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The tenth of December is International Human Rights Day. What does the day mean to you?
Tsafrir Cohen is the Executive Director of medico international.
The tenth of December should really be called the day of supreme hypocrisy. Donald Trump and the global far right are undermining human rights and international institutions every day. To mention just one example, the top judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague are subject to sanctions and no longer have bank accounts. In many countries, human rights organizations can hardly function any more, while their employees also face extreme danger in their personal lives.
In addition, the old liberal order turned human rights into a tool for the West to conceal its interests and secure power. That is one side of the coin.
But there is another side to it. The history of human-rights discourse since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948 teaches us that human rights also have an entirely different function. In the decades that followed the proclamation, it was the still-colonized states that advanced the expansion and legal codification of human rights. They advocated primarily for collective rights, as expressed, for example, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. They hoped that this would lead to a more just world. However, the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s has contributed to an understanding of human rights as individual rather than collective rights.
What do human rights mean in relation to a practice of solidarity?
To all those people who look at the realities and despair, giving up on the idea of human rights, people like our South African partners respond that human rights instruments represent the last line of defence of the marginalized against the powerful, against states and corporations.
Rights are never just given to people but continuously fought for by activists and wider sections of society through a process of negotiation, organizing, and mobilization. However, we must recognize that human rights require social support and are ultimately only worth as much as those underpinnings. It is all about solidarity and resistance, but these fundamental concepts have disappeared from our human-rights discourse. We need to bring them back.
we must acknowledge that we are on the defensive — be it at the global, continental, or national level. Our dream of establishing human rights as the most adequate form of planetary solidarity is over for now.
At the same time, we must also recognize that resistance and solidarity come at a price. Some people go to prison and risk their lives or those of their loved ones for them. Others give something up, like when people from the rich countries of the North donate money to recipients in the South. That is also a form of solidarity. And I would not downplay the importance of individual gestures either. Nowadays, solidarity also means building relationships between unequal parties in order to enable a new form of social coexistence, both on small scales and larger ones.
You wrote in the medico newsletter about the idea of being radical in bearing witness. What do you mean by that?
Being radical in bearing witness means not allowing ourselves to be crushed by our very real powerlessness in the face of the wars, exclusion, and mass murder of our time. We will not look away just because it would make us less vulnerable. We must not turn away in impotence even if we are currently unable to mobilize a majority in favour of the universal promise of freedom and equality.
How does that relate to international solidarity?
We need to distinguish between different levels of solidarity. There is, for example, the solidarity of the family, which is incredibly important, particularly in countries without a welfare system. But it comes at the cost of patriarchy and the church. Welfare systems, on the other hand, are related to the nation-state as a community of solidarity that extends far beyond immediate relationships between people. This is a second, abstract level where we can fight for better legislation and institutions. However, it comes at the cost of nationalism and border regimes.
If we want to overcome this situation, we need a third, international level. Unfortunately, it does not yet exist. At medico, we have thought long and hard about what an international healthcare system might look like. The problem is that there are no institutions to implement it. The UN is making efforts in this regard, but the UN is insufficient and also severely under attack.
Medico was founded in 1968, during the Cold War. Back then, we focused on solidarity with national liberation movements from the Global South. Today, in multipolar times, we must rethink and find new ways to practice solidarity. How exactly this might look is something we must explore and test in a joint process of discovery, both here and around the world.
You have already underlined that solidarity is not a given, that it must be fought for. What’s your assessment of the current situation in this regard?
For starters, we must acknowledge that we are on the defensive — be it at the global, continental, or national level. Our dream of establishing human rights as the most adequate form of planetary solidarity is over for now. At the same time, forms of collective, national solidarity, such as those that are enshrined in the welfare state, are under constant attack. We are therefore forced to defend what little we have managed to achieve.
For the most part, we are in a powerless situation. The challenge, as Adorno once wrote, is “not to let oneself be made stupid either by the power of others, nor by one’s own powerlessness”. We must not accept the fact that German TV does not show the horrors of the war in Gaza, or that even the TV images coming from Ukraine fail to show the carnage that has been taking place there for almost four years, with 1,500 people being killed or severely wounded every day.
In the case of Palestine, we sent a strong message by organizing a rally in Berlin at the end of September. We must create spaces where the voices suppressed by what gets called Staatsräson can speak out and reach a wider audience. That day, there were 100,000 of us protesting against the genocide. That is also part of of what it means to be radical in bearing witness.
Yes, organizing demonstrations is not part of medico’s day-to-day work. Can you give a few more examples of how solidarity can be a concrete political practice at medico?
We have been working in the area of asylum and migration for decades. We have built a vast network and a Freedom of Movement Fund aimed at punching holes in the walls of Fortress Europe. We support people who are unlawfully imprisoned on Europe’s margins. Even though we face an intense backlash on account of our work, the fact remains: migration is not a crime.
At medico, you can sometimes feel as if you had the entire world at your side.
Another example is the climate lawsuit. We are supporting 43 Pakistani farmers in their lawsuit against RWE and Heidelberg Materials. Behind them stand thousands of other villagers who have lost their livelihoods to climate change. For us, this is not only about justice but also about collective empowerment. That is why we were particularly touched when a farmer said that she would give half of the money to her community if she won her case in court — that she not only fights for the rights of her family but also stands in solidarity with all the people affected by climate change.
Over the past decade, those of us connected with medico and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation have discussed the issue of solidarity many times. How has the discourse changed?
Ten years ago, we were still under the impression that we were building international solidarity, that things were moving forward. Now the global situation has changed, and we are facing the end of the post-war order. Today, the right to aid and even the right to live are being questioned. This makes global solidarity extremely difficult.
And what does solidarity mean from a German perspective?
In my opinion, it means, for example, not opposing the lessons learned from the Shoah to those learned from colonialism. This also applies within Germany as a society defined by migration: it means reconciling the experiences of people who come from other countries with the heritage and responsibility of those who historically come from Germany. If we fail to do this, we will experience tremendous social upheaval.
However, this also presents us with an opportunity. Historian Michael Rothberg has proposed the concept of multidirectional memory. All we have to do is overcome our narrow-mindedness and open ourselves to the world: to the world within us as a post-migration society and to the world outside. What do we take from history? How do we make amends for what happened and what role does solidarity play in this process? Mending the world is an important task, and it will do us a lot of good to work at that mending instead of playing different kinds of suffering off against each other.
Where do you find hope in a world in crisis?
At medico, you can sometimes feel as if you had the entire world at your side. Our partner organizations practice solidarity even in the most hopeless situations. I have been to Palestine three times since 7 October and have talked to local partners who have lost everything. They live in tents and have no food to feed their children, but they keep working as nurses, doctors, and so on, and they do so in a place that has been utterly destroyed. They simply continue working, in order to help people. I call that humanity. And then you have the representatives of the Herero and Nama who have been demanding reparations since the German genocide against their peoples at the beginning of the past century — who refuse to give up, in spite of the circumstances. They insist on their rights; they are fighting for their dignity as human beings. With partners like these, you can’t view the world in a pessimistic light.
Interview by Hana Pfennig. Translated by Andrea Garcés and Marc Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
