Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century
Remarks on the Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech in Georgetown University's Gaston Hall, Washington, DC on December 14, 2009
Basic Course Book
Unit 40 Human Rights Ideals
Unit 22 A Reading History: Back to the Old Cooperation
Unit 24 Our Built-in Moral Sense is the Basic We Should Go Back to
Read the text paying special attention to the context in which the italicized word combinations are used and suggest the way they could be translated into Russian
Europe Has to Guard Democracy Amid Crisis
By Anatol Lieven
December 10 2008 IHT
T he present financial crisis, together with the end of the Bush administration, draws a line under the era that began with the end of the cold war. The terrorist attacks of September 11 and their consequences notwithstanding, this was a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity, in which great things should have been possible for the victors of the cold war, the nations of the west led by the US. Now it seems likely that we will have to prepare for an age of much more modest horizons.
Yet compared with our hopes after 1989, the past 19 years cannot in fact be said to have been a glorious era. Remember when we thought that freed from the cost, the hatreds and the obsessions of the cold war, western nations would combine to tackle great problems and launch great projects?
A fraction of the trillion and a half dollars now spent on rescuing western economies from the consequences of their elites’ greed and recklessness would have been enough to have greatly reduced African misery, stabilised Pakistan and other Muslim states – or put a human being on Mars. In fact, whatever was left over from the west’s relentless pursuit of material satisfactions has been largely burned up by the Bush administration’s tax cuts and by misconceived and appallingly executed American wars.
The European Union in this period does, however, have two substantial achievements to its credit. The first is that, albeit far too slowly and inadequately, the EU has placed the issue of man-made climate change squarely on the international agenda.
The second is the democratisation and economic development of eastern and central Europe. Pray God that this is not endangered as a result of the present economic crisis. If we are lucky and the latest actions by western governments take hold, the inevitable economic depression that we are facing will be short and shallow.
We cannot reckon on this, however. It is worth remembering that it took more than two years for the full effects of the US financial crash of 1929 to filter through to Europe and for the political results to make themselves felt. While Roosevelt’s policies prevented further decline in the US, the American economy remained severely depressed for the next six years, until the outbreak of the Second World War renewed industrial growth.
The latest crisis has dealt the coup de grace to the Anglo-American economic model – summed up in the “Washington Consensus” that was preached with near-religious fervour and dogmatism in the 1990s. Given the damage that this ideology did when forced on the former Soviet Union, Latin America and parts of Asia, it is easy to sympathise with the anger with which people in these regions see the model being abandoned in its heartland.
The risk is that contempt for our discredited economic model will fuse in various parts of the world with contempt for our political model, democracy. Indeed, if the global downturn is as severe as most analysts predict, political systems in many economically fragile states will be in danger from unrest – and the beneficiaries of this unrest are unlikely to be democrats.
There may not be much that the EU can do in the years to come to help stabilise – let alone democratise – countries outside Europe. Similarly, if Europe does fall into severe economic depression, then further expansion of the Union will be off the table for many years. It is essential, however, that the EU use the widest possible range of both carrots and sticks to make sure that former communist countries admitted to the EU do not slip into chauvinist authoritarianism.
This applies with special force to those EU members with unsolved ethnic tensions. In Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania and elsewhere, we have already seen disquieting signs in recent years that large parts of the population have been by no means fully converted to pluralist democracy. Nor can this be taken for granted in the older democracies, if growing economic misery drives still more migrants into Europe and this is coupled with continuing fears of terrorism.
If this happens, the entire European democratic example will be undermined – and it is through our example that we will maintain and spread democracy in the difficult years ahead. To this end, il faut cultiver notre jardin.
The writer is a professor at King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. He is currently researching a book on Pakistan
Word the message of the text that follows. Paraphrase the italicized parts of the text
When Freedom Stumbles
Jan 17th 2008
The Economist
OVER the past half century, it often seemed that the advance of democracy and basic freedoms—the right to speak and write without fear of persecution, to demand political change, and so on—was ineluctable. First the Europeans let their colonies go. Then the Soviet empire fell, and with it the communist monopoly on power in Eastern Europe. And apartheid ended in South Africa.
Recently, though, freedom's progress may have come to a halt, or even gone into reverse. That, at least, is the conclusion of Freedom House, an august American lobby group whose observations on the state of liberty are a keenly watched indicator. Its report for 2007 speaks of a “profoundly disturbing deterioration” in the global picture, with reversals seen in 38 countries—nearly four times as many as are showing any sign of improvement.
Using the think-tank's long-established division of the world into “free”, “partly free” and “not free” countries, the planet is still a better place than it was a quarter-century ago. In other words, there are still net gains from the fall of communism, at least in central Europe, and the decline of militarism in Latin America. But the short-term trends seem worrying. Last year was the second in a row when liberty, as defined by Freedom House, inched back.
An especially disturbing sign, says the organisation, is the number of countries in all regions of the world where a previously hopeful trend has gone into reverse. They include Bangladesh (where the armed forces took over last year), Sri Lanka (whose civil war flared up) and the Philippines. Other backsliders included Nigeria and Kenya, accounting for more than one sub-Saharan African in four between them, plus the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. In both Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, former Soviet republics whose “colour revolutions” were warmly encouraged by Freedom House, there was regression. Only two countries, Thailand and Togo, made a clear leap forward last year, going from “not free” to “partly free”.
Of course, not all the targets of Freedom House's ire will feel embarrassed by their low scores. For example, Cuba's envoys to the United Nations have angrily denounced the organisation as a blatant instrument of “interventionist activities” by dark forces in Washington. And in slightly more respectable quarters (on America's academic left, for example) the analysts at Freedom House have been criticised for hewing too close to their home country's foreign policy.
So where exactly does Freedom House come from? It was founded in 1941 by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt, as a counter to Nazism. During the cold war it “fought the good fight” against Soviet-backed tyrannies but also had harsh words for dictators on America's side of the stand-off. Freedom House not only watches the state of liberty, it also calls itself a “catalyst” for the peaceful advancement of civil and democratic rights through “analysis, advocacy and action”. But it has firm ideas about which country is best placed to promote these ideals: it has formally stated that whatever their differences, all trustees are agreed that “American leadership in international affairs is essential to the cause of human rights and freedom.” When America attacked Iraq in 2003, Freedom House wished the campaign well.
Nor does the organisation conceal its financial ties to the American government, which supplies about 80% of its income. But it strongly denies that it acts as an arm of the government, or that it holds back from criticising America and its friends when that is warranted. And it would be hard to argue that diplomatic friendship with the United States has ever guaranteed a country a free pass from the think-tank. Israel, a close American friend, used to get relatively poor grades—a 2 for political rights and a 3 for civil liberties on a descending scale of 1 to 7. In recent years, Israel has improved its scores, but only in 2005 did its civil-liberty rating rise to 2.
Insiders say that in years past, there was some internal debate at Freedom House over whether or not economic welfare, which affects the range of choices people can make, should be included in the calculus of liberty. But the decision has been to keep economic factors out. This helps to explain why China, in the midst of the horrors of its Cultural Revolution when the surveys began, has hardly managed to improve on its early, rock-bottom ratings. Its “civil liberties” are still assessed at a dismal 6.
Russia, too, has been rated on the basis of its worsening human and political rights with no account taken of rising living standards. It was awarded a relatively good 3 for both political rights and civil liberties in 1991, bringing it within a whisker of membership of the “free” group, but is now locked again in the “not free” camp.
How much freer do people feel when they have a few roubles or yuan in their pocket (and access to other goodies like computers and compact discs)? That is an endlessly debatable question. By contrast the sort of liberties and non-liberties measured by Freedom House (multi-party elections, due process and so on) are relatively tangible and easy to assess. That alone may be quite a good argument for having at least one index whose stated purpose is to assess formal freedoms—to vote, speak, assemble and so on. That does not imply that other factors, such as prosperity, have no bearing on how free people feel.
Proficiency file
Gapped Sentences
This type of exercises mainly tests collocations. There are six questions and each question contains three sentences. In each of the three sentences, one word has been taken out. Only one word will fit all three sentences. The gapped word is always in the same form.
· Do not attempt an answer until you have read all three sentences very carefully.
· Make sure that your answer will fit in all three sentences. Check that it fits both grammatically and with the sense of the sentences.
1. Bill Clinton accuses Obama camp of stirring race issue in ………. of the Democratic primary on Saturday, in which at least half the voters are expected to be black.
JAL, once the pride of Asia and a symbol of Japan’s global economic ………., today agreed to file for bankruptcy.
Gerry Adams’ younger brother Liam traded on the Sinn Fein president’s name to ………. his career.
2. It remains unclear what the Republicans will consider sufficient success to ………. bringing the troops home.
Finkelstein continued to push the boundaries until his political activism prompted a judge to issue a ………. for his arrest in connection with an old drugs charge.
The board concurred with the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence of his misconduct to ………. any further investigation.
3. America, which once seemed like a symbol of freedom, now ……… the policies of force.
Animal-rights ………. in France are pushing for legislation that would outlaw the sale of horsemeat, which they see as barbaric.
Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, who is concerned that inflation will become another serious problem ………. a different approach.
4. When people are ……….the right to discuss their life on the parliament floor or in the media, they're forced into the street.
Mr Ozawa has ………. the charges, insisted that the prosecutors are politically motivated.
The Indian middle classes ………. the pleasures of consumerism ever since independence in 1947, are making up for lost time.
5. The election's problems weren't confined to the validity of the vote — although evidence abounded of ………. rigging.
Other conservatives are disgusted by what they see Avatar’s ………. anti-Americanism, claiming the Canadian-born Cameron is offering a critique of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fact that Governor Sanford he went AWOL in South America for almost a week reflected his ………. disregard for the workings of government.
6. No ………. results have been gained during the Iraq adventure by either the Americans or the Iraqi people except getting rid of the tyrant Saddam Hussein.
There should be some ………. evidence that the economy is starting to recover, not just words.
Mr. Obama will also have to demonstrate some ………. action to dispel the notion that his plans to shut down the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, makes Americans less safe.