How do we actually think about human rights in the Netherlands? This seems like a silly question, because human rights have just as obviously a good image as peace and puppies. Yet our relationship with it is not always clear.
Last Tuesday, Mark Rutte tweeted that he had talked to Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang about “the war in Ukraine, stability in the Indo-Pacific, economic and climate cooperation, and human rights.” Three days later, the coalition announced that asylum seekers are only allowed to bring their family members over after 15 months. Asylum expert Mark Klaassen mentioned this in de Volkskrant ‘deliberately training’ and thus ‘contrary to the directive’ which gives the right to family reunification.
What distinguishes one type of human rights from another? What makes that Mark Rutte can address the Chinese Prime Minister about China’s handling of human rights (at least I assume that the relations were that way and not the other way around) and that he suspends human rights in his own country the same week?
Also read this article: ‘Cabinet knows that suspending family reunification is not possible, it only wants to train’
As early as 1949, a year after the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the philosopher Hannah Arendt expressed this paradox in an essay: human rights are universal, but it is sovereign states that must protect those rights. If those states are not interested in the so-called ‘inalienable’ human rights of non-citizens (such as refugees), then those rights are of little value. Without a ‘right to have rights’, in other words to belong to a political community, you are left empty-handed as a human being.
In the VVD election manifesto Arendt’s paradox is clearly visible. The party stresses the importance of states respecting the human rights of their citizens. For example, an EU membership for Turkey is “not realistic” because of “the deterioration of, among other things, human rights and democracy” in the country. But in the passage about asylum, the word human rights does not appear. It does state that it must be possible to terminate or amend the Refugee Convention ‘if necessary’. The VVD apparently wants to get rid of the right to have rights, at least in the Netherlands.
You don’t just see this development here. Turkish-American jurist and philosopher Seyla Benhabib noted two years ago that more and more liberal democracies no longer take human rights so seriously: they put refugees in detention centers and outsource the stopping of migrants to countries such as Libya and Turkey. The era that started with the Refugee Convention in 1951 may be coming to an end, she wrote: we are moving towards a ‘new sovereigntism‘, with more room for maneuver for the nation-state. Benhabib knows this due to a combination of growing migration flows and the insecurity of citizens in rapidly changing societies.
Is this indeed the end of an era? Is it utopian to expect solidarity from people with distant strangers who want to use the same scarce resources? It’s a rather fundamental question: philosophically interesting and also burning topical. But is there a real discussion about this in the Netherlands? Of course not. The debate about the current asylum conditions does not get any further than squabbles about who has the facts straight. Do 10 percent come from safe countries, as Joost Eerdmans said, or 3? Are the asylum seekers’ centers all on the periphery or is that not too bad? Did migrants build this country, as Jesse Klaver claimed? Are the government plans legally feasible?
These kinds of facts are important, but without a normative framework in which to place them, they are of no use. There is no mention of that framework. Who knows, maybe they will have discussions in the depths of political parties about the relationship between the nation state and universal human rights – at the scientific bureaus, or at the party conference drinks table. But in the House of Representatives and on the talk show tables, it remains in the dark.
It’s an insult to everyone involved. Of course for the refugees, but also for the citizens who fear that the welfare state has no place for many extra people. And, of course, for the citizens who want to find an answer to the question: do we still think human rights are important at all?
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 3, 2022