The Program on Human Rights concluded its ninth and final installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Speakers Series on March 13 with presentations with Dr. Mohammed Mattar, executive director of the Protection Project and professor at Johns Hopkins University and Professor Alison Brysk, chair of Global Governance, Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Dr. Mattar noted that while effective anti-trafficking laws depend on law enforcement and survivor protection, the key intellectual and ethical rationale of such laws is the concept of the exploitation of vulnerable people in vulnerable circumstances. Dr. Mattar explained the legal distinction between “human trafficking” and “slavery,” emphasizing that the latter is based on twin ideas of human beings as commodities to be bought and sold, as well as the exercise of ownership of one person over another. “There is no doubt that human trafficking is a degrading and severe violation of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, but it is unnecessary to label human trafficking as slavery because to do so we would need to identify the exercise of powers attached to the right of ownership,” Mattar said.

Among the challenges for a more effective anti-trafficking effort, Dr. Mattar listed the need to hold corporations responsible for their acts, to provide access to justice that allows for victim compensation, the engagement of civil society, and criminal enforcement and accountability under existing national and international law.

Professor Brysk explained that globalization has produced pernicious side effects.  The acceleration of migration, especially of women, increases the incidence of gender violence and the commodification of “disposable people.” All these factors enable the increase of human trafficking. Brysk observed that international recognition of trafficking as a form of contemporary slavery has been helpful in influencing policy change. “There is a slavery spectrum,” Brysk said. “We need to work to guarantee physical integrity of people, migration rights and children’s rights.”

She also noted that the focus on sex slavery has high costs because it is based on “protection and not empowerment,” and “rescue over rights.” The individualistic emphasis and sexual focus of anti-trafficking efforts fails to recognize many forms of exploitative globalized labor. Women and children are put in dangerous and debilitating non-sexual jobs. There are also many forms of sexual and gender violence in other forms of exploitative globalized labor, such as in sweatshops.

Together, the speakers in the final session of the Program on Human Rights speaker series made a strong plea for more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of human trafficking in the 21^st century. Sustained research that accounts for contemporary conditions, they told the Stanford audience, is needed to give policy makers and legislators the information and tools they need to combat the alarming global acceleration of human trafficking.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), an independent advisory committee tasked with providing guidance on the biosecurity oversight of dual use research, announced on March 30 that it would recommend the publication of controversial research on the H5N1 avian flu. The issue ignited a debate in the scientific community on publishing research that could threaten public health. The committee sent its recommendations to the federal government for review. 

On March 12, Professor Paul Keim, chairman of the NSABB, and Dr. David Relman, a NSABB board member and CISAC affiliated faculty and professor of infectious diseases and microbiology and immunology at Stanford, discussed the debate over whether to make public scientific papers about the adaptation of the avian flu virus H5N1 to transmission in a mammal. The NSABB had not announced its decision to publish the research at the time of the presentation.

Audio from the March 12 seminar is available online. 

North Korea’s government announced it will launch a long-range rocket to orbit a satellite within a few days of the 100th anniversary of founder Kim Il Sung’s birthday on Apr. 15.

The statement comes on the heels of an important U.S.-North Korea agreement on Feb. 29, in which the United States promised to provide North Korea with 240,000 tons of food aid over the next year while North Korea would refrain from nuclear and long-range missile tests and allow international inspection of its declared nuclear facilities. The situation echoes that of 2009, when North Korea also gave advance notice of a "peaceful" long-range rocket launch. North Korea’s 2009 missile test prompted a United Nations condemnation, after which North Korea conducted its second test of a nuclear device.

David Straub, associate director of Stanford’s Korean Studies Program and a former State Department Korea expert, speaks about North Korea’s latest statement.

Why is the new North Korea announcement of possible concern?

This type of launch is something the U.N. Security Council earlier condemned and forbade North Korea to do again. There is a large overlap in the technologies used for such a rocket and for a long-range ballistic missile, and the international community is deeply suspicious that North Korea will use what it learns from such launches to develop long-range missile technology.

The larger concern is that North Korea intends eventually to pair long-range missiles with nuclear warheads, creating a much greater threat to other countries, including the United States.

Was there any indication North Korea would issue this statement?

Given North Korea’s history of reneging on deals, the Obama administration wisely noted at the time of the Feb. 29 announcement that it was a "limited" agreement. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that North Korea’s upholding of its side of the agreement would be the key to the deal’s overall success.

There is no doubt the U.S. government would not have announced this agreement if it had anticipated that North Korea would almost immediately have declared its intention to launch another long-range rocket.

Why would North Korea decide to announce a rocket launch?

At this point, we can only speculate about North Korea’s motivations for the announcement. It could be related to the recent leadership succession in North Korea. Kim Jong Un, the grandson of Kim Il Sung, is an inexperienced leader still in his 20s. He and his advisors may feel it is necessary to defy the United States so blatantly to demonstrate at home how strong a leader he is. 

Or perhaps, after testing two nuclear devices and several long-range missiles, the North Korean government has become more confident about its diplomatic ability to withstand international condemnations and sanctions.

In any event, it is a stunning slap in the face of the Obama administration, which will need to react firmly. Already, less than 24 hours after the North Korean announcement, the Department of State has publicly said that the entire Feb. 29 agreement, including the delivery of food aid, has been put on hold.  

What should we expect to happen next?

A real danger is that the events of 2009 will be repeated. The North Korean government reacted angrily to the U.N. Security Council’s presidential statement against it three years ago, and withdrew from the Six-Party Talks. Pyongyang then proceeded to conduct a nuclear test only a month later.

The most worrisome aspect is the possibility that the new leadership in North Korea feels insecure at home and thus obliged to act tough, and also has poor judgment about the United States and the international community as a whole. If so, the North Korea issue could become significantly more confrontational—and dangerous—in the coming months.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

U.S. Department of State: North Korean announcement of missile launch

Reuters: North Korea’s missile and "satellite" programs

A Wake-up Call for America: We Must Connect with the World

Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, currently the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, uses an anecdote in his new book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, to illustrate his concern that Americans have become too insular as a result of the 2001 terrorist attacks. While teaching at Marquette University Law School during the Arab Spring of last year, an undergraduate penned a column lamenting that so many students not only could not find Tunisia on the map – they could spell Kardashian before Kazakhstan.

Feingold writes that he admired this student for his confession about his lack of knowledge on global affairs, then quotes the final thought of the young columnist: “We are connected to the rest of the world in ways few of us can fully fathom, from the shoes we wear and coffee we drink to the cell phones we carry and the tweets we post.”

In a recent interview, CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Feingold discuss steps to be taken to ensure that all Americans – young and old, inside the Washington beltway and out on the farm in Wisconsin – take a patriotic stand by engaging with the world to restore our national unity and regain global respect.    

Senator Feingold, what prompted you to write this book now?

Feingold: For me, as for many Americans, 9/11 was a life-changing event, the wake-up call in which we all understood that we no longer could be safe just assuming the world would take care of itself. We got misdirected with things like Iraq and we developed this sort of invade-one-country-at-a-time approach. There was also exploitation of the fears from 9/11 for domestic agendas, from the Patriot Act to the way that Muslims and Arabs are treated in this country. And then, finally, with the rise of the tea party, I feel like we went back to sleep. But there are signals all over the place, of the continued presence of al-Qaida and the continued potency of al-Qaida, not to mention so many other trends from the Chinese influence in Africa to the Iranian influence in Latin America. We aren’t connecting as a government or as a people in a way that I think is commensurate with our place in the 21^st century. I’m trying to issue a warning that we’re going to get fooled or surprised again if we think we can just go back to being just sort of safely over here across the oceans. That’s just not the world anymore.

So how do you wake up Americans and make them realize we cannot, as you say, survive as a nation without being active and aware of global events and trends? 

Feingold: It’s at all levels. I happen to think we have a good president and I think he’s going to be a great president by the end of his second term. And I think he’s started the process of alerting Americans to the need to connect to all places in the world; he’s leading us toward a global vision of the kind that I think we have to have to be safe and to be competitively successful and to be well perceived by the rest of the world. The president and other leaders should call on each of us to try and become citizen diplomats. Three hundred million people should be urged as part of their patriotic duty not just to go to the moon as we once were, but go to the rest of the world. This isn’t Pollyanna; this is about being safe. I don’t think this country is geared up to make that connection and I think it’s a fatal flaw. The Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians, they’re all over the world and they have a plan for what they’re doing. We don’t.

What do you see as the most pressing global security issues today?

Cuéllar:  The United States is confronting a changing world, where countries like India, Brazil, and China are evolving and assuming greater importance. Engaging these countries to address problems like nuclear proliferation will be critical in the years ahead.  The world also faces a persistent problem involving failed or failing states. In places like Somalia, piracy is not only a regional problem in the Gulf of Aden.  The problem is an example of how threats can affect multiple countries and impact flows of commodities, disrupting the rule of law, highlighting the challenges of governing common resources such as international sea lanes. Another challenge is the enormous potential of technology to change people’s lives for the better, coupled with risks that arise which we are only in a very imperfect and incomplete way managing; risks of vulnerabilities in our infrastructure; risks of theft of intellectual property, risks of disruption of organizations.

Feingold: I like this answer because Prof. Cuéllar did not just say, “Well, it’s Russia and Iran and Colombia.” There’s this tendency to just speak of countries. We’re just trained to say, “OK what’s the hot spot and let’s just worry about that.” Like right now it’s Iran; a few months ago it was Yemen. In my book what I’m trying to point out is that you have to look at trends and overall tendencies around the world and somehow we have to have the capacity to deal with more than one thing at a time.

Senator Feingold, you called the Bush Administration’s terrorist surveillance program – the wiretapping and surveillance of emails and financial records without court approval – one of the worst assaults on the Constitution in American history. How does the government protect our constitutional rights to privacy and probable cause while monitoring criminal and terrorist networks in a digital age?

Feingold: The assault on the Constitutional by the administration was not about whether we could do those things, its whether or not the president would basically make up his own laws just because we’re in a crisis. That to me is completely unconstitutional. We understand that a president might have to take emergency action and he may have to come to Congress and say, you know I did this, it may be beyond the law, would you please pass a law to approve it, or I’ll stop doing it. That’s not what Bush did. Bush hid it. Bush hid what he was doing on torture; Bush hid what he was doing on wiretapping. That’s a very dangerous thing that completely saps our strength from within and is completely unnecessary to stop the terrorists.

Cuéllar: The challenge of living up to our constitutional values while we secure the country is always critical. It requires organizations that can learn from their mistakes to be honest with each other enough and recognize when they have overstepped their bounds, that make good use of entities like inspectors-general, that leverage the ability of Congress to do oversight. These are all elements of making our constitutional values relevant. So me the challenge has always been how to you leverage all the information technology and all our ability to make smart, thoughtful, careful decisions – including decisions that do permit appropriate degrees of surveillance and intelligence – in order to avoid superficial reactions against individuals who simply appear threatening.

What key steps should the U.S. government take to improve its counter-terrorism efforts both at home and abroad?

Feingold: The first thing is to recognize the nature of the threat. One of the chapters in the book is called A Game of Risk, where we seem to think the way to counter terrorism is to invade a country and stay there forever and say we have to stay there or the terrorist are going to come back. But this isn’t the nature of al-Qaida or similar organizations. President Bush used to say there were 60 countries where al-Qaida was operating and, of course, one thing that was embarrassing about it was that Iraq wasn’t one of them. But we’re still in this place today. Al-Shabab in Somalia; al-Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb in northern Africa; a group called Boko Haram in Nigeria, which looks very much like an al-Qaida group, has pulled off some 70 attacks in the last year. So this is an international organization that communicates with each other and they’re not done just because Osama bin Laden is gone. So let’s not get caught unawares again.

Senator Feingold, what was your most memorable, defining challenge in Congress and how did that change the way you see yourself and the world around you?

It had to do with recognizing when 9/11 occurred that there really was a group of people out there who would love to kill all of us and, despite the fact that I’m progressive and I voted against most military interventions, just saying to myself: look, there are times when threats are real. And it caused me to actually seek to be on the Intelligence Committee which is something I never wanted to do; I was not sure of the importance of intelligence in the post Cold War era and it was a real change for me. I remember having an emotional response, saying, “You know what? This is real; what these folks did was real and they have intimidated an entire country if not the world.” I wanted to know everything I could about how they came to be and what they were planning next, and to be a person who could try to think ahead for other kinds of threats so we as Americans can get ahead of threats instead of being the people who are reacting.