Freedom of Speech and Foreign Intervention

Intervention is often legitimate, claims Bielefeldt: Human rights organisations have the right to help countries in which opposition is silenced. Bahmanpour responds with a question.

Heiner Bielefeldt: I would agree that heavy-handed, unilateral intervention in a country’s internal developments and discourses can make that country even more reluctant to deal with matters such as human rights, religious liberty, and equality between men and women. We all know that the ‘human rights’ debate is not just a debate – it has a great deal to do with power politics.

Nevertheless, I am sceptical about your emphasis on the, as it were, ‘natural’ development of countries. What does that mean, after all? Power politics, after all, is not just a feature of the international community; it is also a key determinant inside every national situation. Very often, some elements of a society are silenced.

In such cases, what should an international community do? My understanding, as someone who is very committed to human rights, is that human rights organisations have a responsibility to give a voice to those who are silenced in this way. This does not mean people from outside should take the role of advocates and speak on behalf of others – I agree that societies have to find their own way – but if natural development is not possible, because parts of society are silenced, then at least, people from outside should point to that fact. And international human rights standards give the possibility of monitoring and saying that there is something wrong.

Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour: I agree that we must defend the right to voice one’s ideas in any and every society. But in turn I want to ask you a question. The concept of political secularism has been promoted in a steady way since the nineteenth century, and Islamic countries seemed to accept this idea – among many others – quite smoothly at the beginning of the twentieth century. They changed their style of life considerably, altered their legal systems and abandoned sharia. But in the late twentieth century they returned to sharia (Islamic law), to the idea of an Islamic society, and to hukuma (Islamic governance). Given the steady development of a world order, broad improvements in the standard of living, this is something strange, isn’t it? Why do you think that this happened?