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Law Professor Ruti Teitel Discusses Whether Countries Should Punish Ousted Leaders
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(CNN) - How emerging democratic nations deal with their authoritarian pasts and how they cope with political change is the subject of Professor Ruti Teitel's book, "Transitional Justice." The book discusses international human rights and such issues as whether or not struggling democracies should punish their ousted dictators or previous authoritarian regimes. Present day examples include Bosnia and Rwanda.
Dr. Ruti Teitel teaches comparative, international human rights and constitutional law at New York Law School. She has written extensively on these topics and is a Senior Fellow at Yale Law School's Center for International Human Rights.
Chat Moderator: Thank you for joining us today, Professor Ruti Teitel, and welcome.
Ruti Teitel: It's a real pleasure to be here.
Chat Moderator: What are some of the most immediate issues that emerging democracies face?
Ruti Teitel: Well, emerging democracies really run the gamut from some that are really economically far along and are focusing on human rights issues to others that are dealing with a wide host of political and economic transformation issues. So the post-Communist societies are an example of that kind of variety.
Question from Sponge: Should the United States feel obligated to promote human rights outside our border? Why?
Ruti Teitel: That's an interesting question. The United States doesn't appear to pose that question any more but accepts it as a given. For years, the U.S. has been at the forefront of the human rights movement. This dates back to the post-World War II period, to the U.S.'s championing of the Nuremberg trials and the establishment of the United Nations.
The U.S. has always been the leader of the movement, but we still have a lot of ambivalence about how much support we give to any one human rights policy.
Question from Angolmois: Do you think the issue of national sovereignty is more important than the question of human rights? Why or why not?
Ruti Teitel: That's a really hard question! I don't think we need to pit national sovereignty against human rights. That's a false dichotomy. Since the post-World War II period, human rights is something that extends beyond the borders of nation-states.
The biggest beneficiaries of late have been citizens -- people who find themselves persecuted, often by their own government. But, historically, other nations always took an interest in, for instance, aliens -- people who found themselves at the mercy of other governments while they were traveling -- or in those persecuted for religious reasons. So there's a long history of providing protection extra-territorially, beyond state borders.
Going back to sovereignty, the biggest guarantee of human rights remains a working nation-state. This is what's lacking in periods of transition.
Question from DSW: Professor Ruti Teitel, what do you have to say about who is to blame for any country's problems: the United States and other civilized/developed countries or the people of that particularly troubled country who can't get their act together and stop their own self-destructive behavior?
Ruti Teitel: I think that it's very hard to evaluate blame unless you take history into account. If you look at the contemporary scene, you have to consider colonization and many of the recent transitions and political and economic problems. For example, in Africa, really relate long periods of colonization and occupation by a foreign country.
Beyond that, because we're living in a more globalized economy, no matter who is historically responsible, the whole world feels the impact of suffering elsewhere at this point. So, it's too late in the day to simply isolate responsibility to one country or another.
Question from If: The arguments made seem to indicate the need for an international independent body for redress. Is this possible?
Ruti Teitel: Actually, we're now at the point where there appears to be sufficient political consensus on having an international criminal tribunal, which would be a standing international court that would investigate and indict those responsible for atrocities. This court may well include redress for victims, although it's my preference to have a separate institution to focus on reparations.
This highlights the question of responsibility. There's no reason we couldn't pay a reparations tax, for example, for victims in South Africa, since we also benefited from apartheid policies through the many corporations that cooperated with South African businesses at that time.
Question from Sponge: What human rights issues should we be most concerned about? What rights does every human being deserve?
Ruti Teitel: I think at this point there is substantial consensus on which norms are the most serious violations of human rights. These are called "jus cogens." These are considered offenses everywhere in the world -- universal offenses. They include things like torture and slavery.
However, I think that the focus for folks here should be human rights violations in this country. I would put at the top of that list our continuation of capital punishment, which, as it's administered today in the United States, violates numerous international human rights conventions, namely against racial discrimination. We execute juveniles and we execute the mentally retarded.
This issue is pending right now in Texas, where Governor Bush needs to decide whether or not to grant clemency in the case of a mentally retarded person. People should write to him and let him know what they think.
Bottom line, we are totally out of sync with the great majority of industrialized nations with the question of capital punishment. All of Europe has given it up, and most of Latin America. So I think it should be a front-burner issue for the moment, and certainly the radio campaign has become an issue in this election.
Question from Angolmois: Do you subscribe to the theory that economic trade increases democracy and human rights in a country? Why would it work for China but not Cuba?
Ruti Teitel: Yes, it does help. It will be likely to work in China. It was a terrible trade-off that was made in Congress regarding China.
But I think that we should have long ago reestablished economic trade with Cuba. As a historic matter, it was an economic issue. We drove Cuba into the Russian camp because they needed a market. It's long overdue to undo that mistake.
Question from BO: Ruti Teitel, if the U.S. is at the forefront in human rights, then why do some international organizations say that the truth is the opposite within the U.S.?
Ruti Teitel: This again dates back to historical anomaly, which is that we separate political rights from economic rights. I don't think the opposite is true in the U.S. We have an open, vital political culture. We have substantial political and religious freedoms.
What we lack in the rights area -- the most alarming gap -- is in the area of social and economic rights, where there are huge disparities between rich and poor, and few economic guarantees of minimal rights. This is an area where we differ with the social democracies in Europe.
Question from TRL: Why don't we focus more on what's happening across our borders in Mexico?
Ruti Teitel: We should focus on Mexico, and Latin America in general. The U.S. tends to look only to whether there are free elections and then ignores the democracy in transition once the election has been held. In Central America and the rest of Latin America, these democracies need our political and economic support, even after the election.
Mexico is an example, after a wonderful political turn, where we need to make sure we support the current political direction there.
Chat Moderator: Do you have any final thoughts or observations for us today?
Ruti Teitel: To sum it up in such a large area would be difficult. Where I'd want to leave the question is that the biggest contribution to human rights so far has been the discourse of it, the language of human rights. It continues to happen, but we know about it because of journalism and the media, organizations like CNN.
We can't say that we don't know what's going on overseas, globally. That information and the fact that we can't say we don't know, it's changed the language and the discourse, the burden of proof and the direction of the conversation.
Thank you for participating in this, and thanks to CNN for encouraging this kind of exchange.
Chat Moderator: Thank you for joining us today, Professor Teitel.
Ruti Teitel: Thank you for having me!
Professor Ruti Teitel joined the Law Chat via telephone from New York, New York. CNN.com provided a typist for her. The above is an edited transcript of that chat.