While they’re often more protective of established power than they should be, as noted here previously, Human Rights Watch are to be applauded for their brave, timely and outspoken 2008 World Report, emphasising the West’s indulgence of dictators and autocrats under the cloak of “democracy promotion”. It’s an eerily familiar story, but it hasn’t lost any of its currency. As the BBC reports it:

West ‘embraces sham democracies’

The US, EU and other democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections out of political expediency, Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.

Allowing autocrats to pose as democrats without demanding they uphold civil and political rights risked undermining human rights worldwide, it warned. …

‘Playing along’

In the report, HRW said established democracies such as the US and members of the European Union were increasingly tolerating autocrats “claiming the mantle of democracy”.

“In 2007 too many governments, including Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand, acted as if simply holding a vote is enough to prove a nation ‘democratic’, and Washington, Brussels and European capitals played along,” it said. …

HRW said the West was often unwilling to criticise the autocrats for fear of losing access to resources or commercial opportunities, or because of the perceived requirements of fighting terrorism.

“It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the ‘victor’ is a strategic or commercial ally,” Mr Roth said.

HRW director Kenneth Roth’s accompanying essay on the subject, “Despots Masquerading as Democrats” does nonetheless contain some shortfalls. It includes Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez under the section on “Silencing the Media” – a categorisation which is more than a little dubious. The Chávez government’s refusal to renew the license of RCTV – a station whose coverage uncontroversially aided the coup attempt against the Venezuelan government in 2002 (even receiving explicit thanks from the coup’s leaders) – may not have been entirely justified, but it hardly amounts to a “silencing” of the media: the channel is still available to view on satellite and cable TV in Venezuela. As Peter Wilby astutely points out, we would do well to consider how a case closer to home might fare in the same circumstances:

“As the Venezuela Information Centre points out, the Broadcasting Code in Britain forbids material likely “to lead to disorder” and it is hard to imagine that if, say, Channel Five had done something similar, a British government would have waited five years to get it off air.”

To this day, Venezuela’s major media continue to be perhaps the most oppositional in the whole of Latin America. And, as Roth has acknowledged, all in all the country is basically democratic.

Also according to Roth, “[d]emocracy is a metric by which the United States still measures up fairly well”. This is also thoroughly debatable. The issue of healthcare – which most Americans want to see made available to all through government funding – is a case in point; but there is a striking divergence of public opinion and elite policy in the United States on issue after issue – have a look at the relevant page from the Project on International Policy Attitudes, for instance. Whether “counter-terrorism” is as much a priority for the West as Roth makes out is also more than a little dubious – given that our governments have been consciously pursuing a policy that enhances the threat of terror. The following fact about the invasion of Iraq should hopefully be well-known by now, but just in case it isn’t:

“The Joint Intelligence Committee, the top level of British intelligence, warned Tony Blair on 10 February 2003 in the following terms:

“‘The JIC assessed that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq.’”

As Roth puts it towards the end of his essay:

“To recapture the powerful ideal of democracy, so central to the human rights cause yet so at risk of being manipulated as a false but beguiling substitute, requires heightened attention to the clever subterfuges of its detractors.”

I think that’s seldom been better put. But it’s advice that should first and foremost be applied by members of the public towards their own governments – including us, towards ours.