i'm. going to are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture as the world's largest superpower does the united states have a moral obligation to take military action to stop human rights atrocities pose that question and more to jared genser tonight's conversations with great minds also yesterday the supreme court upheld obamacare a law that will help the lives of millions of americans but despite its wide impact republicans are still full steam ahead when it comes to repealing the law why that and more enter night's big picture rumble and why you probably haven't heard of the supreme court case versus rena you probably definitely have heard of roe v wade why

and what does this have to do with obamacare it's important because some cases have a huge lesson to teach us lessons that spanned decades and generations i'll explain in tonight's daily to. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by jared genser sure it is the founder of freedom now an independent nonprofit organization that works to free prisoners of conscience around the world previously he was a partner in the government affairs practice of deal a piper lp was previously named by the national law journal as one of forty under forty washington's rising stars is taught seminars about the u.n. security council a georgetown university law center as well as the university of michigan and the university of pennsylvania law schools your older bachelor's degree from cornell a master's in public policy from harvard and jurist doctor from the university of michigan law school he's also the coeditor of the responsibility to protect the

promise of stopping mass atrocities in our times if you're and joins me now here. washington d.c. studios greetings thanks for having me tom thanks for joining us what got you into this whole field the idea of government relations international human rights well i had actually been a graduate student in public policy in the late ninety's and at the time was studying domestic criminal justice policy when it was announced that the president of china jiang zemin would be coming to my campus and i got pulled into helping to organize the protest and when it was all over we had had five thousand protesters turn out of harvard the largest protest since the vietnam war but the in the day my question was you know what impact that actually have on people in china and that was what kind of turned me on to international human rights and that was sort of the experience that led me to decide to become a human rights lawyer and what impact did it have well i concluded unfortunately that the protests centered important message to the american people but that of

course people inside of china for the most part couldn't see it because of the state run media and it had no practical impact in terms of the actual day to day human rights of the chinese public so how do you go about having. well at the end of the day you know international law is for the most part actually good here to most countries want to be viewed by its partners in the world critically in the areas of trade or the environment or otherwise is actually. being good partners who would be able to be viewed as abiding by their own obligations human rights of course is a different and more complicated set of questions and and so in my experience and i think it's fair to say and most people working on international human rights matters the law itself is usually not sufficient to bring about the kind of results that one wants and oftentimes you need to combine these international treaties with the political and the public relations pressure that help ensure that results actually out here to what the treaties claim that they are guaranteeing to citizens

of these countries are you concerned about ethnocentrism in the us i mean one of the one of the knocks that china makes. about the united states lecturing them about human rights is that we've got more prisoners than they do and they've got three times as many people and a lot of those people who are prisoners arguably are having their human rights violated and. i mean there are there are a lot of deficiencies i suppose that you can point out in the american system. or any political system frankly i mean how do you that is different countries it seems define the basic rights of humans differently. what does that mean to you how do you navigate those waters short well i think that would have been a valid criticism of nine hundred forty eight when the universal declaration of human rights was adopted because it was primarily western countries that signed on to this universal declaration in the twenty first century that has fundamentally changed so more than one hundred fifty countries in the world for example have signed on to the international covenant on civil and political rights even china to

the united states yes yes in the late seventy's actually shortly after it was adopted what was the one that george bush refused to sign and to do well there the united states is not a party to the convention on the rights of the child which is which relates to the federal state control issues. children's rights issues in the united states among other topics and unfortunately us and sudan are the only two countries in the world that have a. hardliner oh no no but you know even china has signed on to this particular treaty now it hasn't ratified it which means it doesn't have to get implemented domestically but they can't proactively violate these provisions and so it isn't actually united states or the west that define what for example the right to freedom of expression it is this treaty creates what's called a treaty body it's called the human rights committee it's based in geneva it has twenty representatives from parties to the treaty from around the world that interpret across the world what the right to freedom of expression should be

interpreted to mean under this treaty and so it would be fair to say in the twenty first century that. that these are western concepts or western values when you have such broad spread support across the west the global south etc now i will say that in the western tradition there is definitely much more of an emphasis on civil political rights coming from our traditions and in the global south there are as a greater emphasis on economic social and cultural rights and so there's no doubt differences in how one interprets what human rights you know are but you know as it was said to me by a former colleague of mine who was imprisoned in china you know there isn't a chinese version of torture in an american version of torture by torture is torture and the recipient of that torture from a government pretty much knows it when they see it and so one shouldn't be able to put a cultural lens onto those kinds of fundamental questions and you focused on a lot more countries than china and you were involved with the in the case of some

suki. correct my pronunciation please i'm sure in burma in myanmar yes tell us about that sure well i spent five years serving as international counsel to aung sang suu kyi she was elected well her party and her its allies were elected in one thousand nine hundred two to actually more than eighty percent of the seats in their parliament after a series of uprisings in the country of that led to a massacre of ten thousand people and subsequently she spent. you know fifteen twenty one years under house arrest i served as her counsel for the latter five years of her house arrest term and we undertook through my ngo freedom now a range of activities on her behalf which included winning her case on numerous occasions before a body at the un that deals with arbitrary detention and gauging substantial political support for the cause so for example working with many other human rights groups around the world we led an effort that resulted in one hundred twelve former presidents and prime ministers from fifty countries writing to ban ki moon urging

him to go to burma to press for the release of aung san suu kyi and other political prisoners in the country which she ultimately did six weeks later and. you know lots of speaking to the media bad writing political pressure of various sorts to try to impact a situation i've worked for a little over thirty years when international n.g.o.s and i spent a fair amount of time on the thai burmese border with where the refugee camps for the karen people are and i mean these people are being slaughtered by the by the mayan mark government in our right and. it seems to this day that nobody is speaking out for them it's like there are these high profile folks that it's easy to pick out is is freedom now expanding beyond individuals or do you find that by speaking about and for the individuals that you have the effect of helping the people who are associated with well what i would say

is actually on some said she actually or other client. who won the nobel peace prize in twenty ten are very much exceptions if you work to check out our web site at freedom dash now dot org one would see that most of the prisoners are people whose names would be happen would be would be well known but they're all leaders of various sorts and so our model is really to focus on human rights defenders broadly defined by people who are. you know prisoners of conscience people detained for who they are or what they believe to be their used or advocated violence and to take people who are leaders in their various fields so a journalist or a newspaper editor who publish a paper that shut down and gets imprisoned for it you know in one case we represented a rock star in cameroon who sang a song about the lack of freedom in cameroon got jailed for it you know we represented political activist someone like she but we've also represented religious leaders like father teddy is when bentley in vietnam who's been a catholic priest advocating for religious freedom in vietnam for many years and we work all over the world and the idea is if you can focus on leading cases that

where a government is repressing a person and people who are. pressing their own views through the range of activities that they're involved in and they're really at the leading edge of those efforts and get imprisoned for it if you can free them then there will be a ripple effect on the society because you'll create space not just for them to return to their important work but you'll also create more space for everyone else who's behind them who hasn't yet gotten to that front edge of support and you know incur the wrath of the government makes perfect sense you mention freedom know your organization how did this come about why an experience as a law student that really inspired me and i was i was focusing on human rights law as i mentioned before and was in london in the u.k. working at a human rights and geo that primarily took cases to the european court on human rights and in the newspaper about a case of a british national guard named james moxley who had gone to burma to protest human rights abuses and had gotten literally within eight hours of his arrival of a seventeen year sentence in solitary confinement. well it was

a sort of rest there he was a bit relentless would be a fair way to describe it but nevertheless seventeen years seems pretty extreme for nonviolent protests and i tripped through a process myself with the organization that i was working with where i'd taken the case to the u.n. and when i came back to washington for the summer had gotten a bunch of members of congress involved in the work with the state department the british foreign office and a few things came together to trigger his release and that included winning the case at the un combined with word coming out that he'd been beaten up in his cell and those two things came together and he was out within a week and i found myself in the u.k. at heathrow airport you know where he arrived in the v.i.p. lounge at the runway and ten feet in front of me he's reunited with his family after four hundred sixteen days in solitary confinement and his mother introduced him to me and said you know james this is jared and and he gave me a firm handshake and said you've saved my life and i was hooked as you might imagine it was you know extraordinary moment for me personally but in reflecting on

it i also you know realize that you know it was great that i helped get a white british guy out of a burmese person. the real question is could you use this kind of an approach of the sequencing of the legal the political and the public relations to leverage the release of a bernese person in a. prism or a chinese person in a chinese prison and so forth and so the real test was taking that model from you know a higher profile an easier case although not simple going up against at the time the burmese military regime but two cases of people who are indigenous from the countries that they're from who are fighting for fundamental human rights and then to try to leverage their release and what we found is that the model that we've developed is pretty unique there's no other human rights organization in the world that does what we do in the way we do it lots of organizations do pieces of it you'll see other human rights groups you know putting out reports or writing op eds or advocating at different times but we are primarily lawyers although also others and we take on an ethical duty when the family retains us to work on that person's

behalf through the high in the highs and lows and every step of the way until they are released from prison and. sparkles more conversations with great minds right after this.

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. will. be a. back to conversations in the great minds of the jury against your jared is the founder of freedom now an independent nonprofit organization that works to free prisoners of conscience around the world he's also the coeditor of the responsibility to protect the promise of stopping mass atrocities in our time so let's get back to it tell me about the responsibility to protect doctrine and is doctrine the right word to describe i think that's the right word responsibility to protect is a doctrine that was adopted by the united nations in two thousand and five this was

at the u.n. world summit which was the largest gathering of heads of state in the history of the world actually hundred fifty gathered in two thousand and five and they said a number of things in their joint statement but one of them was the responsibility to protect and in essence it says that all states have an obligation to prevent mass atrocities being committed against their own citizens in their own borders and if they're unable or unwilling to discharge that responsibility or of course they're committing them themselves then the international community has an obligation to intervene up through including potentially action by the un security council and this doctrine comes out of the history of the failures of the one nine hundred ninety s. in the genocide in rwanda and. and otherwise where the international community standing idly by and watching as people were being slaughtered and in essence reinterprets understanding of state sovereignty and state responsibility to say that yes states are sovereign they control their own borders they can you know stop

incursions into those borders but with that right comes the responsibility that at a bare minimum they're not slaughtering their own citizens are allowed in their own citizens to be slaughtered. my recollection of the beginning of the u.n. or the early days of the u.n. . and. having read a years ago book by you and also dot com are shoulder. markings i don't know if you for the markings it's an incredible book on the white book about markings and some good biographies of him in the case was that. the idea was you know we're going to restrain or we're going to be the arbiters in the event of violence you know that that that war of violence or may have justification on occasion but really only in self-defense and that. the goal of the u.n. is to create a world peace isn't the idea of opera and this was entirely in turkey.

country and isn't the idea of stepping into in truck country dealing with what's going on within the borders of a sovereign state a huge step off from that original concept of the u.s. so i think it's definitely a huge step well it is a huge step off the original concept but what you're what you're missing a little bit is the last sixty years of history where international human rights law has come to the fore so in many respects the responsibility to protect doesn't build off of exclusively the u.n. charter nine hundred forty five but it also builds off of the whole panoply of international human rights treaties that have been developed over many many years so for example the geneva conventions that prohibit war crimes of the genocide convention the privets genocide or the international convention on civil and political rights which prohibits torture and extrajudicial killings and a whole range of other things as well and so in many respects been states by state within states by states and in fact when states signed on to those treaties when

you sign when a state signs a treaty it cedes its sovereignty to the international community to be able to monitor its implementation of that treaty with regards to its own citizens so you know most states in the world are parties to the genocide convention and they that creates affirmative duties on states to be able to get engaged on questions of genocide and indeed provides the right of states who are treaties to this convention to ask questions even take cases to the international court of justice or do a range of activities to stop a state from actively committing genocide against its own population so the responsibility to protect really is acknowledging the broad developments in the international human rights field that have happened since nine hundred forty five and reasserting i think in a kind of nuanced way that you know sovereignty in the twenty first century is different than sovereignty was in one hundred forty five and i think. it in allows states to have certain rights but also imposes on them at a minimum certain basic you know duties which as i said you know it's really about

at a minimum not slaughtering your own population or allowing them to be slaughtered you know except. you know. that's still going on course and the police powers as it were the military power of the un it's extremely narrowly circumscribed and and relatively weak. how does the responsibility to protect get executed how does it function how does it work short in a practical short while i mean i think that this is really a work in progress over the last seven years since it was adopted in two thousand and five and the questions of you know how is it triggered and what are the range of interventions is still being developed really on a case by case basis the first time it was really used in the most high profile way was back in kenya and the post-election violence in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight where there are national community came together there have been thousands of killings of ethnic groups want to get to the other and the

interestingly enough given the situation in syria today but then former secretary general kofi anon went in with the strong support of the u.n. to broker a compromise between all sides stop the violence and to create a political process with the support of the african union and the international community to get them back on a path towards a negotiated settlement rather than a devolution of the situation into a much bigger mass atrocity situation and it was viewed as a very successful intervention it has been used in much lesser ways in recent years to just justify a range of smaller responses in situations like kurdistan guinea cote d'ivoire and others but of course in the last two years you know everybody knows about libya and syria and so. the one has to be careful over there to think about r two p. as it's called in relation to libya and syria as being the only examples of what are two pm me and. because the reality is that this is the blunt force edge of the range of potential interventions interventions include

a whole lot of things before military force which would include you know negotiate new negotiations the setting of envoys you know mobilizing regional organizations to engage in a situation and then even more coercive measures that aren't use of force like sanctions referral to the international criminal court right it's only when you've exhausted a whole range of other avenues that you get to even the question of whether a military intervention is appropriate and what are done is to to look at military intervention in the context of how the un itself as an institution would engage not any kind of extra u.n. engagement which was of course the criticism of the war in iraq in two thousand and three and previously you know kosovo which was not authorized by the security council three years ago we did our show for a week via satellite phone from government chara little town about fifteen miles from dar for in south sudan just about thirty miles south of the us the sudanese border. the. idea was a disaster just

a screaming disaster as we were flying out and we were watching them burn a village and. what happened to the to the responsibility to protect sure well it is still going on a friend of mine is there right now no i mean look i think it's not surprising that we're going to see a lot of failures and also a lot of successes share was actually indicted. and what was that was that the involvement of the of the of the afternoon in the allowed kenya to work and the lack of involvement that that allows bashir to strut around africa and be ignored and i got arrested what i would say is that up was self cured part partly yes mark at about zero point zero four i mean look at the responsibility to protect is not going to be a cure all for the mass atrocities going in the world and in fact it's i. a little bit unfair to blame this doctrine for the failure let's say of sudan which actually began well before it was always about that but more importantly relates to really

what happens when there are great powers aligned against each other in the u.n. security council right this is actually an institutional flaw in the united nations going back to the founding of nine hundred forty five that was intentionally built and that said any of the p five members can veto decisions by any of the other people have and so what we see in syria today is the reality of the p five member strongly divided and even though you know china and russia stand against almost the whole world including the arab league in wanting to do more this is the way the system was designed and so i would see it more as a failure of the system as it was designed than a failure of r two p. itself with regard to syria with again the libya this was this was an actual level intention of this yes and now you know looking at libya are we seen the law of unintended consequences plan i think in part we are i mean what i would say a couple things about syria sorry about libya first what i would say is you know it

was a real success ultimately for the doctor. but now it's like you know meet the new boss same as the old us right well i mean i think it remains to be seen you know i think the practical reality is there you know the way that it was implemented raised serious concerns and i think the fundamental question posed by libya was if you have a dictator who is committing mass atrocities against his own people and they don't relent when the international community tries to intervene in a whole range of ways right and you then authorize a military intervention the doctrine itself is focused on protecting of civilians not about regime change but one morphs into the other when the dictator refuses to relent and civilians are in open revolt or when the civilians are not as well but then you're inserting yourself into a civil war well and the reality is had to be stopped after this. in security council resolution and pulled back from benghazi there would have been no justification under the security council resolution or under the doctrine to

continue to go after his combat it control mechanisms but it is only when he refused to stop attacking that there was justification in order to protect civilians to do i want of you i certainly don't want to be argumentative but if you have a thought about his argument was that if he stopped attacking they would they would eat his lunch and the right they would take triple and it was probably true short short so. if we had just stood back and let i mean i've seen a couple of pretty good analysis of rights that had had nato not intervened had the world community or however you define it not intervene there might have been a lot fewer deaths. in that situation or do you disagree with that i mean i think it's very difficult to know what is clear to me is that many people have been killed get out the broadcast his intentions on the radio and internationally repeatedly said we're going to find you in your closets and other lovely things and he had managed to alienate not just all those own his own cabinet and leaders at

investors or at the u.n. and otherwise but also his entire neighborhood so i mean libya is a case where a dictator you know. ended up in a situation where he was standing by himself and i think that the consequences of that would be inevitable i do think that the way that that particularly the u.k. and france to a lesser extent the united states which i think you know got pulled into it a little bit unwillingly at least at the outset but the way that u.k. and france played it which was to talk very quickly about regime change after the authorization of the second security council resolution that created some serious problems for future interventions because it raised serious hackles among russia china and others are and we're out of time thanks so much for thanks so much it's a great conversation you're doing great work thanks so much to see this in other conversations the great minds go to our website conversations and great minds dot com. coming up after the break the conventional wisdom tells us the saving more than one hundred million americans have been turned down for health insurance is

a good thing so why do republicans think it's grounds to start an armed revolution all that more and tonight's big picture rumble. down your social implications. from the. video. if you want. christian on the dot com. on. morning news today violence is once again flared up.

in these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all day.