H.E. Dr. Hajo Sani Oon Ambassador, Permanent Delegation of Nigeria to UNESCO | Nigeria
Short Bio:
Dr. Hajo Sani Oon is an Educationist and Policy Analyst with extensive experience in teaching and public administration. She holds degrees in Education, Guidance and Counseling, and Public Administration. Dr. Sani served as a school principal for twelve years and as Minister of Women Affairs from 1997 to 1998, where she defended Nigeria’s CEDAW reports at the UN. She authored influential books on women’s issues, including “Women and National Development: The Way Forward” (2001), and founded the NGO Women and National Development (WAND).
Her other notable works include “First Ladyship and Empowerment Programmes in Nigeria” (2010) and “Women and Leadership” (2012). She has been active in various committees, including the UN Women Civil Society Advisory Group (CSAG), and received the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) in 2006. Dr. Sani worked with the Society for Family Health (SFH) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was appointed Senior Special Assistant to the President on Women Affairs in 2015. In 2021, she became Nigeria’s Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO in Paris.
Event: SDGs Conference 2024
Date: Sept 25, 2024
SPEECH
Excellencies, fellow panelists, colleagues, distinguished ladies and gentlemen. Let me start by expressing my appreciation to the Journalists and Writers Foundation for inviting me to speak at the annual SDGs Conference 2024 on the role of education in achieving the Pact for the Future. My reflections will be on what the Pact aims to achieve. How did we get here from the SDGs dispensation and what is the role of education?
We cannot speak about the Pact of the Future in isolation from Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the 17 distinct but interworking development goals. SDG 4, spearheaded by UNESCO, aims to ensure inclusive, equitable, and quality education, promoting long-life learning for 10 targets covering primary and secondary education to increase the supply of qualified teachers in developing countries. Despite some progress, the agenda is currently behind on its commitments while implementation experience brought the realization that education remains a major factor in achieving the other goals. Furthermore, the SDG 4 objectives have been met with more unexpected negative experiences, especially the COVID-19 pandemic, global conflicts, financial crisis, and inflation with devastating impacts on education, particularly the learning process.
The midterm reality informed the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to put the SDGs back on track starting from realizing Our Common Agenda, the Transforming Education Summit and Pact for the Future are the latest in the series setting the tone for the agenda beyond 2030. Although education is not a standalone action in the Pact, all 58 points demonstrate its importance to achievement. Education has and will continue to play a significant role in sustainable development. Therefore, to address the role of education in the Pact for the Future, I would dwell on four points. First, how the educational policies can be better designed to ensure gender equality and empower women and girls as a follow-up to the commitments. Action number eight in particular aims for gender equality, the empowerment of all women and girls across all SDGs and targets.
This is also in line with SDG 5 whose objective is to streamline the educational system for gender focus programs benefiting students and learners of all ages and grades. Let me draw attention to UNESCO`s transforming mentalities program, which promotes lifelong learning in civic and gender education with men taking the lead as advocates. Under this scheme, members are encouraged to develop programs for life skills and social transformation. Others are accelerating girls’ enrollment, lifelong gender learning, and incentives for women to take an interest in STEM education and profession as well as leadership roles. Implementing the Pact for the Future should emphasize the following mention: promoting gender equality should start by upgrading and updating the national curriculum for girls’ and women’s empowerment and gender-sensitive education at all levels.
What strategy can be employed in the education system to align with the SDGs as outlined in the Pact and the 58 actions embodied in the SDGs? They address further threats to achievements such as protecting education during emergencies, economic empowerment and social cohesion in uncertainties, and adapting to new emerging technologies. UNESCO’s program on education for sustainable development provides a clue to a system that aligns components such as environmental, development, and global citizenship education. The recently adopted recommendations on education for peace and human rights are gender equality in the digital area. They prescribe education systems that effectively improve resilience to climate-driven crises, dealing with their precautions while not causing further damage to the planet. Global citizenship education is essential to prepare learners who value human dignity, cooperation, and dialogue to have a new understanding of peace as not just the absence of violence and conflicts, but also a positive and dynamic process that nurtures the ability to value coexistence and take care of the planet. These are pointers to the right strategy.
My next highlight is the primary challenges in implementing educational policies that support the SDGs and commitments of the Pact for the Future. The functional curriculum regarding the SDGs-related life skills is a challenge. Teachers are in short supply, lacking professional development opportunities, low status and working conditions, and capacity to develop leadership, autonomy, and innovation. Another alarming issue is education in conflict and emergencies where instabilities of stroke learning, including those resulting from war, climate change policies to support sustainable development must improve the station of teachers’ responsiveness to emergencies with innovative and community-based approaches and lifelong cognitive learning.
What future-oriented strategy should be prioritized in the educational system to ensure they contribute effectively to the long-term Sustainable Development Goals? We must focus on teaching sustainability from the youngest age, nurturing environmentally conscious learners, and a new set of global citizens who have not only academic success but are trained to take personal responsibilities. Lastly, since all education initiatives will be void in the face of limited access, deploying new and emerging digital technologies to improve access to holistic education should be a priority. This will include cooperation to overcome the barriers of the digital divide and to build the capacity of disadvantaged regions for connectivity and digital equipment for equity.
President of the Institute for Ecological Civilization
Professor Philip Clayton Ingraham Professor, President, Institute for Ecological Civilization | USA
Short Bio:
Prof. Philip Clayton is the President of the Institute for Ecological Civilization. As a visionary thinker, Prof. Clayton leads EcoCiv in expanding and deepening its mission at the intersections of environment and humanity. With several decades of experience in university-based research, teaching, and lecturing, Prof. Clayton is involved in the conceptual development of all EcoCiv’s projects and ensures mission fit. He assists project leaders about intersectional societal changes relevant for their particular projects. Prof. Clayton holds a PhD from Yale University; has held guest professorships at Harvard, University of Cambridge, and University of Munich. He is the author and editor of several dozen books and over 300 articles on science, ethics, religion.
Event: SDGs Conference 2024
Date: Sept 25, 2024
SPEECH
I open with warm thanks on behalf of all the participants to our hosts and to the Journalists and Writers Foundation for organizing this year’s meeting. I first met with leading writers and journalists from JWF over a decade ago in Istanbul. Today we celebrate almost a decade of JWF support for the Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. Although many do not recognize it, there is a useful barometer for assessing our overall progress on the SDGs. In the good years, we are laser-focused on the details of implementing specific programs within a single SDG (or several together).
These are the seasons of optimism and progress. You can watch the global community rolling up its collective sleeves and solving the difficult challenges in particular areas. When on-the-ground changes are being made and outcomes are measurable, there is energy and hope. In my organization, EcoCiv, we saw this productivity during our consultation on the urban water crisis in Cape Town just before COVID-19; we saw it more recently as we helped the NGO Water for South Sudan launch its new Water Institute last year.
As you know from the SDG reports in 2023 and 2024, this is not one of those moments. The famous words of António Guterres are echoing in our ears: “Unless we act now,” he said, “the 2030 Agenda will become an epitaph for a world that might have been.” Indeed, many of us heard a similar message from the Environment Minister of Samoa, Cedric Schuster, in her interview just two days ago. Speaking as Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, Minister Schuster worried that [fingers] “our countries are moving further and further away from the unity and moral fortitude that we require to protect our people.” She then said the truth bluntly: “The vulnerable people of our world are drained by lip service.” With six years to go, with many of the metrics heading in the wrong direction, and with wars expanding, there is no doubt about the gravity of this moment.
Fortunately, it’s the tradition of this series of SDG summit meetings not to dwell in darkness, but instead to look for where the hope lies … and to listen and learn as global experts in the specific SDGs identify the pathways to get us there. We will hear innovative ideas, novel solutions, and calls to action in the three panels that follow. In preparation for the work that lies ahead of us today, and in the years to come, I offer three images as a framework for these discussions.
Dark times require a guiding light. Today every study underscores the widening disparity between the nations that are contributing most to global warming and those who are suffering its worst effects. There is no longer any doubt: the climate crisis is not “just” an environmental issue; it’s a matter of global justice. So let this be our guiding light in dark moments: Global justice is the starting point of our SDG work and the final destination of all our specific initiatives. The light of justice does shine in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it. We turn our eyes to the future to direct our steps today. Four days ago, Assembly President Philémon Yang lowered his gavel at the General Assembly, and the Pact for the Future became a United Nations consensus statement.
Hear the words: “The Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world, gathered at UN Headquarters, to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations, through the actions in this Pact for the Future.” It is a Pact for “all those generations that do not yet exist and who will inherit this planet.”
We labor for the SDGs on behalf of future generations, even as we struggle to achieve the goals in the present. But why? Why should future generations be our ultimate moral guide? It’s because of what’s called the “intergenerational multiplier effect.” When humans living today cause the destruction of a rainforest, or the death of coral, or the loss of the Thwaites Glacier or the Antarctic ice sheets, these losses affect not just today’s population, but each of the countless future generations yet to be born onto this beautiful blue-green planet. This is why the Pact for the Future “resolves to ensure that present generations act with responsibility to safeguard the needs and interests of future generations.” We work toward the SDGs not only because of the suffering we see around us today, but on behalf of the rights of those yet to come.
Remember when Greta Thornberg was asked, “You’re always talking about ‘1.5 degrees Celsius’ as the upper limit of warming; So what do you do when the earth passes your 1.5 maximum?” Without missing a beat, Greta responded, “I start fighting for a maximum of 1.6.” So also, for us: We are fighting hard for the SDG targets by 2030. But our work continues as long as there are generations still to come. We turn our eyes to the future to direct our steps today.
I want to present a framework that we and many others are using around the world: ecological civilization. This combination of two words points to the place where the values of ecology and the values of the global community come together. For surely the heart of the SDGs is found in the harmony of human and ecological values. The UN’s vision is to celebrate the immense diversity of cultures and ecosystems, joined together by our unwavering commitment to justice and sustainability for all. And the SDGs are what happens when this vision puts on its working clothes and gets to work. Ecological civilization is the wedding of ecology and global justice. Ecology + civilization means ecological harmony for ecosystems, and compassionate justice for human communities.
Last year I walked in the ancient forests of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Jingmai Mountain. On this mountain in Southwest China, indigenous people have planted and cultivated tea trees for over 1000 years. This working together of natural resources and human cultivation has created some of the finest green tea on the planet. To walk in this tea forest, to smell and see its riches, is to experience the harmony of nature, culture, and economy, held together by traditional indigenous spirituality. Each of us must have our image of what success looks like. This image, this dream for the future of our blue-green planet, then becomes our guiding light, our inspiration, our motivation. When I think of the 17 SDGs, I picture Jingmai Mountain.
Remember: Dark times require a guiding light. And we turn our eyes to the future to direct our steps today.
Dr. Fatih Demiroz, Director, Nonresident Research Fellow, European Center for Populism Studies | USA
Fatih Demiroz is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University and a nonresident research fellow at the European Center for Populism Studies. He received his Ph.D. in public affairs from the University of Central Florida. Prior to his assignment at SHSU, Dr. Demiroz worked at the Florida International University as a visiting faculty and Rhode Island Department of Health as a researcher. His research interests are social and organizational networks, disaster management, governance, and behavioral public administration.
VIDEO LINK:
Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023
Date: Sept 20, 2023
SPEECH
Populism’s Impact on Democracies: Populist Leaders and Bureaucracy Introduction Democracy has been declining in the last two decades, even in countries that have been promoters of democracy, such as the United States and European Union members. Although there are many factors contributing to this process, the rise of populism and populism leaders are among the most noticeable ones. There are extensive discussions on why voters turn to populist leaders and why populism is increasing globally, but very little attention was paid to the relationship between populist leaders and bureaucracy. This is an important issue because bureaucracies are often targeted by populist leaders for being part of the corrupt elite and against the pure people that populists represent.
In this paper, I will focus on this issue and discuss the relationship between populist leaders and bureaucrats. Specifically, I will address three questions: What do populists do with the bureaucracy, and how does the bureaucracy react? Should elected leaders have no control over the bureaucracy? Does too much bureaucratic autonomy lead to a rouge bureaucracy, also widely referred to as the “deep state”?
What is Populism? Populism is an ideological position built upon the idea that society is separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps. These two camps are (i) the pure people and (ii) the corrupt elite. The corrupt elite includes the media, some parts of the bureaucracy (if not all of it), universities, intellectuals, some business circles, etc. In this equation, the populist leaders represent the people against the evil elites (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Müller, 2016). The relationship between populism and democracy is complicated. Although populist leaders may set the ground for the development of democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes, they themselves do not always request democracy. There is certainly an element of truth in the conflict between the people and corrupt elites, but it does not always hold ground in every single country, especially in countries with democratic institutions. On the contrary, populist leaders in democratic countries are viewed as (i) anti-elitist, (ii) anti-pluralist, and (iii) illiberal (Bauer & Bekcer, 2020; Bauer, Peters, Pierre, Yesilkagit, and Becker, 2021).
Democratic Backsliding and Populism Populism, claiming to speak for a single people, is one possible driver of democratic backsliding. Democratic backsliding refers to the reduction of political pluralism. Indicators of democratic backsliding are harassment of the opposition, censorship of the media, subversion of accountability, and executive aggrandizement (Bauer & Bekcer, 2020; Bauer et al., 2021). On the one hand, populist leaders are anti-establishment and anti-bureaucracy; on the other hand, they need bureaucratic apparatus (especially security forces) to accomplish their political goals. The tension between being against the bureaucracy and needing the bureaucracy at the same time creates three broadly defined behaviors by populist leaders (Bauer & Bekcer, 2020; Bauer et al., 2021).
What do Populists Do with the Bureaucracy? First, populist leaders may choose to sideline or ignore the bureaucracy. Bureaucratic agencies routinely inform and advise politicians on many issues, from healthcare to national defense. Populist leaders often ignore the recommendations of agencies and their officials who are not aligned with the populist leaders’ agenda. For example, Donald Trump in the U.S. openly expressed his negative feelings for Dr. Antoni Fauci, who was one of the leading figures in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. An even more controversial and bizarre act of ignoring the bureaucracy happened in 2019. Hurricane Dorian approached the U.S. mainland in September of that year. Trump falsely claimed that the Hurricane would impact Alabama (ABC News, 2019). None of the forecast models predicted that Dorian would impact Alabama, and federal agencies initially refuted Trump’s claims. However, after the Trump administration’s pressures on the NOAA, the agency made an unsigned statement confirming what Trump said. Later investigations found that the agency violated scientific integrity codes.
Second, populist leaders may try to dismantle the bureaucracy that they see as an obstacle to their goals. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, promised to dismantle the administrative state during the election campaign (Michaels, 2017). Indeed, the Trump administration followed many strategies to make federal employees quit their jobs or limit their actions (NPR, 2021). A similar example at a massive scale happened in Turkey. In 2013, then-Prime Minister Erdogan’s cabinet was shocked by a graft probe. Four ministers, their sons, and many other important officials were charged with taking bribes and involving in shady dealings. The Erdogan administration immediately reshuffled, suspended, or fired hundreds of police, prosecutors, and judges (Al Jazeera America, 2013). In 2016, after a suspiciously clumsy military coup attempt that Erdogan called a ‘gift from God’ (Bloomberg, 2016), Mr. Erdogan purged hundreds of thousands of officers in the public sector, especially in police, judiciary, education, and academia (The New York Times, 2016; Tharoor, 2017). This example brings us to the third point in the populist leaders’ treatment of the bureaucracy.
The third type of action that populist leaders take in their relationship with the bureaucracy is capturing it. Turkey’s President Erdogan aimed to accomplish this right after firing hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats. They nearly eliminated merit-based hiring procedures in the bureaucracy and handed all the government positions to party loyalists (Reuters, 2020). With that, Erdogan was able to use the bureaucracy to silence the opposition. For example, Canan Caftancioglu, one of the leading figures in the opposition party, was banned from politics because of one of her posts on Twitter (The Guardian, 2022). Similar practices, although at a smaller scale, were visible in the Trump Administration. In his rallies, Donald Trump often boasted how many judges he appointed to the federal courts (The Washington Post, 2020). Some of Trump’s nominees for federal courts did not have even the most basic qualifications to sit in a federal court (The New York Times, 2017).
So far, I have discussed that populist leaders try to sideline/ignore, dismantle, or use the bureaucracy when they come to power. They accomplish these goals through multiple political actions. The first thing they do is change the administrative structure of the bureaucracy through centralization of authority and redistribution of budgets and personnel. Second, they politicize the personnel by purging the top-level officials and replacing them with loyal ideological supporters. They also replace administrative norms with new ones and transform the institutional culture. Third, they rely heavily on executive decrees to avoid checks and balances and accountability (Bauer and Becker, 2020; Bauer et al., 2021).
How Does the Bureaucracy React? The next question I will address is how the bureaucracy reacts to populist leaders. Bureaucrats’ reactions to populist leaders can be classified under three categories. First, they can work with populist leaders. Especially, national security bureaucracy especially tends to work with populist leaders more easily than other agencies. For example, The Border Patrol Union in the U.S. openly endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 elections (Texas Tribune, 2016). Second, bureaucrats may shirk their duties, especially in policies that do not align with their agency missions. For example, bureaucrats in the Department of Education produced legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review on politically sensitive issues, such as Title IX due process regulations (Sherk, 2023). Finally, bureaucrats may try to sabotage the policies of populist leaders. Some common ways to derail populist policies are to leak information to the public and to inform political opposition in the legislature and encourage them to act. Trump’s policies were marred by such actions both from career bureaucrats and people in his own team (Woodward, 2018). Arguably, the most famous example of a saboteur in the Trump Administration was Miles Taylor. Taylor, who was the chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security, wrote an anonymous op-ed to the New York Times in 2018 titled “I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” (Taylor, 2018). He wrote, “I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” (Taylor, 2018).
Balancing Political Control over Bureaucracy and Bureaucratic Autonomy The actions of Miles Taylor and many other people in the Trump administration and the federal bureaucracy bring up a legitimate question: Should elected leaders not have control over the bureaucracy? The answer to this question is not easy to find. In democracies, it is the people’s and the politicians’ right to have control over the bureaucracy. However, the level of political control over the bureaucracy varies depending on the political culture and agency capacity. In the United States, presidents have greater control over the bureaucracy through thousands of political appointments to federal agencies. Many European countries, on the other hand, allow elected leaders to appoint only a few dozen people to manage the bureaucracy (Fukuyama, 2023). Also, how much control to exert on an agency depends on the capacity of an agency (Fukuyama, 2013). Highly technical agencies (e.g., NASA, the National Institute of Health, the National Weather Service) or agencies with greater administrative capacity can enjoy greater levels of autonomy compared to agencies carrying out simpler tasks (e.g., Departments of Motor Vehicles). Balancing political control and bureaucratic autonomy is not an easy task, and many factors, including the political culture and regime values in a country, contribute to this balancing act. On the one hand, too much political control can lead to micromanagement, reduction of administrative capacity, clientelism, patronage, and corruption. On the other hand, too much bureaucratic autonomy can lead to a rogue bureaucracy that is often labeled as the “deep state.”
The issue of the deep state has become one of the discussion points in political campaigns, especially in the United States. Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington and eliminate the deep state. The concept of deep state is believed to be first used in Turkey in the 1990s to describe rouge members of the national security bureaucracy that did extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, extortions, and other illegal acts. The term has been mostly used in the national security context around the world, except for the United States. In the U.S., the deep state mostly refers to the federal bureaucracy, and discussions on the deep state are bundled together with many conspiracy theories. Some of these conspiracy theories are common household names, such as George Soros, the Bilderberg meetings, and Rothschilds. Some conspiracy theories cross national borders and impact other countries. QAnon is a bundle of several deep-state conspiracy theories that originated in the United States, claiming that the world is run by a deep state and a secret group in the American military is fighting it. In 2022, a group of men inspired by QAnon were arrested in Germany under the charges of plotting to overthrow the German government.
Indeed, the issue of rouge bureaucracy needs to be taken seriously. Bureaucrats going rogue and committing crimes is detrimental to democracy. However, promoting conspiracy theories is a tactic from the populist playbook, and discussions on deep state and bureaucratic accountability should be discussed independently of conspiracy theories.
Conclusion In this paper, I addressed three questions. What do populists do with the bureaucracy, and how does the bureaucracy react? Should elected leaders have no control over the bureaucracy? Does too much bureaucratic autonomy lead to a rouge bureaucracy, also widely referred to as the “deep state”? Populist leaders use a combination of sidelining/ignoring, dismantling, and using/weaponizing the bureaucracy. Populist leaders deal with the bureaucracy by changing the bureaucratic structure through reorganizations and resource reallocations, changing the bureaucratic culture by altering organizational norms, purging top-level bureaucrats, and circumventing political checks and balances and accountability by relying heavily on executive decrees. When populist leaders come to power, bureaucratic agencies choose to work with them, shirk or sabotage populist policies.
Bureaucratic reactions to populist leaders lead to questions regarding how much political control we should have over the bureaucracy and how much autonomy we should grant to bureaucratic agencies. The answer to this question depends on the political context of every country. However, it is possible to argue that bureaucratic agencies with higher administrative capacity can enjoy greater levels of autonomy. Concerns regarding too much bureaucratic autonomy leading to rogue bureaucracy, also known as the deep state, are legitimate and need to be taken seriously. However, it is important that such discussions are made independent of conspiracy theories that come directly from the populist playbook.
References ABC News. (2019). Trump displayes altered weather map showing Dorian could have hit Alabama. Accessed October 8, 2023 via: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/map-flap-trump-displays-altered-weather-map-showing/story?id=65384094
Al Jazeera America. (2013). Turkish prime minister reshuffles cabinet amid scandal. Accessed October 9, 2023 via: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/26/turkish-pm-reshufflescabinetamidscandal.html
Bauer, M. and Becker, S. (2020). Democratic Backsliding, Populism, and Public Administration. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance. 19-31.
Bauer, M., Peters,G.B., Pierre, J. Yesilkagit, K., Becker, S. (2021). Democratic Backsliding and Public Administration: How Populist in Government Transition State Bureaucracies. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, United States. Cambridge University Press.
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Foreign Policy. (2022). Germany’s Conspiracists Borrow American Ideas to Plot Against the State. Accessed on October 9, 2023 via: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/12/germany-conspiracy-us-arrests-january-6-capitol-attack-bundestag-nazism-reich-coup/
Fukuyama, F. (2013). What is Governance? Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 26, No. 3, (pp. 347–368).
Fukuyama, F. (2023). In Defense of the Deep State. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration. Published Online: 25 August 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2023.2249142
Michaels, J. (2017). How Trump is Dismantling a Pillar of the American State. The Guardian. Accessed October 9, 2023 via: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/07/donald-trump-dismantling-american-administrative-state
Mudde, C and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism a Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York, NY. Oxford University Press.
Müller, J. W. (2016). What is Populism? London: Penguin.
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Sherk, James. (2023). Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump. Accessed on October 9, 2023 via: https://americafirstpolicy.com/latest/20222702-federal-bureaucrats-resisted-president-trump
Taylor, M. (2018). I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. The New York Times. Accessed on October 9, 2023 via: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html
Texas Tribune. (2016). Border Patrol Union Endorses Trump for President. Accessed on October 9, 2023 via: https://www.texastribune.org/2016/03/30/border-patrol-union-endorses-trump-president/
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Johan Heymans, Managing Partner, Venote Criminal Law and Human Rights | Belgium
Johan Heymans is the Managing Partner of Venote Criminal Law and Human Rights. He obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Law from Namur University in 2010 and his master’s degree from Leuven and Tilburg in 2012. He then took a master of laws (LL.M.) in international and US criminal law at New York University. Mr. Heymans later worked in Phnom Penh for the prosecutor’s office at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and was also a guest lecturer in international criminal law at the Royal University of Law and Economics in Cambodia. He has been a teaching assistant in criminal procedure at the Law Faculty of the Antwerp University since 2015. He also gives guest lectures at Ghent University and at the Belgian Institute for Judicial Training. Johan Heymans is also active as a human rights expert at the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) and at Fair Trials.
Video Link:
Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023
Date: Sept 20, 2023
SPEECH
Strengthening the rule of law to combat the rise of authoritarianism: Intergovernmental Responses
As a group of human rights lawyers, we work on different human rights problems in the world. Sadly enough, we have worked a lot in Turkey in the last seven years. It is in light of these experiences that I want to make some reflections, particularly in regard to Goal 16. There is a need for more peace, justice, and stronger institutions because as we see in today’s world, the rule of law is under threat and pressure. There is one specific tendency that I want to highlight that is really close to my heart and it is a tendency that concerns abductions that have been the rapporteur to the Turkey Tribunal Opinions Tribunal.
It is a tendency that we see increasing in the world today. On the one hand, we have domestic abductions, which have existed for a really long time but are really increasing in frequency. However, these techniques are used to eliminate political opponents in most cases, or any event, critical voices towards the regime. There is also some other tendency that is, in a way, newer but is increasing very rapidly, that concerns international abductions where countries do not limit themselves to their boundaries. They go abroad to eliminate the people who were thinking that was safe, who were thinking that they could construct a new life and suddenly they are captured and illegally brought back to their home countries where they were tortured.
If I take the example of Turkey, in the last seven years, it has abducted individuals from 23 other countries, critical voices, and people whom they consider to be opponents of the regime. So, if you think about it, 1 in 9 countries have been working together with Turkey to eliminate critical voices that have nothing to do with but concern a purely Turkish affair. The second worrying aspect of that tendency is that countries like Turkey are not limited by the fact that these people enjoy the protection of the United Nations. They are not limited by the fact that these people have double nationalities. They are not even limited by the fact that these people have not lived in their respective countries for many years and are doing something completely different in another country.
Abductions are very worrying because it is normalizing an act that is an international crime. Countries are working together; they are sharing the same practices, finding strength with each other to normalize crimes that should not be normal. It forces different countries to work and collaborate on these practices towards a more authoritarian regime, a more authoritarian way of working and thinking. How we can solve that issue is through the intervention of different actors. One of these actors is, of course, civil society. I have seen it in the past; if they are quick to react and intervene immediately after someone has been adopted, they mobilize the international community. Sometimes you can stop the abduction and people are released again.
You also have human rights defenders, who start litigating, when people disappear, either in the host state or in the country where the person has been abducted to challenge the judges to release the person and to help them to find the person. We have also seen that happen in different countries, notably in countries that were working together with Turkey but then if a person disappears, that means that they end up in these secret detention facilities where they are tortured and abused. It is also important to take action and human rights defenders do that by filing complaints to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which then renders provisional measures and imposes pressure on the different countries to release the people or at least make them resurface in the normal, official, and the judiciary system.
Then eventually, if the people resurface, most often that happens after a few weeks but usually it is a few months, a few years, and sometimes they never resurface again. It is important to get these people released as quickly as possible because they are pressured into not talking about what they suffered, and about not sharing the torture experiences that they have gone through. So, it is only when they are out that they can fully speak up and let us know what happened to them but these categories of people will be more familiar.
There is one category of people that we tend to forget and they are really important, which are judges; they have a huge responsibility in stopping these international crimes because in case there is a shift towards an authoritarian regime in a democratic state, a strong institutional and judicial framework can stop this deterioration.
We often see that when there is this strong judicial backbone democracy, even if it is harmed, it manages to survive for a number of years. However, it is at the moment when even the judicial backbone gives up that democracy and it has disappeared at lightning speed. It is really important to also focus on the judges.
If I take the example of Turkey again, over the last few years, thousands of people have been convicted of long sentences. We have been speaking about it for eight years as prolonged sentences are given on empty case files. If you open it, there is nothing in there; but even when there is something in the case files, it is evidence that a first-year law student would see that is not credible at all. Still, these judges convict the people and put them in prison.
I do not want to completely destroy the very honorable profession of being a judge because it is a very important profession. I know it is not easy what they have to do but because I have also seen lots of cases where judges were arrested in their courtrooms. I have one case that comes to my mind where a judge made a decision that was not in favor of the government policy. He was arrested in his courtroom and replaced by another who did the same thing because of the fact there was nothing in the case file. So, they said this person should be released. He was also arrested and then the third one came in and he saw his two colleagues being escorted to jail and he came to a different conclusion. However, I know that it is not easy but if you take on that responsibility, you have to make a choice. Either you do it properly or you do not do it at all.
It is really important, on the one hand, to support the judges who try to do a wonderful job in very hard circumstances. However, on the other hand, we should send out a wake-up call to show them that there are consequences for covering up these international crimes. For instance, the Turkey Tribunal is an opinions tribunal with no legally binding powers but we brought together judges from all over the world, all continents, and people with lots of experience. We presented them with five topics of serious human rights violations in Turkey. They looked at it independently and they came to a conclusion that crimes against humanity are being committed in Turkey.
Notably, they dedicated a lot of attention to the judges who are assisting, covering up these crimes, or not investigating the crimes that are being committed, for instance Turkey. Consequently, we also filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court, in this context, because it was remarkable. The Turkey Tribunal was followed by 2 million people and the most feedback that we got, reactions from the audience, came from judges who were asking, will there be consequences for me? Will I be held accountable because I am functioning in this defunct system? So for us, it showed that the work had an impact and that it could lead a change. That was also the reason why we filed the complaint before the International Criminal Court, not only against the politicians, the secret services, and the police officers who are participating in these crimes but also against the judges covering up everything that the other actors in this context have been doing.
We are also working around universal jurisdiction. It is a little bit comparable to sanctions in other countries like Russia. It all sounds or feels for them like there will be no consequences but then if they want to travel abroad for a holiday or their children study in some place and they want to go to visit them, the risk that they might be arrested for the crimes, the complicity in the crimes that they have been helping to commit. That sometimes helps to change the mindset of the people. It is not that I have the pretension to say that certainly will change the entire system and the rule of law in Turkey but also in other countries.
Still, I think it is important to know that every single one of us has skills and is good at something and that everybody if we unite and we keep on fighting for these things, that with these very small efforts combined and consistently done, can make great social impact and change. I think that it is important to remember for all of us that we should try to think about what we keep and what we can do. How can we help to make a difference? Often when you look at these big questions, you have the feeling that it is overwhelming and too complicated for an individual to do something. However, every single one of us can do something to change these situations.
Guilherme Stolle Paixão e Casarões, Professor of Political Science and International Relations | Brazil
Guilherme Stolle Paixão e Casarões is a Doctor and Master of Political Science from the University of São Paulo, a Master of International Relations from the University of Campinas (San Tiago Dantas Program), a specialist in History and Political Cultures from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He has a degree in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais. He is Vice-Coordinator of the Graduation in Public Administration of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV EAESP) and Professor of FGV in the areas of Public Administration, Political Science and International Relations. He was a visiting fellow at the Tel Aviv University (2011) and Brandeis University (2015). Guilherme Stolle Paixão e Casarões has published researches and articles in the areas of Brazilian Foreign Policy, Brazil-Middle East Relations and International Relations Theory.
Video Link:
Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023
Date: Sept 20, 2023
SPEECH
Rising trends of populism: Threats to global peace and security
Foremost, I would like to address the concept of populism, to which I draw on the already classic works of Cas Mudde and Benjamin Moffitt. I acknowledge this is not a new idea to most of you, but some clarification might be necessary. In academic circles, there are endless debates on the nature of populism or whether it is an ideology or a political strategy. Nevertheless, the main features of populism are well-known:
Populists divide societies in binary terms, usually between what they understand as ‘the true people’ versus ‘the corrupt elites.’ In some cases, the division takes place between pure good versus pure evil. By doing so, they advance a view of politics as war, in which the ‘other’ must be defeated or even eliminated from political life.
Populists despise technocrats and democratic institutions, especially those whose members have not been elected. They want to tap into the common sense of the average person. They do so by resorting to bad manners and, most importantly, by offering simplistic solutions to complex problems – from violent crime to health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Populists thrive on chaos and insecurity. They feed from people’s anxieties, grievances, resentment, and fear, and transform them into an unstoppable political force based on hate. This is why populists are always fostering crises and breakdowns as the necessary fuel for their political strategies.
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The second part of my discussion seeks to discuss what populists are not (necessarily).
Populists are not necessarily authoritarian – although they might easily slip into authoritarianism as they do not like political institutions to hold them back. They also advance the idea of a homogeneous society that most times leaves no room for the pluralism of civil society movements.
Populists are not necessarily serial liars – although they often feel tempted to construct ambitious narratives about the people (and of themselves) through disinformation tools, from straight-up fake news to sophisticated algorithms, from rewriting history to banning (or even burning) books.
Populists are not always right-wing – although they tend to favor socially conservative agendas based on race, ethnicity, and/or religion. Even left-wing populists, despite embracing revolutionary motifs and progressive causes at times, tend to privilege the majority to the detriment of minorities, instead of protecting the latter.
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In part 3, I will answer the following questions: what does a populist foreign policy look like? How does it threaten global peace and security? In this effort, I draw my points on Sandra Destradi and Johannes Plagemann’s work on India’s foreign policy, which may be generalized to think about other cases of global populism.
Populists threaten global security because they are suspicious of and often hostile to, global governance mechanisms and multilateral treaties that have been critical to world peace.
Populists threaten global security because they prefer bilateral over multilateral relations, leading to complicity towards great-power conflicts or to unilateral violence and repression (in case a great power is ruled by a populist).
Populists are a threat to democracy and political stability not just at home, but also abroad, as they frequently expand their understanding of the people to diaspora or religious communities across the world, and weaponize them to the populist’s own political interests.
Populists threaten global security because they are not bound by traditional foreign policy institutions and diplomatic rituals that often prevent disruptive events from taking place.
Populists threaten global security and stability because they are able to permanently mobilize ‘their’ people against democracy, fundamental rights, and basic freedoms.
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Finally, in the last part, allow me to look into how populism affects the attainment of SDGs, which are at the heart of this conference. Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke at the UN General Assembly yesterday (Tuesday, September 19). In his speech, he underlined two points I consider crucial to the future of multilateralism and the SDGs:
SDGs are the UN’s most ambitious initiative, but they may become the UN’s most shameful failure if countries fail to cooperate wholeheartedly and urgently.
Most political problems in the world today – brutal conflicts, democratic breakdowns, and the rise of extremism – share the common root of poverty and inequality.
Although populists are not necessarily against ending poverty and hunger (Goals 1 and 2), they will only commit to cooperation if there is no one else to blame. Populists are certainly not committed to quality education (Goal 4) and gender equality (Goal 5), as they feel the state should only serve those who share their values. Populists do not seem to care about clean energy (Goal 7) and climate change (Goal 13), often reducing these concerns to mere conspiracies advanced by transnational elites, which include scientists, activists, and politicians (dismissed as liberal or communist). They are all accused of disregarding the true needs of the people.
Having said all that, it comes as no surprise that populists are not willing to embrace Goal 16, peace, justice, and strong institutions. I am confident that populists uncommitted to global peace and security may lose momentum soon. It requires solid institutions, brave activists, and increased cooperation.
