew the law. I could speak Spanish. Almost by default, things fell to me.”
The young law professor’s work on behalf of friends launched his career as a legal scholar whose work has taken him from South America to the United Nations. Named last year as the U.N.’s independent expert on the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, he’ll be discussing his recently submitted report in front of the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission on Apr. 12.
Goldman’s report sheds light on a question that could well be controversial: How to classify and treat accused terrorists. It has implications from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, and for insurgency-ridden countries from Nepal to Colombia to the Sudan.
“To some extent, we’ve entered into a new Cold War. During that period, the dissident was a Communist. Every internal enemy is ‘a terrorist.’ [Zimbabwe’s Robert] Mugabe today is calling opposition press ‘terrorists,’” Goldman says. “There’s no question that a group like Al Qaeda, if they could get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction, would use it. The issue is how you confront the threat.”
Goldman works at the law school at a hardwood desk facing a wall covered with Native American regalia: a Crow Indian war shirt from the 1880s, a beaded pipe bag, knife sheath, rifle scabbard, and moccasins. Beside him hangs an immense 80-year-old painting from the Indian province of Rajasthan. Well-worn Oriental rugs cover the floor, faded from the sun streaming through a picture window and partly covered by piles of legal briefs and papers.
It’s the office of a very busy person. “Frankly, I’ve always held two jobs,” Goldman says. He is, of course, a law professor. He was also one of the founding members of Americas Watch in the 1980s, a division of Human Rights Watch, and is one of the directors of AU’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.
During the Clinton administration, he spent eight years as a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, serving with WCL dean Claudio Grossman. AU was the only school to have two members on the commission.
While terrorism is being painted as a new threat, there are already clear international standards for addressing such issues as the treatment of “non-combatants” who commit atrocities, he says. “Despite the fact that they call it terrorism, the law of war still applies. We didn’t cease applying the law of war in World War II because the SS followed the German troops and committed terrorist acts.”
Military lawyers, he says, tend to be the first to recognize the protected status of prisoners. “Most military lawyers will tell you torture is counter-productive,” he says. Not only does it fail to produce reliable information, but it leaves American troops in a dangerous position. “We have the most exposed military in the world. If we can claim to justify this, our adversaries will say they can do this to us as well,” and the United States will have lost the moral high ground, Goldman says.
Goldman and a Pentagon lawyer teach a popular course, International Humanitarian Law, referred to casually as the “law of war” course, offered annually since WCL became one of the first law schools outside of the military system to teach the subject in 1983. “One of the reasons I like teaching with someone from the armed forces with combat experience is they can give a better and realistic position that comes from experience,” says Goldman.
As a scholar and author, Goldman helped pioneer the use of “law of war” methodology by human rights bodies, which enabled them to fix responsibility for illicit acts committed by both government and dissident armed forces involved in armed conflicts. While governments can be held responsible for human rights violations by their security forces, rebel and dissident groups that aren’t eligible to sign treaties are not directly bound by human rights laws.
Regardless of whether prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay are viewed as prisoners of war, civilians, or unprivileged combatants who may have engaged in terrorist violence, they are both legally responsible for their acts and protected by the law of war and human rights law. “It makes no difference how you classify them,” Goldman says. “No one can be subjected to torture or inhumane treatment.”
Some voices in the current administration, of course, have taken a different viewpoint on the treatment of prisoners. But the longtime law professor leaves no doubt about where he stands. “They were wrong,” Goldman says. “The president got terrible advice on this. He was very poorly served by his advisors, and by not listening to experts in the State Department and the Pentagon.
Reprinted from American Weekly, March 22, 2005.
top |
