Renewing the fight for human rights and the spirit of 2 George Yard (Part 1)
Modern human rights campaigning has its roots in abolitionism
Injustices can be addressed through strategic collaboration
20th-century efforts to guarantee rights are being undone
This report is the first in a two-part series on human rights from GIS Expert Lord David Alton. The second part assesses responses to the most salient human rights issues of the 21st century.
The first recognizably modern human rights campaign had its origins in a printing shop and bookstore at 2 George Yard in the City of London. The year was 1787.
The abomination of the slave trade had drawn together a small group of like-minded people. But beyond that immediate cause, they also puzzled over what it means to be human and on the duty to act, which falls on those privileged citizens who enjoy the freedoms denied to vast swathes of the human race.
Over the intervening 250 years, mankind has continued to demonstrate an infinite ability to inflict gross suffering on other human beings – the Holocaust, genocides, war crimes, totalitarianism and widespread denial of human dignity and rights.
Yet, as those who gathered in 2 George Yard demonstrated, the vested and ideological interests which trade in human misery and subjugation, do not have to have the last word.
Ending the slave trade
Of the dozen men who met in May 1787, nine were Quakers and one of the others, Thomas Clarkson, was a Cambridge University student who, after a religious experience, abandoned his studies and vowed to give his life to organizing opposition to the slave trade.
Like Clarkson, a group of Quaker women had become greatly disturbed by the stories reaching England about the harrowing seizures and the enslavement of West Africans, barbaric and perilous Atlantic voyages and the brutalities of the plantation owners.
Although motivated by religious sentiment, these doughty advocates knew that they had to be worldly – learn how to campaign, lobby and create a broad-based coalition way beyond their small circle of friends. So, they created the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
The group set itself the task of changing hearts, minds and laws. To spearhead their legislative battles, it recruited a young member of Parliament, William Wilberforce. Notwithstanding fierce vested interest and opposition, by 1807 they had persuaded Parliament to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and, by 1833, to pass the Slavery Abolition Act.
French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville said that what happened that day at 2 George Yard was “absolutely without precedent. … If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary.”
Tocqueville was not simply referring to the desire for freedom or the enactment of just laws – after all, six centuries before the birth of Christ, Cyrus the Great had freed the slaves of Babylon, while, in England, the 13th-century battle for fair laws led to Magna Carta, paving the way for common law, the English Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution.
What Tocqueville detected was the organization of a systematic civic, democratic campaign with the aim of defending the fundamental rights of other human beings. A group of like-minded and highly motivated people set out to change the world – and did just that.
A flurry of antislavery books, posters, pamphlets and prints were accompanied by huge public meetings
The campaign created techniques which human rights campaigners use to this day – usually beginning with the creation of a society or committee with a declared objective. The abolitionists may not have had the internet or social media, but it was no coincidence that their 1787 meeting was held in the printing shop where the Quakers published their tracts.
A flurry of antislavery books, posters, pamphlets and prints were accompanied by huge public meetings across the towns and cities of England. There were petitions and boycotts of plantation sugar. Clarkson’s 1788 “Essay on the impolicy of the African slave trade” was followed by meetings at which he displayed the manacles and chains used to immobilize human cargo.
There were medallions and hair braids worn by thousands. They bore the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” – a phrase that provided the answer to the central question over which the group had puzzled at 2 George Yard: what does it mean to be human?
Today, we would call it the campaign’s slogan. The items on which they were engraved became fashionable, much like contemporary wristbands and T-shirts that everyone wants to wear.
Public pressure began to manifest itself in Parliament and barely a year passed without yet another bill being introduced (and initially defeated, year after year) as an unanswerable case was gradually mounted.
I have personally stood at Zomai, in Benin, where, 200 years earlier, from among the captured slaves, sick, disabled or elderly people were picked out and thrown into a common grave.
Some were buried alive. Those who became ill en route were thrown overboard from ships, like the infamous Zong.
There, I was moved to stand at the Door of No Return with a small group of Black Americans who sang Amazing Grace, the hymn which the former Liverpool sea captain and slave trader John Newton had composed.
At parliamentary hearings organized by Wilberforce, Newton described the graphic details of the murders on the Zong. The case for reform and change became unassailable.
But despite all this, the human rights argument – that each person had God-given rights because they were made in His image – continued to be contested and to meet fierce resistance from deep-pocketed vested interests.
Campaigners today puzzle over why there is such opposition to taking a stand against China’s use of Uighur slave labor in Xinjiang. They need look no further than the bottom line of cheap goods and big profits.
That was also what the George Yard abolitionists encountered.
Vested interests
Between 1701 and 1810 almost 6 million people were taken into slavery – with one in every four ships leaving Liverpool alone a slaver. The profits this generated were astonishing. In 1807 in Liverpool, the slave trade accumulated a staggering 17 million pounds sterling. The vested interests pitted themselves against reform.
While calling out and exposing these practices, along with the profiteering that accompanied it, Clarkson and an escaped slave, Olaudah Equiano, faced threats to their lives. They made powerful speeches up and down the land, exhibiting manacles and chains used to degrade and torture other human beings.
To his eternal credit, the Liverpool MP, William Roscoe – poet, philanthropist and man of letters – joined the campaign against the trade, penning an epic poem “The Wrongs of Africa.” Having voted with Wilberforce in the House of Commons, he was physically attacked by the traders on his return home.
But this first human rights campaign was successfully changing the attitudes of the populace and, through clever legislative measures, was effectively undermining the profitability of the trade.
The end of the 18th century was also a moment of religious revivalism. The political message was reinforced by the ethical and moral arguments proclaimed in the new wave of chapels founded by the great preacher, John Wesley, who denounced slavery as “a scandal of England, of religion, of human nature.”
The first human rights campaign was not the achievement of just one man, but a remarkable civic alliance
The expedient default position of the trade’s supporters was the familiar argument that “if we don’t do it, someone else will.” It is still used to justify everything from the sale of arms and weapons to dictators to the purchase of goods made by slave labor. But it, too, became contested by more enlightened leaders of commerce and business who did not want blood on their hands.
Tellingly, the great 19th-century pioneer of free trade, Richard Cobden, denounced both slavery and the opium trade (which brought ruination to China and phenomenal profits to the British East India Company), as evils that could not be justified in the name of trade or commerce.
It took these many voices to bring change.
This first human rights campaign was not the achievement of just one man, but the coming together of a remarkable civic alliance combining secular and religious, parliamentarians and popular organizers, publicists, lawyers, academics and firsthand witnesses – including escaped slaves and traders like John Newton.
The little group who had met in 2 George Yard in 1787 may not have anticipated it but, undoubtedly, the pebble they threw into the pond rippled across the world and has rippled across the centuries since.
Modern parallels
Some of the unhealed scars of that odious trade in human beings are still there to see in cities like Minneapolis where George Floyd, an African American man, was murdered by police in May 2020. Following the conviction of Derek Chauvin for murder, charges have now been brought against four ex-police officers for violating George Floyd’s civil rights. The Black Lives Matter campaign has convulsed America.
In the United Kingdom, protestors took to the streets of Bristol and pulled down an 18-foot-tall statue of the 17th-century slave trader, Edward Colston, and threw it into the harbor. Before doing so, one protestor pressed his knee against the statue’s neck, replicating the chokehold used by Mr. Chauvin during the murder of George Floyd.
Colston is estimated to have been responsible for the transportation of over 84,000 Africans – and many of Bristol’s institutions were built on the proceeds and named after their benefactor.
Even universities, which have a duty to carefully seek truth, can foolishly become susceptible to cancel culture
But pulling down statues, renaming buildings, and what has been dubbed as “cancel culture” can easily become tokenistic and distort history while distracting from the painstaking and urgent need to defend 21st century human rights.
Even universities, which have a duty to carefully seek truth, can foolishly become susceptible to cancel culture
Liverpool University’s crass decision to remove the name of William Ewart Gladstone (son of the city and Prime Minister four times) from one of its buildings is just one example.
While it is true that Gladstone’s father had been involved in the slave trade, his son came to denounce it as “the foulest crime” and described abolition as one of the greatest achievements of the period. He was also an ardent opponent of the opium trade and the champion of human rights of the Armenians, as well as the peoples of Ireland and the Balkans.
The tokenistic and absurd removal of Gladstone’s name from a building will bring little comfort to the more than 40 million people whom the International Labour Organization estimates are in some form of contemporary slavery. Nor will it help those caught up in human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage and bonded labor, descent-based slavery, enslavement of children and young girls through forced early marriage.
The beleaguered, enslaved Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang won’t be cheering either.
Liverpool University has a partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and relies on Chinese students for 29 percent of its tuition fees, generating an estimated 89 million pounds in income from Chinese students (now 19 percent of its students) last year alone.
While finding time to wrongly traduce the reputation of a 19th-century statesman, perhaps that helps explain its silence about contemporary slavery in China?
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Renewing the fight for human rights and the spirit of 2 George Yard (Part 2)
Modern-day slavery goes unpunished due to vested interests
Many find it more convenient to ignore the genocide in Xinjiang
Societies must understand the consequences of this inaction
This report is the second in a two-part series on human rights from GIS Expert Lord David Alton. The first part, above, looked at the beginnings of contemporary human rights activism.
Large sums of money have always been a pretty big inducement when it comes to buying collaboration, compliance or silence.
This was the determining factor in bolstering the position of the slave traders. It was also the case with many of the beneficiaries of Nazi slave labor such as IBM and Volkswagen, which even built a camp next to one of its factories to ensure a supply of workers. This form of extermination through labor is comparable to what is happening to the Uighurs and others. Think of Hugo Boss, Kodak and Siemens.
Siemens ran factories inside concentration camps, including at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen. Boss supplied the uniforms for the Hitler Youth and Waffen-SS. Today it profits from the cotton produced by laborers subjected to genocide in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Political will
In 1948, it was out of the ashes of Hitler’s concentration camps that two of the most important human rights declarations emerged: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The same spirit that motivated the friends who had gathered in 1787 in 2 George Yard was at work in 1948.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who saw more than 40 of his relatives murdered by the Nazis, coined the word genocide and developed the convention. His determination to combat this ultimate violation of human rights had actually been spurred decades earlier, by the death of 1.3 million Armenians and the murders of Assyrians and others at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. He knew that Hitler’s belief that he could kill with impunity (the German leader allegedly referred to the Armenian genocide as his evidence) had paved the way for the Holocaust.
We need to recognize that human rights are under increasing attack
Simultaneously, the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt (appointed to the fledgling General Assembly of the United Nations by President Harry Truman) chaired the drafting committee of the UDHR and used her considerable skills to produce a document which enabled a weary and humbled, yet hopeful, international community to collectively express its belief in human rights.
In its 30 articles, the UDHR and accompanying documents identify five categories of human rights: economic, social, cultural, civil and political – ideas rooted in basic rights and freedoms which are the birthright of all human beings.
From the right to life to a prohibition on slavery, these provisions include the principle of equality before the law, the outlawing of torture and enslavement, the right to information and expressing opinions and the right of every citizen to believe, not to believe, or to change belief.
Taking stock of where the world is today, we need to renew the spirit of Roosevelt, Lemkin and the George Yard abolitionists and recognize that human rights are under increasing attack, along with the international order represented by the 1948 edicts.
While we have been pulling down statues or renaming buildings, malign forces are tearing down the architecture so painstakingly created by our forebears.
Subversive states
We may not be in a new Cold War; “Cold War lite,” some call it. But we are in a contested world order – increasingly divided into authoritarian states who abuse human rights (China, Russia, North Korea, Turkey and Venezuela being some of the most obvious) and liberal democracies who uphold the rule of law, democracy and human rights.
The subversion of multilateral institutions has been accelerated by China’s use of debt bondage through its Belt and Road Initiative. The gigantic project now encompasses 71 countries and $760 billion is earmarked for its completion.
As Jonathan Hillman, director of the Reconnecting Asia project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says, the Belt and Road Initiative is “a vehicle for China to write new rules, establish institutions that reflect Chinese interests and reshape ‘soft’ infrastructure.”
Countries such as Pakistan now owe more than half of their foreign debt to China. There are increasing signs that debt trap diplomacy is being exploited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to extract strategic concessions, including support for its claims on disputed territory and silence over violations of human rights.
As it increases its use of economic muscle and leverage, Beijing exports this authoritarian ideology along its silk road, running down any pedestrian who dares stand in its way. It brings to mind the unidentified protestor, known as Tank Man, who in 1989 courageously stood in front of CCP tanks that were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of pro-democracy supporters.
It is nothing short of bizarre to now see China – along with Russia, Pakistan and Cuba – as members of the UN Human Rights Council. Their determination to reshape the language of human rights has become ever more apparent.
Russia and China can always be relied upon to use their veto power in the UN Security Council to prevent referrals of genocide or atrocities to the International Criminal Court (ICC, established in 1998 with the intention of giving teeth to the Convention on the Crime of Genocide) for investigation. This veto is the reason why the UN’s own report on North Korea (“a state without parallel … crimes against humanity … reminiscent of the Reich”) has never been referred to the ICC.
It is why attempts to refer to atrocities in Africa’s Tigray – so reminiscent of Darfur and Rwanda – have been thwarted. It is why Turkey can get away with the deployment of white phosphorus on Kurdish civilian populations in Syria and aiding and abetting Azerbaijan in its military actions against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. And the list goes on.
But, above all, it enables the CCP to ride roughshod over an international treaty guaranteeing “two systems one country” in Hong Kong; to use kangaroo courts and show trials to arrest and imprison lawyers and legislators; to threaten and intimidate the people of Taiwan; and to lock up its own citizens when they dare to question or criticize Beijing.
And, of course, it has allowed the CCP to degrade the indigenous people of Xinjiang. Around one million Uighur Muslims have been incarcerated and forced to work for free in camps. Academics describe it as the world’s worst incident of state-sanctioned slavery.
The President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews stated in a letter to the Chinese Ambassador: “The world will neither forgive nor forget a genocide against the Uighur people,” noting “the similarities between what is alleged to be happening in the People’s Republic of China today and what happened in Nazi Germany 75 years ago.”
Having seen a video of shackled and blindfolded Uighur Muslims being led from trains to camps, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab (whose Jewish family survived the Holocaust) has said this is “reminiscent of something not seen for a long time,” while Professor Adrian Zenz, a German scholar, describes it as “the largest detention of an ethnoreligious minority since World War II” and Dr. Joanne Smith Finley, a Newcastle University academic, says it is “a slow, painful, creeping genocide.”
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has described the region as “a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a no rights zone.”
Escapees have provided harrowing accounts of degrading treatment – including public rape and forced renunciation of their Muslim religious beliefs.
A report by Human Rights Watch details the CCP’s “mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment” of Xinjiang Muslims and says the CCP is collecting biometric data for mass surveillance. One million Uighurs have been incarcerated without trial in a network of sinister reeducation camps.
Some reports suggest that Uighurs have been subject to forced organ harvesting
The UK government says it has intelligence that “families are obliged to host Chinese officials in their homes for extended periods, to demonstrate their loyalty to the Communist party. On the streets, Uighurs and other minorities are continuously watched by police, supported by extensive use of facial recognition technology and restrictions on movement.”
Huawei – effectively an arm of the Chinese state – is making huge profits from Xinjiang’s unique techno-totalitarianism.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said, as reported in a leaked document, that his officials should “show no mercy” to anyone who disobeys the edicts in Xinjiang. A CCP official said on television that their intention is to “[b]reak their lineage … break their connections and break their origins.”
Some reports also suggest that Uighurs may have been subject to forced organ harvesting. The eminent international lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, chaired an independent tribunal into forced organ harvesting in China and another one, which will conclude in September, examining Uighur persecution. In June, UN experts expressed concern that Uighurs and other minorities were being targeted for organ harvesting in China.
The final report of the tribunal led by Sir Geoffrey Nice had come to the same conclusion: “Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale. … Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply. … Crimes against humanity against the Falun Gong and … Uyghur … [have] … been proved beyond reasonable doubt.”
Just days after 22 nations sent a letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights protesting China’s massive detention and “re-education” program in Xinjiang, 37 other countries submitted a letter defending China’s policies.
Paying the price
Battle lines are increasingly being drawn around fundamental human rights and the institutions created to defend them. For example, the European Union recently made the welcome decision not to ratify a gigantic investment deal with the CCP following sanctions imposed on members of the European Parliament for daring to speak out about the treatment of the Uighurs.
In the U.S., the outgoing Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration, reflecting a rare bipartisan unity, have both declared the oppression of the Uighurs to be a genocide. So have the Canadian House of Commons, the Dutch Parliament, the UK House of Commons and others.
The CCP has responded with sanctions against parliamentarians (including this writer), Professor Zenz, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and Dr. Joanne Smith Finley, and economic sanctions against Australia for daring to call for an independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19. Meanwhile, New Zealand has said its trade with China matters more than supporting an international alliance defending human rights and naming genocide as the gravest crime imaginable.
The friends who met in 2 George Yard in 1787 would not have remained silent
Recently we commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. As a young boy, Judge Thomas Buergenthal was incarcerated there and survived. He throws down this challenge to each of us:
“The human mind is simply not able to grasp this terrible truth: a nation transformed into a killing machine programmed to destroy millions of innocent human beings for no reason other than that they were different. … If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past? … One cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.”
In attempting to break that cycle, Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s Chief Rabbi, wrote about his encounter with a Uighur woman who had escaped from Xinjiang: “An unfathomable mass atrocity is being perpetrated in China. The responsibility for doing something lies with all of us. … I can no longer remain silent about the plight of the Uighurs.”
The friends who met in 2 George Yard in 1787 would not have remained silent either, nor would the originators of the UDHR or the Convention on the Crime of Genocide.
The question is whether we are willing to accept the economic readjustment that will result from being vocal or whether we are willing to see the rule of law and human rights – along with the institutions, values and ideas they represent – simply wither on the vine.
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