The catalog below organizes our collection of articles primarily about the war into general categories to facilitate access to relevant topics for policymakers, researchers, journalists, scholars, and the public at large. The archive will be updated as new pieces are published.

We welcome readers to use this catalog to follow the unfolding situation and generate new lines of analysis. To search headlines and authors, expand one or all of the topics, as needed, and use CTRL-F on your keyboard to open the search tool. The archive also is available in reverse chronological order at the Russia-Ukraine War articles page.

IMAGES (left to right): A man takes a selfie in front a destroyed apartment building on April 9, 2022 in Borodianka, Ukraine. The Russian retreat from towns near Kyiv has revealed scores of civilian deaths and the full extent of devastation from Russia’s attempt to seize the Ukrainian capital. (Photo by Alexey Furman/Getty Images); A woman with a Ukrainian flag stands outside the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) or Peace Palace on the first day of hearings on March 7, 2022 in The Hague The Netherlands. Ukraine is petitioning the ICJ to classify Russia’s invasion as a genocide and issue an injunction under the UN Convention against Genocide. (Photo by Michel Porro/Getty Images); Ukrainian servicemen carry the casket bearing the remains of journalist Maks Levins on April 4, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Levin, who was a contributor to LB.ua and Reuters, among other news organizations, went missing on March 13 and was found dead on April 1 near the village Huta Mezhyhirska, north of Kyiv. (Photo by Alexey Furman/Getty Images)

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The administration also faces challenges on multiple fronts at home as it seeks to deal with rising inequity, root out systemic racism, restart a sluggish economic recovery, and repair American democracy in a deeply divided political landscape. Meanwhile, the climate crisis remains an existential threat, and the COVID-19 pandemic rages on due to the emergence of new variants, a global failure to ensure vaccine equity across the world, and unfounded but entrenched vaccine skepticism.

As Biden acknowledged in his inauguration speech, this is a “time of testing” that will “challenge us in profound ways.”

Has the Biden administration risen to this challenge? As we reflect on the state of the nation and the world, Just Security asked former diplomats and top experts to assess the administration’s progress, obstacles and opportunities ahead, and implications for the midterm elections in 2022 and beyond.

[Editor’s note: some of our expert contributors commented on multiple political developments, which are organized thematically].

GREAT POWER COMPETITION

Lisa Curtis (@LisaCurtisDC), Senior Fellow and Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She previously served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for South and Central Asia on the National Security Council:

The world must respond decisively to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, both to maintain the European security order and to prevent China from perceiving it can get away with similar aggression toward Taiwan. Washington does not have the luxury of choosing whether it will stand up to either Russian or Chinese aggression. To preserve a rules-based order where countries are able to preserve their sovereignty and independence, the United States must work with like-minded partners and allies to meet the challenges from both countries.

The White House Indo-Pacific Strategy released on Feb. 11 lays out a blueprint for the United States to deter a rising and increasingly aggressive China and shows the Biden administration understands the critical importance of U.S. engagement and leadership in this vital region. Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin made clear in a speech last December that China’s military is on pace to become a peer competitor to the United States in Asia and is seeking to usurp the U.S. leadership role in the Indo-Pacific.

One way the Biden administration is pushing back against Beijing is by elevating and expanding the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan. Though not a military pact like AUKUS (the Sept. 2021 Australia-UK-US pact), the Quad is asserting a shared vision for an open and free region and focuses on strategic issues like critical and emerging technologies, infrastructure development, and cyber security.

The Biden administration has discussed the concept of “integrated deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific but has yet to provide details on what this means in practical terms. To deter China and reassure the nations of the region that the United States is committed to defending their sovereignty, the administration must move forward expeditiously with plans to expand defense capabilities and its forward posture in the region, incorporating partners and allies into its force deployment strategies, operational planning, and naval maneuvers.

Christopher Walker (@walker_CT), Vice President for Studies and Analysis, National Endowment for Democracy:

In recent years, there have been any number of seemingly “game changing” events in the foreign policy context. Russia’s maximalist war in Ukraine represents a genuine game changer.

But Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor itself is the culmination of a more comprehensive and longer standing Kremlin project. Over 16 straight years of global democratic decline, the leadership in Russia has been an engine of authoritarian aggression, which has translated into escalating disruption and destruction internationally. And Russia is not alone in this project. Authorities in China have built up their international posture to present an unambiguous challenge to the liberal order. We may not be willing to fully acknowledge it, but we are already quite a ways into a new era.

For the United States and its democratic allies, the challenge is growing. Leaders in Russia and China have achieved what might be understood as a “shared consciousness” concerning their international policy approach that may crystallize into a closer partnership. The Chinese authorities’ reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has so far been a rhetorical hedge, but in practice has effectively allowed Moscow unbridled freedom of action. This attitude speaks to a larger, ongoing ambition, led by Beijing and Moscow, to reforge the global rules of the road. These regimes are offering an alternative, authoritarian-friendly set of norms, while simultaneously seeking to undermine key rules-based organizations. The recent ground gained by authoritarian powers in the battle to set international rules shows the risk of taking the foundations and endurance of the international system for granted, without purposeful action and support from the democracies.

Therefore, in the coming period the Biden administration will be obliged to find new avenues of cooperation with like-minded partners to defend democracy and retake the initiative. Democracies must respond to the depredations Russia is now inflicting upon the people of Ukraine. In the bigger picture, the United States and its democratic allies will need to come to grips with the advanced competition that has emerged to challenge democracy and the values that underpin it. This is a multidimensional challenge that will require democratic ambition and innovation in spheres that include but are not limited to: more successfully dealing with the transnational kleptocracy and strategic corruption that have metastasized in ways that subvert systems of all stripes; addressing a dysfunctional and unreliable information landscape; developing more effective capacities to communicate internationally in a far more complex and competitive information environment; and dealing with critical issues of emerging technology that will be integral to the future of freedom.

MULTILATERALISM

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (@NiAolainF), U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism and Executive Editor at Just Security:

Writing a “State of the Union” reflection with a European war upon us and untold human suffering and misery unfolding in Ukraine is a testing task. It follows a trying summer, as the images of masses of frightened and vulnerable people fleeing Afghanistan were indelibly burned on our collective memory and remain prescient. The Taliban’s firm re-emergence underscores the fundamental failure of the so-called “war on terror,” and the twenty years of counterterrorism that contributed to state fragility and the conditions that produced the consolidation of power by that non-state power. Ownership of that failure belongs to multiple administrations. Its ugly end has been fatefully handed to the Biden administration and there is pressing work to do on human rights, women’s rights, and humanitarian protection and assistance. The unfinished business in Afghanistan, including a harshly unfolding humanitarian catastrophe constitutes a fundamental setback for national and international security.

In parallel, our international law-based order and the integrity of the collective security system established by the United Nations (U.N.) Charter is now under unrelenting and direct attack. We are in the eye of the storm – so assessing progress, setbacks, and opportunities in international law and foreign affairs can only be partially done. The challenge for this administration is to hold firmly to its vision of promoting democracy and the rule of law in the nitty gritty of day-to-day diplomacy, capacity building, technical assistance, security work, and partnerships with states. It will require breaking with those who do not fundamentally share those values, reject the rule of law, attack civil society, and use security discourse as cover for the worst of their human rights abuses. Instead, deep, profound, and close relationships with like-minded states will define the outcomes of these perilous times. It has never been more essential to support allies, democratic institutions, civil society actors, journalists, human rights defenders, and the values of international law continuously and consistently.

Positively, and to this end, the Biden administration is doing this work, walking the corridors of international institutions, rebuilding relationships, and showing leadership. The Biden administration’s presence at the U.N. Human Rights Council comes at a critical time when authoritarians and back-sliding democracies increasingly are finding international institutions to be welcoming and comfortable spaces. Enabling the country visits of two U.N. Special Rapporteurs (minority issues and contemporary forms of racism) shows an openness to scrutiny and critical self-reflection that is welcome, and shows exactly how democracies should behave and then encourage others to follow.

This moment in history demands a vision beyond responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine. We must understand that this is a symptom of ascendent authoritarianism and strikes at the heart of the values of open societies and a rule of law-based international order. In such moments, as Winston Churchill remarked, “success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”

COUNTERING DISINFORMATION

David Lapan (@DaveLapanDC), Fellow and former Vice President of Communications for the Bipartisan Policy Center:

Social media platforms and the explosion of podcasts, radio programs, and other forms of media have expanded the channels available to those who traffic in mis- and disinformation, both at home and abroad. Russia used these channels to sow discord in the United States and to interfere with the 2016 election. It continued to use them through the 2020 election and now uses them as it attacks neighboring Ukraine.

In the lead-up to the Feb. 24 assault on Ukraine, the United States (and some allies) did a good job of countering Russian propaganda and disinformation by releasing intelligence information in unprecedented ways. That must continue. Carefully releasing intelligence information is something only the federal government can do, but non-government actors, including media outlets, have important roles in calling out and countering mis- and disinformation. In addition, the Global Engagement Center, created by the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, must be energized, and resourced effectively.

Domestically, the Biden administration must do more to counter mis- and disinformation without trampling on free speech rights. As it did with its National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, the administration needs to consider the creation of a national counter-disinformation strategy, to address both foreign and domestic actors and actions.

The Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s December report, Countering Disinformation in the United States, represents a good first step toward addressing the issues. The executive branch can lead, with the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice playing key roles, but Congress must consider and act on the commission’s recommendations to create meaningful and lasting efforts to defeat the disinformation threats to our democracy.

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth), Executive Director of Human Rights Watch:

By comparison with the dismal performance of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden refreshingly promised a foreign policy guided by human rights. But despite some positive steps, Biden’s approach has been disappointingly conventional.

For starters, we can be thankful no longer to have a president who embraces every friendly autocrat under the sun – even Russian President Vladimir Putin. In addition, reversing Trump’s moves, Biden rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council, re-engaged with the World Health Organization, supported global efforts to fight climate change, and cancelled sanctions against the International Criminal Court prosecutor for examining torture by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan and war crimes by Israeli officials. Biden also has continued the longstanding practice of pressing U.S. adversaries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to curb their abuses, including by imposing targeted sanctions.

On China, Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which presumptively bars imports from Xinjiang. After labeling atrocities targeting Uyghurs as genocide and crimes against humanity, Biden joined a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics to undermine President Xi Jinping’s efforts to “sportswash” his repression. Yet despite these important discrete steps, Biden has yet to put forward a comprehensive strategy, with clear goals, to curb Beijing’s oppression at home and its efforts to undermine international human rights institutions.

When it comes to relations with abusive allies, Biden showed little sign of a human rights-guided approach. Apart from modest tweaks, he continued large-scale U.S. arms sales or military aid to Egypt despite the worst repression in the country’s modern history, to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates despite their devastating airstrikes and other atrocities against Yemeni civilians (casualties surged after Saudi arm-twisting succeeded in lifting U.N. scrutiny in October), and to Israel despite its attacks on large civilian apartment and office buildings in Gaza and its crime against humanity of apartheid affecting millions of Palestinians. Silence from the White House matched Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence before his supporters’ increasingly virulent attacks on Muslims.

Even some of Biden’s positive steps have been half-hearted. After his summits with key leaders such as Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the White House said “human rights” were discussed but provided no details, leaving in the dark the persecuted people from those countries – the primary agents for change – and missing an opportunity to use the moral influence of the president’s office to support them. Just days after Biden’s Summit for Democracy, the administration invited autocratic leaders from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand to a U.S.-ASEAN summit. The administration implemented economic restrictions on Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover that are severely harming the Afghan population, which now faces a looming humanitarian crisis and large-scale starvation. And while some migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border have been allowed to seek asylum, many are still summarily turned back despite the considerable danger of violent attack.

Frances Z. Brown (@franceszbrown), Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Project:

President Joe Biden assumed office proclaiming that global politics is increasingly defined by a struggle between democracy and autocracy. Events of the past week underscore that, unfortunately, he is right. Biden also came into office declaring that his administration would place this struggle for democracy at the core of its foreign policy. It is too early to pronounce judgment on how he is faring on this front: democracies are consolidated in a matter of decades, or centuries. Presidencies are ultimately measured in four-year terms, not first-year scorecards. But in the meantime, for Biden to convert his democracy agenda into a democracy legacy, his administration will need to resist falling prey to the trap of diverted attention.

As the invasion of Ukraine has raised existential stakes for democracy there, Biden’s team has taken notable steps to impose costs on Russia. It also impressively galvanized partners to try to head off, and now counter, this egregious authoritarian aggression. But the struggle to bolster global democracy is, of course, global. As the U.S. administration marshals action on Ukraine, they will need to guard against the risk that the situation will offer a field day for authoritarians elsewhere. As such, to make good on their democracy and human rights agenda, Biden’s team will need to continually ask: where else should we be exerting leverage? Where else should we be focusing attention?

For example, though global focus is trained elsewhere on the Eurasian landmass, China’s abuses of its Muslim minority citizens continues, as does its campaign to subjugate Hong Kong. In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is neither rights-respecting nor inclusive. In Ethiopia, there is still an urgent need for accountability for rights violations and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. In Myanmar, the military junta continues to indiscriminately attack civilians. Even within Russia itself, Putin’s most visible opponent, Aleksei Navalny, could be jailed for another 15 years on spurious charges of embezzlement while the democratic world is consumed with decrying Putin’s adventurism elsewhere.

Further, now more than ever, critical democratic junctures will still require the United States’s attention. Upcoming elections in backsliding countries such as Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey will likely determine these countries’ democratic fates. An alarming spate of military coups in Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Myanmar, and Sudan will need continual U.S. engagement in order to push along any putative transition to civilian authority. And shaky democratic openings – be it in Zambia or Honduras or elsewhere – will require ongoing U.S. focus, as well.

Democracy is under global siege. Authoritarians like Putin benefit from attention being diverted elsewhere. As President Biden embarks on his second year in office, he should not let his agenda to bolster global democracy be yet another casualty of Putin’s game.

COUNTERING VIOLENT EXTREMISM

Barbara McQuade (@BarbMcQuade), Professor of Practice at the University of Michigan Law School and former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and Co-Chair of the Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee:

President Biden made some important strides toward countering violent extremism when his administration issued the nation’s first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, but the strategy should take some additional steps. One important reform would be to advocate for a federal statute criminalizing domestic terrorism. Currently, there is no way to charge federally a plot to engage in mass violence using firearms or vehicles as weapons unless the plot has a link to a recognized international terror group. The federal terrorism statute prohibits killing, kidnapping, maiming, committing an assault resulting in serious bodily injury, assaulting with a dangerous weapon any person in the United States, or creating a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to another person by destroying or damaging a structure, conveyance or property or attempting to do so, when the conduct extends beyond the United States. A domestic terrorism law could borrow from this existing statute that makes it a crime to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, simply replacing “national” with “state.” This tool would enable federal law enforcement to initiate investigations of groups plotting dangerous attacks before any loss of life occurs.

Another important step would be to take on private paramilitary organizations that call themselves militias. The intelligence community has assessed that militia violent extremists pose the greatest risk to the U.S. government. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 181 such groups exist in the United States, and they answer to no government authority. As interstate communication and travel become easier and weapons more abundant, the danger these groups present is growing. Members of the Oath Keepers militia have been charged with seditious conspiracy for using force to obstruct the lawful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021 and beyond. President Biden should urge all 50 states to enforce the laws they already have on the books to prohibit unlawful militia activity. In addition, as former Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord has argued here, President Biden should also advocate for federal legislation that prohibits unauthorized paramilitary military activity in the form of combat training and the wearing of military uniforms at scenes of civil unrest.

David Lapan (@DaveLapanDC), Fellow and former Vice President of Communications for the Bipartisan Policy Center:

Domestic terrorism is a growing threat in and to the United States. Taking office in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Congress added urgency to the task of addressing this domestic threat. On his first day in office, President Biden directed a comprehensive review of government efforts to address domestic terrorism and, within 150 days, published a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, the first of its kind.

The strategy and the approaches it prescribes are not without their critics and implementation bears close watching, of course, but the speed and seriousness with which the administration tackled the issue is commendable. The Department of Homeland Security has a key role to play, and it cannot afford to repeat old mistakes, but the leadership seems attentive to those concerns.

Importantly, these efforts will require continuous focus and appropriate resourcing amid other pressing national security and domestic issues. The threat has grown over time and the efforts to counter it will take years of dedicated attention from the federal government down to local communities. The new strategy represents a promising start.

THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

Laura Rozen (@lrozen), veteran foreign policy journalist and member of Just Security’s Board of Editors:

The Biden administration has put working in tight coordination with international allies and partners at the center of its efforts to try to negotiate a return of the United States to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), if Iran returns to its full implementation.

Indeed, President Biden’s decision to spend the first weeks after his inauguration consulting with with European partners on Iran, before announcing in late February 2021 that the United States would return to the JCPOA if Iran returned to full compliance, may have wasted valuable time and foreclosed a quick return to the deal while Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was still in office. Or maybe not. We will never know.

A year later, as I write from Vienna, and as the parties are in the tenth month of indirect endgame talks to see if a decision on restoring the JCPOA can be reached, one thing is clear: the Biden administration has succeeded in putting the United States back in the “P5+1” – the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany – after Trump’s decision to quit the deal in 2018, and subsequent efforts to collapse the deal, increasingly splitting the United States from its partners, particularly the E3 (the United Kingdom, France, and Germany).

Whether the Iran nuclear deal can be restored is still uncertain, although a deal could be announced the week of Biden’s State of the Union. But Biden has succeeded in resurrecting the P5+1, and putting the U.S. back at the table with its international allies and partners, even if, as of yet, not with Iran.

AFGHANISTAN

Lisa Curtis (@LisaCurtisDC), Senior Fellow and Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security:

President Biden’s decision to abruptly withdraw from Afghanistan, along with the chaotic evacuations process and his callous remarks about the Afghan security forces the United States fought alongside for 20 years, has left a permanent stain on his foreign policy record. Biden seems to want to close the book on Afghanistan, but the growing humanitarian crisis there and the Taliban’s failure to uphold the rights of women and girls will compel the United States to remain engaged.

Although the withdrawal and evacuations were badly mishandled, the Biden administration has made some positive moves on Afghanistan since August. One is providing over $500 million in humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people and working with the international community to find creative ways to funnel money directly to the Afghans, while largely bypassing the Taliban. The other is appointing a Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls, and Human Rights to monitor and hold the Taliban accountable for upholding the rights of women and minorities.

There is an opportunity to work more closely with like-minded European and regional partners to address the humanitarian situation and to condition development assistance and engagement with the Taliban on their policies on human rights and counterterrorism. So far there are few signs the Taliban have evolved on the issue of human rights. Whether they follow through on their announcement to reopen schools for all Afghans in March will be one indicator of how they intend to treat women and girls.

Chris Purdy (@itsapurdy), Director of Veterans for American Ideals, Human Rights First, and Emilee Cutright, Program Strategist, Human Rights First:

President Biden’s first year in office will certainly be defined by his response to the Afghan crisis, one that did not end in August but instead will have repercussions for years to come. In the lead-up to the withdrawal, advocates like myself and others spent months educating, cajoling, and begging the Biden administration to think about ways to relocate vulnerable Afghan allies ahead of the Sept. 11th, and then Aug. 31st, deadline. We were unsuccessful in getting this president to act, and the two weeks at the end of August proved how disastrous that was.

When Kabul fell, advocates across the political spectrum had spent the previous six months working in overdrive to prepare for what we saw as the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government. On Aug. 15, Kabul fell, and the hours, months, and weeks we had spent pleading with the administration to act felt futile. As the humanitarian crisis unfolded we doubled down and pulled every connection in the public, private, and international aid sectors that we had at our disposal. We worked with nascent veterans organizations to charter flights, created an ad hoc infrastructure with our friends in government to get people through the airport gate, and spun up whole coalitions at the national, state, and local level to seed the ground to resettle our allies, stepping in where the Biden administration could not.

Since then, the Biden administration has stepped up to the plate, but so much more needs to be done. After the Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) in August, the U.S. government successfully resettled almost 80,000 Afghans. Through a complicated series of waypoints and resettling stations, the government used terms like “lily pads” and “safe havens” to house and vet Afghans as they came to the United States. Now our allies are seeking to put down roots in their new home, and they are looking to the president for leadership, something he personally has not yet provided. Thousands of Americans have stepped up to the plate, welcoming our new neighbors for the long haul with open arms and full hearts. While his administration is beginning to see the long-term political and humanitarian crisis that Afghanistan represents, if human rights is to be the centerpiece of U.S. policy then the president should personally commit to restoring the human dignity of the Afghans that we failed.

PUBLIC OPINION AND COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY

Stephen Van Evera, Ford International Professor in the MIT Political Science Department:

Presidents must shape U.S. public opinion if they hope to persuade Congress to pass their programs. As Abraham Lincoln noted, “Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.”

A successful presidency therefore requires a communications strategy and program that can drive the terms of public debate.

The Biden administration still needs such a communications strategy and program. It has scored some big policy wins, including the March 2021 American Rescue Plan and November 2021 Infrastructure and Investment bill. But it also suffered grievous losses, on two crucial bills to protect U.S. democracy (the John Lewis and Freedom to Vote Acts), the Build Back Better human infrastructure bill, and police reform. These failed because the Biden team failed to communicate their value to the U.S. public. The bills have strong selling points that remain widely unknown. Meanwhile, the public believes falsehoods that fuel opposition to these bills (e.g., the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, and the falsehood that “Build Back Better” will harm the economy).

The current Biden communications team is smart and capable. But it follows a 50-year Democratic custom of low-key communications tactics that presume that the virtues of good policies largely speak for themselves. A hard sell is not essential.

It’s a critical mistake. A zone-flooding hard sell is always essential, and even more so now that we face a divisive political landscape at home and abroad.

The Biden team should draw lessons from past administrations that communicated effectively. Four administrations stand out: those of FDR, Truman, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan (first term especially). The George W. Bush and Trump administrations also did some important things on communications strategy well. The stratagems of Reagan first-term communications director Michael Deaver deserve special attention.

Useful lessons are also offered by professional communications best practices, which emphasize that people believe four things: what they hear first, what they hear most often, what they hear from a trusted source, and what they do not hear rebutted. Ergo, communication strategy should focus on being first with the message, repeating it relentlessly, recruiting trusted messengers, and quickly rebutting counter-arguments.

Repetition requires wide use of surrogates. No president can reach nearly enough ears with their own speeches. Most communication should therefore be done by skilled surrogates (e.g., assistant cabinet secretaries and close thinktank and media friends). They should practically live on cable TV, local TV, and talk radio. It’s hard, but crucial, work.

Presidential strategies to imitate: FDR’s fireside chats; Truman’s dramatic use of the public square for theater; Reagan’s use of disciplined surrogates; and Trump’s use of vast repetition though Twitter and the use of media figures (Fox hosts and talk radio hosts) as surrogates.

A mistake not to imitate: relying on presidential speeches to shape public opinion, as Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama did. Instead, success requires core reliance on surrogates – lots of them, prepared and disciplined Mike Deaver-style.

Communications strategy cannot be an afterthought. Developing the best possible communications program should be a top priority for the Biden team if Democrats hope to win in the midterm elections this November and, beyond that, looking ahead to 2024.

Image: US President Joe Biden, flanked by US Vice President Kamala Harris (L) and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (R), addresses a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on April 28, 2021. (Photo by Melina Mara / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MELINA MARA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images). 

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The primary tools thus far have been diplomatic condemnation, sanctions, and weapons shipments to Ukraine. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Thursday widened sanctions levied against Russia by imposing economic blockades on Russia’s largest financial institutions, covering 80 percent of all assets, and on the ability of state-owned and private entities to raise capital. The Biden administration also sanctioned more Russian elites and their family members. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom unveiled what Prime Minister Boris Johnson described as the “largest set of sanctions ever imposed anywhere by the U.K. government.” Those include asset freezes on more than 100 new entities and individuals (including all major manufacturers supporting Russia’s military) and banning Aeroflot flights from the country, which could have a particular impact on Russian elites who own real estate in London. The EU imposed financial, energy, transport, and individual sanctions.

Some private sector actions were particularly creative, literally: Carnegie Hall canceled a five-concert U.S. tour that was to begin today by famed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who has often expressed support for his friend, Putin, and accepted a prestigious prize from the leader.

Many more possibilities exist for accountability, though the effectiveness of these options may depend significantly on multilateral or multi-stakeholder action, which means aligning parties with divergent interests and values. Allies have not yet taken the step of cutting Russia off from the SWIFT bank messaging system, which would hamper Russian banks’ and individuals’ ability to operate on global financial markets but might also cause some unintended consequences. In the United States, a sanctions package that began as a bipartisan measure against Russia months ago was earlier (before the Russian invasion) bogged down in partisan bickering, although President Joe Biden has been able to impose a range of economic measures thus far without new legislation from Congress. That said, there are currently bipartisan proposals on the table, including freezing and seizing the assets of the so-called Navalny 35, a list of Russian oligarchs, officials, and others whom jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accuses of corruption, human rights abuses, and political persecution. Co-Chairs of the Congressional Caucus Against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy (CAFCAK), Representatives Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and John Curtis (R-UT) called for such a move again Thursday. There have also been calls to use the Global Magnitsky Act much more vigorously against Russian officials implicated in human rights violations and corruption.

Ambassador Daniel Fried, in a panel discussion co-sponsored by Just Security, offered suggestions for ramping up sanctions and other economic penalties. Sanctions on Russia’s central bank could be risky because of potential financial blowback, Fried said, but this step would be a major strike against Russia’s economy. “You don’t get to make money working with our system when you are attacking our system,” he said.

But what accountability measures outside of the economic toolkit should policymakers be considering? The following represents a sample of the types of measures that individual countries or coalitions in the international community could impose immediately and as the conflict unfolds. Many of these actions also could be taken against Belarus to send a strong signal for any state that would directly support such a war of aggression.

Impose Visa Bans

• Visa bans could be used to deny Putin, his close associates, Russian legislators who voted to authorize Putin’s use of military forces in Ukraine, and other relevant Russian officials the ability to travel. Edward Lucas, former senior editor at The Economist and author of books on Russia and geopolitics, suggests “visa bans on all government ministers, on all members of the Duma and Federation Council, all governors and office-holders in Russia’s regions, on all officials in the ‘power ministries’ and security agencies, and on the 35 individuals named in Alexei Navalny’s list… Announce a sweeping program of asset freezes on these individuals, and on companies linked to the Kremlin or owned (even in part) by Kremlin cronies.”
• Restrictions on travel will be much more effective if implemented as broadly as possible across jurisdictions where the targeted individuals seek to travel or reside.

Withhold Recognition of Unlawful Situation, and Deny Aid or Assistance to Russia

• As Diane Desierto explains, under international law, “No State shall recognize as lawful a situation created by a serious breach [of an obligation arising under a peremptory norm of general international law ], nor render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation” (emphasis added). The International Court of Justice has emphasized the applicability of this customary international law obligation in the context of aggression and unlawful acquisition of territory. 

• A concerted diplomatic campaign could bring other States along in respecting this obligation and ceasing aid or assistance to Russia in maintaining its invasion and in what may become an occupation or purported annexation of Ukraine. China, in particular, should be pressed to commit to meeting its obligations and steer clear of supporting Russia’s efforts to evade sanctions and other accountability mechanisms.

Release Information on Corruption and Money Laundering

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury, in coordination with interagency partners, could release information on corruption and money laundering on the part of Putin and his inner circle. The intelligence community should vet all press releases carefully to ensure protection of sources and methods. 
• This action would be most effective if undertaken in coordination with foreign counterparts, particularly allies that have a large Russian business community, such as the United Kingdom.

Impose Consequences in International Organizations (IOs)

• For some IOs in which Russia is a member, dispute-resolution mechanisms or adjudicative mechanisms could provide an avenue of accountability. Hence, member States should think twice about whether to exclude Russia from those fora. In other IOs, members should consider suspending or expelling Russia. 
• The Council of Europe (CoE), for example, moved today to immediately suspend Russia’s membership from the 47-member human rights organization. Political scientist Jasmin Mujanović was among those suggesting such a move. He says it would “remove significant Russian influence from a key pan-European democratic forum. That’s especially important in vulnerable non-EU states where CoE opinions and decisions carry more weight.”
• Three options that are essentially unavailable: challenging Russia’s legal status to hold the USSR’s seat at the United Nations or suspending or expelling Russia from the U.N. The first is likely off the table due, in part, to two decades of silence from member States on the matter (the legal principle of laches applies), and suspension or expulsion are subject to Russia’s (and China’s) veto. Diplomatic efforts would be better spent elsewhere. That said, if there were ever sufficient political support to force Russia to exercise its veto to stay on, that alone may be a powerful diplomatic success.
• The U.N. Security Council is due to vote today on a resolution condemning the invasion and demanding that Russia immediately halt its military operation and withdraw all troops from Ukraine. The resolution will be blocked by Russia’s veto, but a similar measure is to follow in the U.N. General Assembly, where there is no veto.

Isolate Russia Diplomatically 

• States can also take individual steps to isolate Russia diplomatically. Governments can declare ambassadors, diplomats, and consular officials persona non grata and send them home, while maintaining a hotline for communication.  
• Lucas suggests, “Withdraw all Western (NATO, EU, OECD) ambassadors from Moscow and send their Russian counterparts home. Close all Russian consulates, trade missions. We need barebones embassies, nothing more.”

Shut Down and Counter Disinformation Operations

• The United States and its allies took unusual steps leading up to the invasion to declassify and share intelligence to debunk Russian propaganda and false flag operations. These efforts could continue, in coordination with foreign partners, to expose and counter Russian disinformation. The clear stakes of declassifying this intelligence before the invasion to try to avert a war remain: the aim would be to stop Putin from expanding his threats to the global order even further. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned on Feb. 24 that Putin has ambitions beyond Ukraine. 
• In particular, the intelligence community could release intelligence on Russian hackers involved in cyber operations against Ukraine as part of a targeted sanctions package, while protecting intelligence sources and methods.  
• The Department of Homeland Security, as part of its larger role in countering the disinformation threat, could step up efforts to warn the American public of Russian efforts to shape U.S. public opinion and media narratives. 
• Some social media companies have already undertaken steps to increase their content moderation and security resources in response to the crisis. All social media companies could step up efforts to take down false flag operations and Russian accounts spreading disinformation, as well as to move Ukraine to the highest priority tier for internal content moderation and monitoring. However, these steps should be undertaken with consideration for preserving evidence of potential atrocity crimes. Justin Hendrix suggests that social media companies could also take further steps to isolate and deplatform propaganda outlets and Russian officials.
• In contexts in which RT and other official Russian propaganda outlets are broadcast on regulated networks, regulators could kick them off the networks. Following the European Union’s lead, the United States could work with allies to expand sanctions more broadly against outlets taking direction from the Kremlin, such as RT and the Internet Research Agency. 
• The West could also take steps to ensure Ukraine’s continued connectivity to the internet by bolstering the country’s cyber defenses, boosting connectivity from non-Russian neighboring states, and providing financial aid to telecommunications companies to enable them to continue services during the conflict if billing is interrupted.  

​​Cut Sports and Cultural Ties

• Amid discussions in 2017 on how to punish Russia for its attempts to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Just Security author John Sipher noted that autocratic leaders can sometimes be more sensitive to cultural and political sanctions than even economic sanctions. The Carnegie Hall cancellation against Putin’s conductor friend could send a message, as could visa bans against children of Russia’s elite who enjoy the privileges of education and culture in the West.
• The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) yanked the Champions League soccer final from St. Petersburg, Russia, as a result of the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian soccer federation also called for the suspension of all Russian club and national teams from international competitions. Formula One racing canceled the Russian Grand Prix. The International Olympic Committee urged all sports federations to move their events out of Russia and Belarus.
• Among other potential penalties still pending, the world soccer governing body FIFA was still hedging.

Prosecute International Crimes

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a textbook example of the crime of aggression, and reports of attacks that may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity have started to emerge. 
• Neither Ukraine nor Russia are party to the Rome Statute, but Ukraine has submitted a declaration giving the ICC jurisdiction for crimes committed anytime on its territory after February 2014. Ukraine could now request that the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) move from preliminary examination to a full investigation that includes the recent crisis. Prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan QC issued a statement Thursday night saying that he is  “closely following recent developments in and around Ukraine with increasing concern” and reminding the parties of his Office’s ongoing jurisdiction. 
• There is no avenue for prosecution of the crime of aggression. Both the victim and aggressor State must be parties to the Rome Statute for the Court to investigate or bring these charges. As Russia is not a member of the ICC, the prospects for prosecuting the crime of aggression are non-existent. Khan’s statement also makes that clear.
• The United States can support the ICC and national courts that might exercise universal jurisdiction (see e.g., Germany) by sharing relevant intelligence about potential perpetrators and actions.. Professor Peter Singer wrote, “One thing west needs to be doing more of [is]identifying publicly the Russian unit commanders, to create a public record linking them to war crimes.” The United States should also revisit its position that the ICC should not exercise jurisdiction over non-States Parties.  
• Under the Geneva Conventions grave breaches regime, all State parties have an obligation to search for and prosecute individuals within their jurisdiction who commit war crimes in an international armed conflict. States could make public statements reaffirming those obligations, and announce that their domestic authorities are prepared to address war crimes by exercising such jurisdiction, specifically including in the event of Russian attempts to assassinate dissidents, journalists, or political leaders.

IMAGE: Clockwise from upper left: BRUSSELS, BELGIUM – FEBRUARY 25: French President Emmanuel Macron (L), the President of the European Council Charles Michel (C) and the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen (R) speak to media at the end of an EU Summit on the situation in Ukraine on February 25, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images); KYIV, UKRAINE – FEBRUARY 25: People look at the exterior of a damaged residential block hit by an early morning missile strike on February 25, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images); WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 24: U.S. President Joe Biden arrives to deliver remarks about Russia’s “unprovoked and unjustified” military invasion of neighboring Ukraine in the East Room of the White House on February 24, 2022 in Washington, DC. Biden announced a new round of sanctions against Russia after President Vladimir Putin launched an attack on Ukraine from the land, sea and air on Thursday. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images); Russian Olympic Committee’s Vadim Shipachev gets ready for the men’s play-off quarterfinal match of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games ice hockey competition at the Wukesong Sports Centre in Beijing on February 16, 2022. (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images); Vassily Nebenzia (right). Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations and President of the Security Council for the month of February, chairs the emergency Security Council meeting on the current situation in Ukraine. At left is Secretary-General António Guterres. (UN Photo/Mark Garten); Anti-war protesters hold placards during a demonstration against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in front of the NATO headquarters in Brussels on February 25, 2022, as NATO leaders hold an extraordinary virtual summit to discuss the security situation in and around Ukraine. (Photo by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images)

The post Holding Putin and Russia Accountable: A List of Legal and Policy Options appeared first on Just Security.

But the decision’s impacts will reach far beyond U.S. borders and must be understood in this broader context. Two features of the case are particularly salient. First, Trump was a government official when he was removed from the platform, but has since left office. The decision to de-platform him thus occurred when he was a head of state, but the decision to maintain his suspension comes while he is among the principal leaders of the opposition political party. Second, the decision to ban Trump was justified on the grounds that his posts were inciting violence, a situation generated in part by Facebook’s own underlying design decisions that amplified the reach of Trump’s posts for months before the platform decided to act.

The Trump decision presents a case study of the considerations faced by Facebook and other platforms as they consider moderation policies that apply across different types of users, physical locations, cultural contexts, and political systems – and as they design their systems for distributing and amplifying speech. Many expect the FOB to overturn Trump’s ban, with some preemptively decrying such a decision. But analyzing the merits of any decision – to maintain or lift the ban – requires assessing the impacts of the precedent set not only in the U.S. political system but around the world. It also requires understanding that user bans and content removals are only the tip of the content moderation iceberg – a fact that has important implications for evaluating the merits of Facebook’s own justification for its moderation policies.

This article addresses three issues we should focus on as we read tomorrow’s Oversight Board decision. First, it describes the real tensions between the rights to speak and to hear, the risks of real-world harm caused by certain speech, and the design decisions adopted by platforms to connect speakers and listeners. Second, it explains that while the impulse of both the Oversight Board and many of Facebook’s critics has been to look to human rights law or U.S. constitutional law to govern content decisions, attempting to ground decisions in international law on free expression or privacy rights, or in domestic regulation of speech, cannot resolve these tensions. Third, we must keep in mind the decision’s implications for government officials and political leaders around the world, for the listeners who access their speech, and for Facebook’s decisions about how to connect these groups in political and media environments that are very different from those in the United States.

The Decision to Ban Trump

First, some background on the case: Facebook removed two posts by then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. Both posts were messages to Trump’s supporters, posted during the Capitol Hill insurrection, urging rioters to go home but also repeating the lies regarding election security that prompted the attack; telling the rioters that he “love[d]” them and that they were “very special;” and calling on them to “remember this day forever!” Facebook also suspended Trump’s ability to post for 24 hours. The following day, Facebook announced that its suspension would last “indefinitely, and for at least the next two weeks.” (Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account on Jan.8). Finally, on Jan. 21, Facebook announced that it would refer the then ex-president’s suspension to its Oversight Board and that the suspension would remain in effect until the Board issued its decision.

In its initial statement on the decision to suspend Trump’s access, Facebook did not explicitly reference violations of its Community Standards. Instead, in announcing its initial decision to take down the two Trump posts, Facebook justified its decision on the grounds that, “on balance these posts contribute to, rather than diminish, the risk of ongoing violence” (which could be grounds for violation of its policy on violence and incitement, among others).

Similarly, Facebook justified its decision to extend the suspension of Trump’s account with a general reference to the ongoing, immediate threat of violence: “We believe the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great, so we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks.” In a simultaneous post explaining the decision, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the suspension would remain in effect “for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”

The Broader Context

Facebook has previously hesitated to take down posts or suspend accounts of public figures, including heads of state, in situations with potential for deadly violence.

For example, Facebook was used to spread rampant disinformation and hate speech in Myanmar throughout intense episodes of genocidal violence in 2016-2018, including through official channels and the posts of government officials. The company was slow to take action despite widespread criticism and a U.N. investigation citing the platform’s role in stoking the genocide. Facebook finally suspended the accounts of army chief Min Aung Hlaing and several other military leaders in August 2018, nearly two years after the most intense episodes of violence. According to Facebook, this was the first time that the company had taken such action against a political or military leader. In their statement announcing the ban, the company acknowledged, “we were too slow to act.”

The company has been likewise reluctant to police or incapable of policing hate speech and incitement in Ethiopia, where ethnic tensions have periodically erupted into violence fueled by Facebook posts, including posts from political officials and opposition leaders. In India, Facebook has been used to spread anti-Muslim rhetoric and allegations by leading politicians, and Facebook workers allege that local Facebook officials specifically intervened to prevent the platform from banning Indian leaders engaged in hate speech.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been accused of acquiescing to pressure from governments to block access to the accounts or posts of opposition leaders. As early as 2014, the company blocked Russians’ access to an event page for a rally in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny at the request of Russian prosecutors. Last year, Facebook blocked event pages of anti-lockdown rallies in the United States that violated government stay-at-home orders to combat COVID-19.

In other cases, Facebook has been criticized for failing to resist government cutoffs of the service designed to silence protestors or political opponents – although some of these decisions involved potential threats of real-world harm, and unique considerations come into play with each piece of content. Most recently, the Oversight Board swiftly overturned Facebook’s original decision to remove a video criticizing India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (though Facebook restored the content before the FOB issued its decision, attributing the takedown to an error). The Board decision came after public outcry over overt pressure from the Indian government to take down content criticizing the government’s coronavirus response, and a brief period in which “#ResignModi” was blocked in India (according to Facebook, the latter was also a mistake, not the result of government pressure). The Board noted in its decision on the video that “Facebook also declined to provide specific answers to the Board’s questions regarding possible communications from Indian authorities to restrict … content critical of the government.” Some governments have formalized systems for requesting that Facebook take down content they deem troublesome by developing Internet Referral Units to flag content that may violate terms of service; Facebook honors an increasing proportion of these requests.

Free Speech (on a Private Platform)

Free speech advocates have voiced concern about Facebook’s extraordinary control over public debate and urged respect for international human rights standards of free expression. Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression David Kaye has urged social media companies to “recognize that the authoritative global standard for ensuring freedom of expression on their platforms is human rights law, not the varying laws of States or their own private interests, and they should re-evaluate their content standards accordingly.” Others have pointed out that speech and expression (and related rights to listen) are not the only rights at stake: rights to privacy, protections against hate speech, and safety interests are also implicated by content moderation policies. Some have recommended that the Oversight Board prioritize the protection of democracy as a core value distinct from free expression.

In its formation of the FOB, Facebook heeded the call to incorporate human rights into its structure, listing international human rights law as a third “body of law” – in addition to its self-generated “Community Standards” (essentially content moderation policies) and “values” – that should guide the Board’s decisions.

Other free speech advocates suggested alternative sources of law to guide moderation of political speech. Citing U.S. First Amendment jurisprudence, the Knight institute explained in its public comment on Facebook’s decision to block Trump’s account access:

Because of Facebook’s scale, Facebook’s decisions about which speech and speakers to allow on its platform determine not just which voices and ideas get heard on the platform, but which voices and ideas get heard at all. Against this background, Facebook should adopt a heavy presumption in favor of leaving political speech up, in keeping with the principle that ‘debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’ New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964)

But as many (including Facebook) have pointed out, neither body of free speech law, international or domestic, fits comfortably with private companies’ choices to remove content or to de-platform particular users. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) enshrines a broad right of freedom of expression including the “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” Moreover, government restriction of this right “shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary…For respect of the rights or reputations of others;… For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.” But international human rights law such as the ICCPR is designed to bind States; it is likewise made and interpreted by States. It is not designed for application to the content regulation decisions of a private company. Likewise, the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protects the free expression rights of persons against unjustified government interference and is not applicable to companies like Facebook.

This mismatch between the sources of law and their intended application has two potential implications. First, and most obviously, there is the risk that human rights law may not be adequate or suited to grapple with the distinct problems of private restrictions on speech, leading to normatively undesirable or suboptimal outcomes in private content moderation. There is also a risk that the high-profile and impactful decisions taken by private companies on content restrictions – decisions that they publicly ground in human rights law, but which are also necessarily informed by profit maximization and other private interests – will in turn shape the interpretation and implementation of international human rights law.

As Sejal Parmar asked when Facebook announced the creation of its Oversight Board:

[T]o what extent will the board’s decisions and advisory statements, which will be published, impact the advocacy of human rights activists, the elaboration and interpretation of international human rights law by UN human rights bodies, and the judicial rulings of regional human rights courts and national courts? To what extent will the board shape international normative developments and discourse on freedom of expression, notwithstanding the fact that it is a self-regulatory body established by a private company?

Within evolving norms of free expression, the decision reached by the Board on Trump’s de-platforming may create a precedent not only for private content moderation by other platforms, but also for the norms of free expression applied by States to their citizens.

Content Regulation by Another Name

Perhaps the most severe mismatch between international human rights law as applied to States and private regulation of speech by tech giants is that the vast majority of content “regulation” on private platforms happens through choices that are not only non-transparent, they are largely non-human. On all dominant social media platforms, algorithmic formulas decide to a large extent what content is seen, by whom, and in what context. This is true not only in takedown decisions – where automated removals of content have led to high-profile “errors” that the Oversight Board has urged Facebook to correct – but also in shaping the overall information space created on these platforms. Determining what is seen and by whom has a much greater impact on the ability of particular users to speak and be heard than the relatively limited instances of removals or bans, a fact which has led to endless articles advising content creators on how to “beat,” “outsmart,” or “make [Facebook’s algorithm] work for you.”

In this context, the restriction of speech that occurs when Facebook or other platforms remove a particular post or ban a user entirely is overshadowed by the restriction, manipulation, and control of speech made by algorithmic design decisions long before any content reaches an audience. This fact holds particular salience in the context of the Trump ban. As the Knight Institute notes in its comment on the case:

Trump’s statements on and off social media in the days leading up to January 6 were certainly inflammatory and dangerous, but part of what made them so dangerous is that, for months before that day, many Americans had been exposed to staggering amounts of sensational misinformation about the election on Facebook’s platform, shunted into echo chambers by Facebook’s algorithms, and insulated from counter-speech by Facebook’s architecture. (emphasis added).

Algorithmic echo chambers on social media platforms fundamentally distinguish these contexts from government regulations of speech. While governments may broadly shape information environments through licensing and infrastructure investment, they cannot (thankfully, yet) tailor the messages sent and received by citizens with anything near the degree of precision that Facebook can and does. Rules designed to prevent States from interfering with the speech of their citizens, such as Article 19 of the ICCPR, do not grapple with the impacts of such control over information architecture.

This dynamic also gives the lie to Facebook’s own justification of its historically laissez faire approach to more overt forms of content moderation. Far from a single “marketplace of ideas” where harmful or false speech would be driven out by higher quality speech – like a subpar vendor banished from a market by choosy customers – Facebook instead operates countless individualized echo chambers in which it determines precisely what speech is heard by each consumer. A customer selects from the options that actually appear in the “marketplace” – and these options are controlled by Facebook’s algorithmic design.

In a recent, striking example of the real-world political impacts of Facebook’s algorithmic design choices, the company announced prior to the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, “As we have done in emergency situations in the past, we may also limit the spread of content that our systems predict is likely to violate our Community Standards in the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement.” This decision preemptively increased “friction” on certain types of content that the algorithm predicted might cause harm – in other words, it limited the capacity of certain speech to reach as wide an audience as it otherwise would have under Facebook’s default policies. As Evelyn Douek put it, “Facebook … turn[ed] down the dial on toxic content for a little while. Which raises some questions: Facebook has a toxic-content dial? If so, which level is it set at on a typical day?” Facebook’s claimed “marketplace” justification for hosting harmful content is incompatible with this reality in which it exercises absolute power to “turn down” – or up – the dial on such content.

This is not to say that such algorithmic organization of content is inherently malign – indeed, it is absolutely necessary to sort through the unimaginable volume of content generated each day on the internet. But if, as Zuckerberg has claimed, “the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us,” then Facebook’s current echo-chambered design is a barrier, not an asset, to that progress.

When a Government Official Speaks

Arguments about Facebook’s regulation of speech – whether through algorithmic design or content and user moderation policies – form the backdrop of the more specific debate on how Facebook should regulate the speech of government officials, politicians, and candidates, including former President Trump. In this context, Facebook has generally argued for leaving posts up – even when they may violate Facebook policies – citing citizens’ rights to hear what their leaders are saying. Indeed, in 2019, Facebook publicly committed to leaving up posts from politicians, including elected and appointed officials as well as candidates, even if they violated the company’s Community Standards. They reversed the policy in June 2020, announcing that they would affix labels to content from politicians that violated their policies, and remove hate speech and voter suppression content, even from politicians.

The Trump case highlights the contradictory implications of political speech by government officials on Facebook that violates Facebook policies. In both its referral and the original decision to suspend his account, Facebook makes reference to the likelihood of Trump inciting violence while noting the right of populations to access the statements of their leaders. The official rationale for referring the case to the FOB references this tension:

We have taken the view that in open democracies people have a right to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can be held to account. But it has never meant that politicians can say whatever they like. They remain subject to our policies banning the use of our platform to incite violence. It is these policies that were enforced when we took the decision to suspend President Trump’s access. (emphasis added).

These two factors give rise to competing conclusions:

Position 1: Government officials’ posts should be left up – perhaps even if violative of some standards – to give their constituents access to their statements. The Knight Institute alludes to this position in their submission on the Trump case, arguing:

The heavy presumption in favor of political speech is especially important with respect to political leaders, many of whom don’t have access to the kinds of alternative media platforms that a U.S. president does. Facebook should remove political leaders’ speech only as a last resort because access to that speech is vital to the public’s ability to understand and evaluate government policy, and to the public’s ability to hold political leaders accountable for their decisions.

Position 2: Government officials’ posts should be closely monitored for compliance with Facebook’s Community Standards – or perhaps held to higher standards given their increased capacity to influence public action including potential violence – and should be taken down if close to the line. Some have recommended that Facebook gauge its moderation decisions by a completely different standard when evaluating politicians’ statements: “Preserving democratic accountability, especially free and fair elections, should be the standard by which Facebook judges the expression of the politicians that use its platform.”

The Oversight Board has implicitly recognized at least a mild version of this latter position, stating in its decision to overrule Facebook’s takedown of a post with the potential to incite violence: “The user not appearing to be a state actor or a public figure or otherwise having particular influence over the conduct of others, was also significant.” Implicitly, then, the Board might apply a higher standard to the posts of public figures, including perhaps the president of the United States, compared to ordinary users when assessing whether speech with the potential to incite violence, or undermine democratic processes, will stay up or be taken down.

A separate consideration in balancing the response to speech that violates community standards is the availability of alternative speech outlets. Facebook’s dominance, along with that of a few other tech giants such as Twitter and Google, means that individual speakers banned from these platforms may have few other options for engaging in public speech. Government officials, on the other hand, often have independent access to powerful platforms to express their ideas, making their access to Facebook less crucial for either their right to free expression or their constituents’ right to access their statements. However, as illustrated by recent statements issued by Trump since his removal from most social media sites (and since leaving government office with its attendant public platform), substitute methods of communication may not have quite the same impact, especially for an opposition leader.

Finally, the appropriate response to community standard-violating speech by political leaders may depend in part on the robustness of media independence in each particular political context. In contexts where independent media is curtailed or lacks a tradition of challenging official narratives, the right to access politicians’ statements directly may be of even greater importance. Likewise, in environments dominated by state-run media, the right of the public to access the direct statements of leaders, including controversial ones, is of increased importance in assessing government actions. Yet in the same context, the potential for leaders’ statements to incite violence may be greater, as they are less likely to be challenged, contextualized, or factchecked by independent media.

Assessing the Oversight Board’s Decision

In its decision on whether to uphold or overturn Facebook’s ban on Trump, the Oversight Board must grapple with these competing considerations not just with regard to Trump himself, but as applied to government officials, politicians, and opposition leaders around the world. Since the Trump ban, Facebook has taken steps to ban other political leaders and parties with the aim of preventing offline harm and incitement to violence. For example, since the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar, Facebook has expanded its existing ban on the Myanmar military, its leaders, and any “military-controlled state and media entities… as well as ads from military-linked commercial entities.” As in the Trump ban case, Facebook cited “emergency” conditions to explain its suspension of the relevant accounts. In the Oversight Board’s decision on the Trump ban, it must grapple with the precedent that would be set by overturning an emergency account suspension in the context of an attempted insurrection – or a military coup. If it upholds the ban, on the other hand, it must consider the precedent set by explaining restrictions on free expression with reference to “emergency” conditions, as determined by Facebook.

Likewise, in evaluating the Board’s ruling, the public should consider the impact not just on a particularly polarizing U.S. political figure, but also on what platforms are available to government leaders and opposition figures and the impact of that access on citizens’ rights to hear from these leaders. Given the considerations outlined above, including availability of alternative platforms and independent media, it may be that the right of the public to hear (as opposed to the right of an individual to speak) provides a more compelling lens through which to assess the merits of content moderation policies.

However, balancing these expression rights against real world harms requires making moral choices not dictated by either international human rights law or First Amendment jurisprudence. We must recognize that these choices are already being made, through explicit content regulation and takedowns but also through decisions about the algorithms that determine the reach of speech. Both Facebook and the Oversight Board must grapple honestly with these moral questions. They – and we – cannot duck the responsibility for these moral choices with references to human rights or constitutional laws that do not answer these thorny questions.

[Editor’s note: Readers may also be interested in Rebecca Hamilton’s De-platforming Following Capitol Insurrection Highlights Global Inequities Behind Content Moderation]

Image: Then-President Donald Trump waits during a commercial break of a Fox News virtual town hall “America Together: Returning to Work,” event from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on May 3, 2020. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

The post The Facebook Oversight Board’s Trump Ban Decision Is About More Than Trump appeared first on Just Security.

The Investigation  

Nine days after the Aug. 4, 2020 blast, military court judge Fadi Sawan was appointed by the Supreme Judicial Council, Lebanon’s judicial oversight body, to lead the probe. In carrying out the investigation, Sawan had to determine the causes of the explosion, including the origin of the ammonium nitrate, the reason for its continued presence in the port, the failure to secure it, and the cause of the fire that ultimately ignited it. Between August and early December, Sawan charged 37 people in connection with the blast. The vast majority were port officials and other low-level government employees. According to a recent Human Rights Watch investigation, at least 25 have been detained in violation of their basic due process rights.

However, on Dec. 10, 2020, Sawan issued four key indictments. He charged acting Prime Minister Hassan Diab and three former ministers — two of whom are current sitting members of parliament — with criminal negligence. These two former ministers challenged the indictments and requested Sawan’s dismissal, arguing that their parliamentary immunity invalidated any charges against them. Sawan’s probe was suspended a week later. After a two-month standstill, Sawan was set to resume his investigation with the approval of the judicial chamber overseeing it. But on Feb. 18, one day after one of the indicted ministers again refused to appear before him, the panel of judges from Lebanon’s highest court abruptly reversed course, removing Sawan from the investigation.

The court provided no public justification for its decision, but journalists obtained the legal documents which revealed a two-part rationale. First, the court claimed that Sawan could not be impartial because his house, located in the Ashrafiyeh neighborhood of central Beirut, was damaged in the blast. Second, the court said there were reasons to suspect Sawan was not impartial and instead was unduly influenced by public opinion because of his refusal to respect a red line: the legal immunity claimed by officials and former officials.

Both of the reasons have been widely criticized: The blast, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, damaged the homes of hundreds of thousands of people. What’s more, the claimed immunity of the officials and ex-officials so far implicated by Sawan is at best constitutionally disputed, if not wholly non-existent or inapplicable here (more on that below).

Sawan’s appointment, investigation, and then dismissal are a microcosm of the Lebanese judiciary, where attempts to hold powerful interests to account typically wither on the vine. But how and why do the Lebanese political elite evade accountability so consistently?

The Lebanese Judiciary: A Study in Patronage Politics

 In theory, Lebanon’s judiciary is an independent, coordinate branch of government. Instead, the patronage politics and corruption that characterize the rest of Lebanese institutions also pervade the judiciary. To understand why government-led efforts at political accountability and judicial review – the Beirut blast investigation included – tend to be exercises in futility, it is important to first understand how the judiciary’s very structure promotes impunity.

The Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) sits as an oversight body atop Lebanon’s judicial system (though not at the pinnacle of appellate jurisdiction; its role is administrative). The SJC’s powers include approving judicial appointments, promotions, and transfers in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice; undertaking disciplinary actions and monitoring court performance; and proposing judicial reforms.

However, unlike in other countries (such as France, the United Kingdom, and South Africa) with similar judicial oversight and appointment bodies, the SJC lacks financial independence and the executive branch exerts direct control over appointments to the council itself. Only two of the council’s ten members are directly elected by judges; the rest are chosen by the executive. The SJC wields enormous power over appointments and discipline for other courts, allowing it to ensure that the rest of the judiciary operates in a way that does not threaten the political status quo.

In large part because of the appointment scheme, Lebanon’s numerous courts are all vulnerable to political influence. This jumble of courts includes, at the trial level, distinct courts for civil, criminal, and commercial matters, as well as labor, land, administrative, and juvenile courts. At the appellate level, there are six appellate courts (one for each district of Lebanon). The court of last instance is the Court of Cassation (the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court). There is also a dedicated constitutional court to evaluate the constitutionality of legislation, religious practices, and election-related disputes, but citizens lack standing in this court.

Instead, if citizens want to bring suit against the government, they should be able to do so in Lebanon’s parallel administrative courts. However, the country’s trial-level administrative courts have yet to be formed due to a failure by the Ministry of Justice and State Council Bureau to issue implementing decisions.

As a result, the administrative court of last resort, the State Shura Council (also known as the State Council or the State Consultative Council), has been presiding over empty air for twenty years. The State Council additionally fulfills both an advisory and an adjudicative role, meaning that it at turns provides legal advice to the government and decides lawsuits brought against the government by other parties.

For family law matters like custody and divorce, an array of religious tribunals have exclusive jurisdiction: Each of Lebanon’s 15 recognized sectarian groups maintains its own personal status law. Military courts, which are only authorized to try military and security personnel and cases relating to terrorism and national security, have nevertheless long played a role in prosecuting civilian dissidents and protesters.

Across the tangled expanse of the judiciary, judges’ careers are subject to extensive political gatekeeping and interference. To become a judge, candidates must pass both a written and an oral exam. But to even sit for the written exam, candidates must first pass through two rounds of interviews. At every stage, the SCJ and a separate entity, the Judicial Studies Board (whose composition is entirely controlled by the executive), possess broad discretion to reject candidates they dislike without proffering a substantial reason.

During a three-year training period at the Institute for Judicial Studies, trainee judges’ career prospects rise or fall based on evaluations by the Board and the SJC. The SJC has total discretion in deciding which trainees to elevate to full, tenured judges. This decision is not subject to appeal. Predictably, these layers of gatekeeping have produced a judiciary filled with judges who have connections to the political elite. A 2018 study by the Lebanese human rights NGO Legal Agenda found that one-ninth of all judges were children of judges. In 2016 alone, of 17 total appointments, six were children of judges and three of those six were children of SJC members.

Sectarian power-sharing norms further complicate the picture. The SJC, as with other top government positions, must be equally balanced between Muslim and Christian members, in accordance with the Ta’if Agreement. Although the rest of the judiciary has no legally codified sectarian quotas, the unwritten norm of sectarian power-sharing retains immense force: The Lebanese judiciary maintains a 50-50 Muslim-Christian split. This makes it even more difficult for qualified candidates to be appointed, since vacant seats carry implicit sectarian labels.

Even after appointment, the SJC retains the discretion to dismiss judges from their duties at any time, with minimal process. Judges are also subject to transfer to other jurisdictions or courts without their consent and with no clear justification. These transfers are a favorite tactic of retaliation against judges who cross political leaders.

The Lebanese judiciary also lacks avenues for meaningful accountability and disciplinary action against judges. Once again, the minister of justice and the cabinet exercise appointment powers over both investigatory and disciplinary bodies. As a result, political actors can drive spurious disciplinary proceedings against judges they want to punish, and judges who have engaged in misconduct at the behest of these same actors face no consequences.

Thus, the apparently impartial judiciary is, in fact, subject to complete financial, administrative, and disciplinary control of the other branches of government. In this way, the judiciary plays a key role in sustaining the political apparatus, providing a veneer of impartiality and legitimacy while entrenching elite political interests and incentives.

The Warlords’ Bargain

The corruptibility of the judicial system is no accident. Instead, the convoluted structure of the judiciary complements the structure of the rest of the political system – in that it facilitates impunity at the highest levels and protects those who have retained power in the aftermath of Lebanon’s civil war.

The post-civil war era in Lebanon began with a grand bargain to wipe slates clean of the varied atrocities committed by all sides to the conflict. The Ta’if Agreement was signed in October 1989, largely ending the active civil conflict. In March 1991, (some of) the many militias of the civil war disarmed. And in late August 1991, the Lebanese parliament voted to grant a blanket amnesty for crimes committed in the course of the 15-year war, including both political offenses and war crimes.

However, the end of the war did not signify a return of the state. Instead, the ceasefire and amnesty enabled the transformation of war-time systems of distribution into political and quasi-legitimate patronage networks. Describing the civil war-era governance structures, sociologists John Nagle and Mary-Alice Clancy observe:

In the absence of a functioning state, the warlords nurtured forms of governance that covered their sectarian fiefdoms. The sectarian militias constructed their own spheres of civil society to distribute a wide portfolio of services for the communities they claimed to defend. Practically everything – ranging from medical care, education, refuse and postal collection, the supply of gas and electricity, to even childcare – became subject to the purview of the sectarian militias. By providing basic services, the militias exploited the situation to extend coercive control over their war-weary communities.

Rather than surrender these “fiefdoms” upon the cessation of hostilities or integrate them into the state, civil war-era leaders largely retained their personal, sectarian control over social services and state functions and, with their newly minted impunity for wartime offenses, transformed their civil war constituencies into political clients.

And it was not just the abstract clientelist strategies that persisted after the war. The very same individuals who commanded these domains during the war transformed themselves into the heads of state, trading their fatigues for suits.

Thus, the distribution of social goods – including access to justice, as well as careers in the judiciary – flowed along the same clientelist channels as other social services during and after the war. The allocation of discretion within the Lebanese judicial system is designed to both ensure control by the same cadre of leaders (by concentrating control of the judiciary in the executive, which is itself allocated among these warlords) and to reward and punish its constituents – lawyers, judges, and citizens seeking justice – according to their placement within this system of power.

Impunity in Law and Practice

The warlords not only dodged consequences for their past crimes. In the process of molting from militia commanders to presidents and ministers, they granted themselves immunity from prosecution or accountability for future offenses too.

Politicians enjoy layers of protection from accountability. Parliamentary immunity from criminal arrest or prosecution extends to all current members of parliament except in cases where the person is caught in the commission of a crime (in flagrante delicto), and that immunity can be lifted only by vote of parliament itself (Lebanese Constitution, Art. 39-40). This immunity is explicitly limited in text to current members of Parliament (MPs): “No Chamber member may be prosecuted or arrested, during the session, for committing a crime, unless authorized by the Chamber, except in case he is caught in the act” (emphasis added), and perhaps only then to the time of year when Parliament is actively in session.

The president is likewise immune from prosecution during his term (as is the case in many systems). The constitution specifies an impeachment process in cases of violations of the constitution or treason by the president, but notes that charges for these – or for ordinary crimes – require approval from a two-thirds majority of parliament (Art. 60). Again, the text suggests that this immunity extends only as long as the president holds office: “While performing his functions, the President of the Republic cannot be accountable [except for impeachable constitutional violations or treason]” (emphasis added).

In contrast, the constitution affirms that both the prime minister and members of the cabinet can be impeached for treason or violation of their duties by parliament, but it does not include any limiting language indicating that they enjoy immunity from ordinary criminal or civil charges either in office or after (Art. 70). Nor does the constitution suggest that consent of parliament would be required to bring criminal charges against a sitting member of the cabinet. Commentators argue that the absence of any specific language on immunity from ordinary criminal charges, especially in light of Article 60’s explicit presidential immunity, strongly suggests that no such immunity applies to ministers including the prime minister. Nevertheless, ministers continue to claim immunity from any criminal responsibility. Even former ministers claim immunity. A specialized tribunal – composed of seven current MPs and eight judges – has jurisdiction to try ministers and presidents accused of impeachable offenses, but has yet to hold any ministers or presidents to account.

It is notable that in all cases of constitutional protection from prosecution, the text is either silent or strongly implies that the immunity lapses upon leaving office, yet former ministers, MPs, and prime ministers unanimously claim continued immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office.

The effects of these formal immunities are amplified further by their indeterminacy and the political power involved in their interpretation. Efforts to hold politicians to account are often defeated by these technical provisions which are deployed as shields to diffuse scrutiny even when the law does not clearly provide immunity.

“Red Lines”

Not only are these forces of elite impunity at least partially to blame for the deadly port explosion, they have also emerged to doom – for now – the investigation. Sawan charged the three former ministers and the country’s caretaker prime minister, who resigned days after the explosion amid public fury, with criminal negligence in relation to the blast. But the former ministers uniformly resisted the charges, not just claiming their factual innocence but citing their supposed ministerial immunity. Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab acquiesced to be interviewed as a witness in September, but objected strenuously to the idea that a former prime minister could be criminally charged, rejecting the charges as “politically targeting the position of prime minister” and accusing Sawan of violating the constitution by charging him directly instead of referring the charges to parliament. His line of argument, it should be noted, ignores the fact that the prime minister is not afforded immunity from ordinary criminal charges under the constitution – even less so, former prime ministers.

Nevertheless, Diab was joined in these critiques by a cadre of former prime ministers and other political rivals. This solidarity marked an abrupt (and self-serving) departure from past relationships between Diab and other recent prime ministers and political elite, who had regarded the caretaker minister as an outsider since his designation.

On Feb. 18, these objections seemingly won out. Sawan was dismissed.

The Battle for Accountability

Yet this win for political impunity may not be permanent. Despite fears that Sawan’s dismissal would allow indefinite postponement of the blast probe, direct action led by victims and their families forced an uncharacteristically swift response from the government. Within hours of the announcement of Sawan’s removal, families of the victims staged a protest and sit-in in front of the Ministry of Justice, expressing their rage and pain. The SJC appointed Tarek Bitar – the head of Beirut’s criminal court – as new lead investigator the next day.

Bitar’s swift appointment may signal that the political establishment feared stronger backlash from further delay of the investigation. But it remains to be seen whether Bitar can fulfill the demands of victims and of justice. In the aftermath of Sawan’s dismissal, the families of blast victims outlined three central demands for the investigation: (1) that the new judicial investigator possess both integrity and courage, emphasizing that integrity alone is not sufficient; (2) that the investigator be independent and not affiliated with any political party; (3) that a special assistant to the investigator be appointed in order to speed up the process.

This local struggle for accountability is nothing new. Civil society organizations and activists’ calls – for specific, granular policy and legislative changes, as well as much more expansive, structural transformation – date back decades. These demands include changes to address the three sources of corruption: the lack of judicial independence, the warlords’ bargain, and official immunity.

When it comes to the judiciary, a coalition of human rights organizations, unions, and professional associations has identified a shortlist of priorities for reform: full financial independence for the SJC (and other bodies in charge of judicial appointments, training, and discipline); political independence for these bodies (replacing the executive’s role in appointing members with direct voting by judges’ peers); safeguards for judges (including changes to the tenure structure and implementing protections from involuntary transfers); and transparency in training, selections, and discipline. Draft legislation incorporating these reforms, developed by Legal Agenda from 2014-2018, remains pending before a parliamentary committee.

Efforts to unseat the warlords and their allies reached a peak in 2019 with unprecedented protests in which the ubiquitous cry “Kelon ya’ane kelon” (All of them means all of them) was used to signify opposition to the entire entrenched political class. So far, however, these extraordinary protests have not managed to shake the foundations of power. On Oct. 22, 2020, five days after the anniversary of the start of the protests, which unseated him the year before, Saad Hariri was once again designated as prime minister.

Meanwhile, local organizations have continued to question the extent of official immunity. Local human rights watchdog Legal Agenda notes favorable precedents for narrowly interpreting constitutional grants of immunity. Proposals to curtail financial corruption have elicited similar legal interpretations suggesting that immunity is not absolute, especially for ministers. Yet officials have aggressively resisted these efforts, including by quietly killing legislation that would voluntarily lift immunity in some cases as well as seeking new forms of impunity through vague amnesty laws.

Although Bitar has been appointed as Sawan’s replacement, this is far from a guarantee that the probe will be allowed to proceed without further interference. Bitar has a reputation for relative political independence from his time as head of Beirut’s criminal court, but his position on “red lines” surrounding immunity remains unclear. Civil society and human rights organizations are watching his next steps closely. For their part, families of the blast victims have made it abundantly clear that they are prepared to escalate in the future if the political class derails the investigation again, and the fate of the investigation will serve as an indicator – to the Lebanese and international communities alike – of the prospects for justice and rule of law in Lebanon.

Image: The State Council building in downtown Beirut on Oct. 29, 2019 at the height of protests against Lebanon’s ruling class. Banners unfurled from its windows contain pro-revolutionary slogans. Photo by Tess Graham

The post “Red Lines” in Beirut Blast Investigation: How Exactly Lebanese Politicians Escape Accountability appeared first on Just Security.

The key national security takeaways from her confirmation hearing for the position, which Biden has returned to Cabinet-level rank, include:

China

The overwhelming focus of the hearing was on China. Thomas-Greenfield answered questions on balancing U.S. relations with mainland China and Taiwan; the characterization of Chinese treatment of the Uyghur minority as genocide; countering Chinese influence in U.N. agencies; working with China in the Security Council and on areas of mutual concern; competing for economic dominance; providing an alternative to Chinese influence in Africa and other developing countries; and, most persistently, on an Oct. 2019 speech that she gave at the Savannah State University chapter of the Confucius Institute, the controversial and powerful Chinese cultural institution.

Thomas-Greenfield expressed regret for having accepted the invitation. She noted that she did so as a favor to Savannah State University, a historically Black university (HBCU), where she hoped to inspire Black students to consider careers in the Foreign Service. She said her experience on campus rang alarm bells about the activities of Confucius Institutes in the United States, the extent of which she said she had not realized, having primarily seen their work in Africa. The Trump administration in August required the center that manages such institutes in the United States to register as a foreign mission, and the institute at Savannah closed last year.

Although some senators (notably, Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX) repeatedly returned to the speech to question Thomas-Greenfield’s judgment and integrity, a bipartisan majority of senators seemed to be satisfied with her explanation. She said she supports the Senate’s investigations and legislation on the Confucius Institute’s operations in the United States and reiterated her concern, expressed in her public statements since 2007, about China’s growing influence in Africa and around the world.

Drawing on her speech, several senators asked the nominee’s views on China and its relationship to the United States more broadly. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) questioned a line in the speech in which Thomas-Greenfield asserted “we are not in a new Cold War,” asking, “What do you think the situation is between China and the United States right now if we’re not in a cold war?” Thomas-Greenfield answered that her characterization in the speech was meant “not to refer to the U.S. and China, but to Africa’s relationship with the U.S. and China,” and that she sought to contrast Africa’s position as a “pawn” in the Cold War with its situation now.

In subsequent discussion, Thomas-Greenfield characterized China as “a strategic adversary,” and stated, “Their actions threaten our security, they threaten our values, and they threaten our way of life, and they are a threat to their neighbors, and they are a threat across the globe.” She later elaborated, “China has engaged in gross human rights violations and has authoritarian ambitions that go against our democratic values.”

Johnson also asked about the U.S. role in defending Taiwan. Thomas-Greenfield voiced support for Taiwan as “one of the strongest democracies in the region.” She said the United States should “provide them with the security they need to push against any efforts by the Chinese to compromise their security.” However, the nominee deferred to “the powers who make those kinds of decisions,” on questions of weapons sales to Taiwan, though she suggested support for “providing them with the wherewithal to also support their own security.”

Thomas-Greenfield was asked repeatedly for her view on China’s treatment of Uyghurs, including the State Department’s determination in the waning hours of the Trump administration that China’s actions constitute genocide. Thomas-Greenfield replied:

What they’re doing there has been referred to as genocide, and I know that the State Department is reviewing that as we speak. What they’re doing is horrific, and I look forward to seeing the results of the review that’s being done… I think the State Department is reviewing that now because all the procedures were not followed.

She later clarified, in response to Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), that her reticence to classify the treatment as genocide was out of a desire to ensure that the procedures for such designation had been followed, not a dispute about evidence: “What is happening with the Uyghurs is horrendous. And we have to recognize it for what it is.”

Iran and the Nuclear Agreement

On the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with Iran by the United States, the European Union, France, Germany, Russia, and China, Thomas-Greenfield reaffirmed the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and noted that “over the past four years, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of backtracking since we pulled out of the [JCPOA] agreement.” In addition to working with allies to revive the agreement, which the U.N. Security Council supported in Resolution 2231, Thomas-Greenfield said the United States should find common ground with non-allied Security Council members, especially Russia and China, to get Iran back into “strict compliance” with the JCPOA and other limitations. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said the Biden administration should carefully consider the conditions on the ground in Iran before deciding whether to reverse Trump’s policies of maximum pressure, though he expressed willingness to work with the new administration on a change in policy.

Israel

Aside from China, U.S. relations with Israel – and the relationship between Israel and the U.N. – attracted the most attention. Senators from both parties decried repeated condemnation of Israel by U.N. human rights mechanisms and asked the nominee about her position on the issue. She reiterated the Biden administration’s position that the United States and Israel will remain strong allies, united by shared interests and shared values. “I look forward to working closely with the Israeli embassy, with the Israeli ambassador to work to bolster Israel’s security and to expand economic opportunities for Israelis and Americans alike and [to] widen the circle of peace,” she said. “Israel has no closer friend than the United States.”

Asked specifically about the boycott, divest, sanction (BDS) movement to pressure Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians, Thomas-Greenfield criticized the tactic: “I find the actions and the approach that BDS has taken toward Israel unacceptable. It verges on anti-Semitism, and it is important that they not be allowed to have a voice at the United Nations, and I intend to work very strongly against that.” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo similarly labeled the movement anti-Semitic during an unprecedented visit to an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank in November. Thomas-Greenfield indicated that she would work with Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) on their bill to pressure Arab countries to fully normalize relations with Israel.

On the Abraham Accords, the nominee expressed cautious optimism that the agreements could provide new ground for engagement between Israel and Arab neighbors:

I see the Abraham Accords as offering us an opportunity to work in a different way with the countries who have recognized Israel. As I mentioned earlier, we need to push those countries to change their approach at the United Nations. If they’re going to recognize Israel in the Abraham Accords, they need to recognize Israel’s rights at the United Nations. And I will use my perch if I’m confirmed as the U.N. ambassador to push them on this effort. I intend to work closely with the Israeli ambassador [and] with my colleagues across the globe. This is not just an issue in New York, but also pushing our colleagues to address these issues with their countries bilaterally so that we can get a better recognition of Israel in New York.

U.N. Reforms

Thomas-Greenfield cited concern with the operations of U.N. agencies, including the pressure placed on Israel by some human rights bodies and Chinese efforts to expand their U.N. influence. She explained that participation in the international system is key to countering this influence: “First and foremost, we need to be there. President Biden indicated that we will run to rejoin the Human Rights Council … If we’re on the outside, we have no voice…”

She said countering Chinese influence would be her “highest priority,” including in the Security Council, by collaborating with allies and “calling out” Chinese efforts to “bring a set of values to the United Nations that does not fit the organization that we all support.” She identified the previous administration’s approach of unilateral attempts to reform these structures as “one of the failings” of the administration.

Thomas-Greenfield also emphasized the need for the United States to pay its dues to the U.N. in order to retain its voice in international organizations. On Security Council reform, she expressed openness to restructuring, potentially to include increasing the number of members or creating permanent seats for Japan, Germany, or India.

Yemen

Yemen received brief but detailed discussion. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) asked Thomas-Greenfield her views on the next steps towards peace in Yemen, noting that the most recent Security Council resolution on Yemen, from 2015, is outdated and no longer reflects the reality on the ground. He also noted Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s reiteration of Biden’s commitment to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign there. Although she agreed with the urgent need for action and committed to reviewing the relevant Security Council resolution, Thomas-Greenfield did not specifically commit to seek a new resolution:

Let me start by saying the situation in Yemen is horrific. It is one of the worst humanitarian crises that we’re facing right now. We need to aggressively move forward to address finding a negotiated solution to this situation. Yemen is being used by both the Saudis and the Iranians who have contributed to the war. And so I think it is incumbent on us in New York, if I’m confirmed, to address this issue at the Security Council.

Russia

Russia was mentioned only a handful of times, in contrast to the overwhelming attention on China. Indeed, many of the questions and answers that referenced Russia lumped it in with China as a challenging Security Council member and strategic adversary.

The most substantive discussion of Russia was with Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who referenced mass demonstrations against the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.  Navalny was detained upon his return from Germany to Moscow on Jan. 17 after months of treatment following his poisoning in Russia last year with a chemical agent linked to the Kremlin. Thomas-Greenfield emphasized the need for skilled diplomacy to counter Russian action:

It’s clear to us that Russian actions against the U.S. have been aggressive and adversarial. And we do have to respond aggressively to their actions. At the same time, we have to find a way to work with them in the Security Council on issues where we have common interest. I will look forward to working with them on issues, for example, to address the situation in Iran, but I will not hesitate in my engagements with them, to press them on tough issues, such as their interference in our election, such as their cyberattacks against the United States, and their own human rights violations, including what happened with Navalny.

Other Topics

Thomas-Greenfield, a former U.S. ambassador to Liberia who previously served in U.S. embassies in Nigeria, Kenya, Pakistan, The Gambia, and Jamaica, noted that she also worked extensively on humanitarian issues in the State Department, including as deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. She stated that bolstering refugee protections worldwide is a high priority; she agreed with senators on the need to press for increased cross-border aid to reach rebel-held areas of Syria; and she reiterated the Biden administration’s intent to work with the WHO, which the United States has rejoined under Biden.

On North Korea, Thomas-Greenfield stressed the need to reengage with allies: “This is not something we can do alone, and this is, I think, one of the biggest failings of the Trump administration is that they did try to go it alone and our allies were left kind of holding the bag.” She noted the need to also engage with China and Russia on North Korea to increase the efficacy of sanctions.

On climate change, several senators highlighted the multifaceted threat, noting related increases in conflict, migration, and refugee flows. Thomas-Greenfield affirmed that she is looking forward to working with John Kerry, whom Biden has appointed as special presidential envoy for climate, and that he and the president have initiated plans to hold a climate conference as soon as April.

The Gaps

Nearly as notable as what was discussed were the topics that received little to no attention.

Despite frequent references to the nominee’s long career – and to Africa in general – the senators did not actually engage with African issues, the centerpiece of Thomas-Greenfield’s expertise. The nominee served most recently as assistant secretary for the Bureau of African Affairs under the Obama administration (2013-2017). She was ambassador to Liberia from 2008-2012 and held postings in multiple other U.S. embassies, including others on the continent, as well as at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in Geneva.

Yet discussion of Africa was cursory except as it relates to China, Chinese influence, and strategic competition with China. Thomas-Greenfield discussed the dynamics of Chinese investment and influence in Africa:

Much of the time that I spent on the continent of Africa was spent making the case to African countries about why they should partner on economic growth with the United States [instead of China]… [Chinese investment] has not worked for Africans. And it has not worked in the same way that the Chinese would have expected. I have seen an increased amount of activity, but where they have failed is Africans still prefer, if possible, to work with the United States. We need to take advantage of that sentiment and be more proactive in our engagements. When they have a choice, they choose us… So if I’m confirmed, one of the areas I intend to work aggressively on is engaging with my colleagues on trying to address some of the issues they’re facing in dealing with the Chinese and pushing a more proactive engagement by the United States with Africa.

Yet the diverse issues facing Africa, including democratic struggles, climate change, migration, brain drain, youth unemployment, tropical and communicable diseases, burgeoning creative and technology industries, and even counterterrorism received scant mention – despite the nominee’s urging that Africa not be treated as, or allow itself to be, a pawn of the United States and China. Thomas-Greenfield did express concern over the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia and desertification in regions bordering the Sahara.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was not mentioned at all. Although the Court is not an organ of the United Nations, it is part of the architecture of international law and interacts with the U.N.; for example, cases can be referred to the Court by the Security Council. Moreover, the Trump administration left office in the midst of an ongoing feud with the Court over investigations into alleged crimes by U.S. persons in Afghanistan – a feud which culminated in sanctions on ICC personnel and threatened penalties for others who engage with the Court. The Biden administration is currently reviewing how to rebalance relations with the ICC. The Court’s complete absence from the discussion was, therefore, notable.

Also absent from the hearing was any mention of Palestine or Palestinians, despite the extensive discussions of Israel.

Image: Linda Thomas-Greenfield appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on her nomination to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 27, 2021. (Photo by GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The post Biden’s UN Nominee Thomas-Greenfield Awaits Vote After Questioning on China, Iran, Israel and More appeared first on Just Security.

 On Dec. 16, the President of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Munir Akram said the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines would be an “acid test” for the international community. Akram argued that vaccines must be seen as a “global public good” accessible to everyone. Akram is also Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.N., and he said, “Certainly we as developing countries, as international actors here at the United Nations, we must press for this equity.”

Akram called on countries to support the vaccine sharing platform COVAX, and this week World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus urged countries to close the funding gap for COVAX. He said COVAX had an immediate need of $4.3 billion to support vaccines for needy countries. According to Dr. Tedros, COVAX hopes to deliver two billion doses by the end of 2021, and COVAX has currently secured one billion doses.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO Director-General and head of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, also urged funding for his initiative. The ACT Accelerator has a broader focus than COVAX, with the coalition overseeing the production, development, and distribution of therapeutics and diagnostics in addition to vaccines. Aylward called for $28 billion in funding. He said, “This is the best deal in town. No question. This will pay itself off within 36 hours, once we get international travel and trade mobility moving again.”

Syria Chemical Weapons Declaration “Cannot be Considered Accurate and Complete”

On Dec. 11, after several fact-finding missions in October and November were unable to make conclusive findings on the status of chemical weapons in Syria, Fernando Arias, Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said that Syria’s declarations on its chemical weapons program and stockpile were insufficient. “Considering the gaps, inconsistencies and discrepancies that remain unresolved, the declaration submitted by Syria still cannot be considered accurate and complete,” he said. OPCW recently conducted Fact-Finding Missions on the alleged use of chemical weapons in Aleppo in 2018 and Saraqib in 2016. The missions said that they were unable to establish whether chemical weapons had been used with the information available to them.

On Dec. 16, U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock told the Security Council that Syrians “remain without respite after almost a decade of conflict.” Lowcock noted high levels of economic distress and food insecurity. 80% of displaced Syrian families say their income does not cover their needs and 37% of displaced mothers are malnourished. Further, while there has been limited COVID testing to assess the virus’s spread in Syria, Lowcock said that hospital beds are full with COVID patients.

Compounding Humanitarian Crises in Lebanon Leave 9 of 10 Refugee Households in Extreme Poverty

On Friday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released the preliminary results of its yearly Vulnerability Assessment of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon. The survey found a “sharp increase in the proportion of households living under the extreme poverty line, reaching a staggering 89 per cent in 2020, up from 55 per cent only a year before.” These households live on less than 300,000 LBP per month – at current real exchange rates, the equivalent of less than 40 USD per month. Debt levels among refugees have also increased in the last year, with many using debt to pay for essentials such as food and rent.

UNHCR and the World Bank reported on Thursday that poverty and debt among Lebanese have climbed precipitously over the last year, with the rate of poverty up 33 percent among Lebanese. Steep and unpredictable inflation, ongoing economic crisis, political uncertainty, corruption, COVID-19 infections and lost wages due to associated lockdowns, and the massive Aug. 4 explosion at the Port of Beirut have all contributed to the escalating humanitarian emergency.

Human Rights Lawyering “Effectively Criminalized” in China

U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders Mary Lawlor issued a statement on Dec. 16 expressing “shock” at the treatment of human rights defenders and lawyers in China. Lawlor said “the profession of human rights lawyer has been effectively criminalized in China” since 2015, when China began using a law framed as a method of protecting national security to crack down on human rights defenders. Lawlor cited the case of human rights lawyer Chang Weiping, who was forcibly disappeared for ten days in January and whose law license was annulled. In October, he posted a video alleging he was tortured during his detention. He was detained again shortly after the video, and his whereabouts have remained unknown since his detention.

U.N. Rights Experts Express Concern with Charges for U.S. Indigenous Leader

Five U.N. Special Rapporteurs issued a statement on Tuesday expressing concern with the charges faced by Nicholas Tilsen. On July 4, Tilsen and others blocked a road to Mount Rushmore, where President Trump was holding a fireworks celebration. The protesters objected to the holding of the event without the consent of the Great Sioux Nation. A total of 15 protesters were arrested. Tilsen, a member of the Oglala-Lakhota Sioux Nation and president of the NDN Collective, is facing four felonies and three misdemeanors; an initial hearing in the case is scheduled for Dec. 18.

The Special Rapporteurs called on U.S. officials to ensure Tilsen’s due process rights are protected and voiced alarm over allegations of excessive force and intimidation by law enforcement officials in response to the protest. The Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, and the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights all signed the statement.

Guterres Calls for Declaration of Climate Emergency in All Countries

On Dec. 12, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Climate Ambition Summit that all countries should declare a climate emergency. Guterres asked, “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” 38 countries have already declared a climate emergency. Guterres also said it was “unacceptable” that G20 countries have invested more in fossil fuels than in low-carbon energy in their COVID recovery packages.

On Dec. 15, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) issued its annual Human Development Report, declaring that people and the planet are on a “collision course.” The report argues that humans have entered the “Age of the Anthropocene.” According to UNDP administrator Achim Steiner, this means that “we are the first people to live in an age defined by human choice, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.” The report introduced a new Planetary Pressures-Adjusted Human Development Index to take into account each country’s environmental impacts.

Libyan Ceasefire and Peace Talks Spur Economic Activity

On Dec. 14 and 15, representatives of Libyan civil society, economic institutions, and opposing parties met in Geneva to continue negotiations over a political resolution to the country’s nine-year conflict. The meeting came two months after a ceasefire and amid tentative signs of economic recovery. The head of the U.N. Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), Stephanie Williams, noted that “This meeting here in Geneva is taking place in the context of some positive developments on the economic track, including the full resumption of oil production.”  Revenues from oil production will be crucial for rebuilding the country, but reaching consensus on their distribution will present challenges for the negotiating parties.

In another positive sign, the Board of Directors of Libya’s central bank met on Wednesday for the first time in five years and agreed to unify the country’s currency exchange rate, which is expected to help stabilize the currency and reduce opportunities for corruption.

Guterres and UNICEF Call for Release of Children Abducted by Boko Haram

Secretary-General Guterres and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) both called for the immediate release of the Nigerian children recently abducted by Boko Haram. On Dec. 11, gunmen attacked the all-boys Government Science Secondary School in Kankara. More than three hundred children were declared missing. On Dec. 16, the Nigerian government announced that 17 of the children had been rescued but two students were killed in the operation. At least 344 of the abducted children were returned to authorities on Thursday night, to the jubilation and relief of their parents, but the total number of children initially abducted is not known; it is therefore not clear whether all have been returned.

On Dec. 15, the U.N. expressed concern for the safety of refugees and internally displaced people in Niger. Toumour, a town near the Nigerian border hosting 30,000 refugees and displaced people, was attacked by Boko Haram militants on Dec. 12, killing 28 people and burning down much of the town. Many of the refugees and displaced people have fled Toumour for Diffa, a town about 100 kilometers away that is already hosting about 46,000 refugees and displaced people.

Special Rapporteurs Call for Independent Investigation into Killing of Palestinian Child

On Thursday, two Special Rapporteurs issued a statement condemning the killing of a child at a protest in the occupied West Bank: “The killing of Ali Ayman Abu Aliya by the Israeli Defense Forces – in circumstances where there was no threat of death or serious injury to the Israeli Security Forces – is a grave violation of international law.” The 15-year-old child was shot in the stomach by an Israeli soldier on Dec. 4, and died in the hospital. He is the sixth Palestinian child killed by Israeli soldiers in 2020 and among more than 1,000 who have been injured this year, according to the U.N.

The U.N.’s Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) indicated that the protestors had thrown stones at the Israeli forces; the Special Rapporteurs said in their statement that they were “unaware of any claims that the Israeli security forces were in danger at any point of death or serious injury.” Israel has announced that it would launch an investigation into the killing, but the Special Rapporteurs noted that such investigations have rarely yielded charges or discipline: “This low level of legal accountability for the killings of so many children by Israeli security forces is unworthy of a country which proclaims that it lives by the rule of law.” The experts called for either an independent, transparent civilian investigation by Israel or an international investigation.

The statement was attributed to Agnès Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions; and to Michael Lynk, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

Image: On Dec. 16, Security Council members hold a videoconference in connection with the Middle East (Syria). (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

The post National Security This Week at the United Nations (Dec 11 – Dec 18) appeared first on Just Security.

Ethiopia’s security forces shot at and detained U.N. staffers as they tried to reach part of the embattled Tigray region on Sunday. The U.N. staffers were assessing civilian infrastructure, an essential step before aid convoys are sent in. Ethiopia’s government has confirmed that federal troops fired at U.N. staff: a spokesman for Ethiopia’s task force in Tigray stated Tuesday that the U.N. workers were attempting to gain access to areas “they were not supposed to go” adding that, “they indulged themselves in a kind of adventurous expedition.” The staffers have since been released.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the government’s statements “alarming” and said U.N. officials “are engaging at the highest level with the federal government to express our concerns and avoid any such incidents in the future.” The incident comes in the midst of ongoing conflict, which began with a November 4 ground and air offensive against the People’s Liberation Front in the Tigray region. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s office has pledged to work with the U.N. to expand humanitarian access under “a well-coordinated framework led by the federal government.”

On Dec. 11, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi issued a statement of alarm about the situation of refugees and displaced people in the Tigray region – particularly Eritrean refugees who have been caught in the crossfire.  He stated, “Over the last month we have received an overwhelming number of disturbing reports of Eritrean refugees in Tigray being killed, abducted and forcibly returned to Eritrea. If confirmed, these actions would constitute a major violation of international law.”

U.N Experts Concerned by Terrorism Trial of Al-Hathloul, Call for Her Release

The Chair and Vice Chair of the U.N. Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls called for the immediate release of human rights defender Loujain Al-Hathloul, whose trial before Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Terrorism Court began on Thursday. Al-Hathloul is an influential human rights activist advocating for the expansion of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, including the right to drive and to be free of male guardianship laws. She was arrested in 2018 and accused of breaching cybercrime restrictions, charges which many – including the U.N. experts in their statement Thursday – have described as “spurious.” The transfer of her case to the terrorism court in November raised alarm, given the nature of the charges and the court’s reputation for “issuing lengthy prison sentences following seriously flawed trials,” according to Amnesty International.

During her detention for the last two years, Al-Hathloul has not been allowed regular access to counsel or contact with her family, and has been subjected to abusive conditions of detention, according to the U.N. statement. In October 2020, she began a hunger strike to protest these conditions, but was forced to suspend the strike due to intense pressure – including sustained sleep deprivation – from authorities.

The U.N. Special Rapporteurs on the situation of Human Rights Defenders, on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association joined the Chair’s statement.

See further statement of the Special Rapporteurs on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism and on the situation of Human Rights Defenders on Just Security, here.

Sudan at “Critical Juncture” in Democratic Transition

U.N. political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told a virtual meeting of the Security Council on Tuesday that “Sudan is at a critical juncture … It is incumbent on all of us to support Sudan in its efforts to achieve democratic governance, economic prosperity and an inclusive society for all Sudanese.”

It has been nearly two years since the start of the Sudanese Revolution, which led to the overthrow of long-time leader, Omar Al-Bashir, in April 2019. A military-civilian body has ruled the country since then, pending elections. DiCarlo expressed concern over the growing impact of COVID-19 which has “further aggravated the humanitarian needs” which she noted were exacerbated by “severe flooding, intercommunal violence and prolonged displacement.” DiCarlo concluded her statements by noting the additional strain being put on Sudanese authorities due to the Tigray conflict which has resulted in over 48,000 people fleeing Ethiopia to Sudan.

Planet Heading for Global Temperature Rise Exceeding 3 Degrees C

The United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP)’s Emissions Gap Report 2020, released on Wednesday, urges investment in climate action as part of the COVID-19 recovery. Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director commented on Wednesday that a green recovery from COVID-19 can take “a huge slice out of greenhouse gas emissions.” The report urged Member States to take measures such as supporting zero-emissions technologies and infrastructure, reducing fossil fuel subsidies, stopping new coal plants, and promoting nature-based solutions – including large-scale landscape restoration and reforestation.

Secretary-General Highlights the Warnings Signs of Atrocities, Genocide

Guterres noted that victims of genocide and atrocities are often “early targets of hate speech, discrimination, [and] violence.” He called on social media platforms, technology companies, and social leaders to combat these warning signs, and urged governments to “guarantee civic space for human rights institutions and defenders…” and to protect the rights of the most vulnerable. The prevention of genocide is “foundational to the United Nations,” he added, noting that “victims have rights to truth, justice, reparation, and a comprehensive package of guarantees of non-recurrence.”

See further Just Security coverage of warnings signs of atrocity here.

U.N. Celebrates Human Rights Day

On Dec. 10, the United Nations (U.N.) marked the anniversary of the 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the U.N. General Assembly. The theme for 2020’s Human Rights Day is “Recover Better – Stand Up for Human Rights,” and U.N. officials used the occasion to call for a focus on human rights as the world battles and eventually recovers from COVID-19. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “universal, rights-based frameworks like health coverage for all, to beat this pandemic and protect us for the future.”

Image: Ethiopian refugees who fled the Tigray conflict, wait to fill their jerrycans with water at Um Raquba reception camp in Sudan’s eastern Gedaref state on December 3, 2020. – More than 45,000 people have escaped from northern Ethiopia since November 4, after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered military operations against leaders of Tigray’s ruling party in response to its alleged attacks on federal army camps.  (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)

The post National Security Last Week at the United Nations (Dec 4 – Dec 11) appeared first on Just Security.

A curated guide to major national security news and developments over the past 24 hours.

US GENERAL ELECTION

In a memo on Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence branch warned federal and state law enforcement that Russia has sought to amplify concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting is linked to significant fraud. The memo found with high confidence that Russian actors have sought to undermine confidence in absentee voting since March through disinformation about unaccounted for ballots, outdated voter rolls, and the risk that the U.S. Postal Service would be overwhelmed by widespread mail-in voting. The warning came one day after it was reported that DHS withheld a July bulletin warning of Russian misinformation regarding the mental health of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. President Donald Trump and administration officials have frequently repeated claims about the vulnerability of mail-in voting and Biden’s mental health. Josh Margolin and Lucien Bruggeman report for ABC News.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and 10 fellow Democratic senators sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin requesting immediate sanctions on individuals and agencies acting on behalf of Russia and other countries to interfere with the 2020 election. The letter references intelligence findings that Russia has promoted efforts to portray Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as mentally or physically unfit for office. The letter cited legislation and executive orders authorizing sanctions against those who seek to interfere with a U.S. election “as an agent or on behalf of a foreign government.” Tom Hamburger reports for the Washington Post.

Several social media companies, including Facebook, announced moves on Thursday to limit political advertising, misinformation, and confusion surrounding the November election. Facebook said that it would bar any new political ads on its site in the week before Election Day, and would strengthen enforcement measures against posts that seek to suppress voting. Facebook also announced that it plans to quash any attempts by candidates post-election to falsely claim victory or question the validity of results by redirecting users to accurate information. CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned of an increased risk of civil unrest in the wake of the election. Critics noted that the announcement does not address misinformation shared in private Facebook groups or in posts by users. Mike Isaac reports for the New York Times. 

Attorney General William Barr stated on Wednesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had indicted a man in Texas for fraudulently collecting, filling out, and submitting 1,700 mail-in ballots; however, prosecutors involved in the case said “That’s not what happened at all.” In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Barr argued that mail-in voting was “very open to fraud and coercion” and cited the Texas case as an instance of such fraud. The former prosecutors who handled the case said that the investigation of possible voter fraud had initially suspected up to 1,700 fraudulent ballots but had instead uncovered one instance of a man attempting to collect ballots door to door, possibly for later alteration by others. Lawyers involved in the case estimated that the man might have collected a maximum of 12 ballots in a day. A spokesperson for DOJ stated that Barr had relied on a memo prepared by DOJ staff when making his comments, and that the memo had contained “an inaccurate summary” of the case. Matt Zapotosky reports for the Washington Post.

A state-by-state guide for voting by mail and voting in person is provided by NBC News.

PROTESTS AND RACIAL INJUSTICE REFORM

On Thursday night, federal law enforcement agents shot and killed an apparent antifa supporter, Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, in an attempt to arrest him in the fatal shooting of a right-wing activist who was part of a pro-Trump caravan in Portland. “Initial reports indicate the suspect produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers. Task force members responded to the threat and struck the suspect who was pronounced dead at the scene,” the U.S.Marshals Service said in a statement. Hallie Golden, Mike Baker and Adam Goldman reporting for the New York Times.

Seven police officers involved in the asphyxiation death of Daniel Prude last spring have been suspended, according to Rochester, N.Y. mayor. Prude died after officers took him into custody using a hood and other restraints; his family had called police for assistance managing a mental health crisis. Public protests were sparked on Wednesday when the body camera footage of the circumstances of his arrest was released following a public records request from the family’s lawyer. Ben Chapman and Shan Li for the Wall Street Journal reporting.

A group of Tulsa residents, including a 105-year-old survivor, has filed a lawsuit seeking reparations from the city and other government entities for ongoing damages from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The suit estimates damages from the massacre at between $50 million and $100 million and relies on precedent from the 2019 opioid-related judgment against Johnson & Johnson to argue that the massacre was a public nuisance with ongoing impacts. Brakkton Booker reports for NPR. 

US DEVELOPMENTS

The Trump administration has appointed Matthew Klimow, the U.S. ambassador to Turkmenistan, as acting inspector general for the State Department. Klimow has previously served in the White House, NATO command, and the U.S. Army. Klimow’s role was made effective as of Aug. 31, but was not announced by the State Department until it was reported on Thursday by POLITICO. Klimow takes over the role of acting IG after President Donald Trump fired Steve Linick at the request of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and then Linick’s replacement resigned after less than three months in the position. Linick had been conducting two investigations related to Pompeo’s actions as Secretary. Nahal Toosi reports for POLITICO. 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) will file an antitrust suit against Google within weeks at the urging of Attorney General William Barr, who has accelerated the timeline for bringing charges over the objections of several Justice Department lawyers working on the case. The DOJ is investigating Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Youtube, and numerous other products, for antitrust violations related to its dominance of online search, advertising, video sharing, and email platforms. The DOJ opened its inquiry in June 2019, and action against Alphabet’s dominant market position is supported by a wide coalition of lawmakers and states. However, Barr’s imposition of a September deadline for the filing of charges raised concerns among career DOJ lawyers that he is seeking an announcement of a popular enforcement action in order to provide political advantage to the Trump administration before the November election. Katie Benner and Cecilia Kang report for the New York Times. 

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton ruled that the DOJ had the right to deny public access to large portions of FBI reports on witness interviews from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, finding that the information withheld by DOJ was properly exempted from public disclosure under the attorney work product privilege. Buzzfeed and CNN forced disclosure of thousands of pages of notes from witness interviews and other preparatory material under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last year, but have reported that excessive redactions from these materials were unjustified. Josh Gerstein reports for POLITICO. 

The Department of Defense has restarted many domestic projects which were stalled or defunded to pay for a wall along the southern border. The decision to restore funding for 22 out of the 34 construction projects from which funds were diverted comes as several Republican incumbent senators whose districts lost planned military construction projects seek to defend their seats from challenges in the November election. The funds to revive the projects were secured by diverting funds from overseas projects, including some designed to improve defenses against Russia. Projects were revived in North Carolina, Colorado, and Arizona. The Pentagon said in a statement that the process to determine which projects should be executed in 2020 “obviously did not consider, nor was influenced by, the political affiliation of Members of Congress in whose district or state these projects reside.” Paul Sonne reports for the Washington Post. 

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals questioned DOJ attorneys about the Trump administration’s decision to exclude undocumented immigrants from census data when apportioning congressional seats. A coalition of state attorneys general and immigrants’ rights groups brought a challenge to the July decision to exclude undocumented immigrants, arguing that the decision violates legal and constitutional requirements to include all persons present in the United States in the census count, regardless of legal status. The judges on the panel appeared concerned about the process and rationale for excluding undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count, since census forms do not ask for citizenship information. Harper Neidig reports for The Hill. 

President Trump has disparaged the intelligence of American military service members, asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, and described service members who died in war as “losers,” “suckers,” and other insults. According to multiple unnamed senior aides who witnessed the remarks, in 2018 Trump declined to visit a cemetery where American war casualties were buried because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and remarked “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” On the same European trip, Trump described marines killed in battle as “suckers” for having lost their lives. A White House spokesperson categorically denied the report, as did the president in a series of tweets. Jeffry Goldberg reports for The Atlantic. The Associated Press’s James La Porta and the Washington Post’s Colby Itkowitz, Alex Horton, and Carol D. Leonnig confirmed parts of The Atlantic’s reporting.

CORONAVIRUS

One day after new Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance was issued instructing states to prepare for distribution of a coronavirus vaccine by the end of October, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development taskforce, stated that the possibility of having a vaccine ready for distribution by October or November was “extremely unlikely.” In a separate interview, the former director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the CDC confirmed that it was highly unlikely that a vaccine would be available by November, and clarified that the guidance was not a prediction about a timeline but rather a policy to ensure that, when a vaccine is ready, states will be prepared to distribute it quickly. Christianna Silva reports for NPR. 

A map and analysis of all confirmed cases of the virus in the US is available at the New York Times.

US and worldwide maps tracking the spread of the pandemic are available at the Washington Post.

A state-by-state guide to lockdown measures and reopenings is provided by the New York Times.

Latest updates on the pandemic at The Guardian.

INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

The European Union urged the United States to reverse financial sanctions targeting two senior officials of the International Criminal Court. “The International Criminal Court (ICC) plays an essential role in delivering justice to the victims of some of [the] world’s most horrific crimes…. The sanctions announced by the United States administration on 2 September against two Court staff members, including its Prosecutor, are unacceptable and unprecedented measures that attempt to obstruct the Court’s investigations and judicial proceeding,” said the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in a statement. Emma Anderson reports for POLITICO.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS       

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu privately acquiesced to U.S. plans to sell arms to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), despite his later public opposition and claims that he had not assured the United States of Israeli cooperation. Officials familiar with the negotiations reported that Netanyahu chose not to block the deal in the context of the broader diplomatic negotiations which led to normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE last month. Mark Mazzetti, Edward Wong, and Michael LaForgia report for the New York Times. 

One month after the devastating explosion in Beirut, a Chilean rescue team identified possible signs of life under the rubble of a collapsed building. The rescue team was alerted to the presence of at least one body and one possible survivor by their search dog. Residents of the neighborhood said they had previously reported a smell of decomposition emanating from the building, but security forces and rescue teams failed to search the rubble for bodies or survivors. Security forces briefly forced the Chilean team to cease their rescue operations, saying that the necessary equipment could not be secured, but after intense public pressure and private efforts to secure equipment, the rescue efforts were resumed overnight. Timour Azhari reports for Al Jazeera.  

A repeatedly stalled prisoner exchange between the Afghan government and the Taliban was largely completed on Thursday, according to an Afghan government official. The completion of the exchange opens the door for direct negotiations between the government and the Taliban after the United States committed to securing the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners in its deal with the insurgents in February. The few remaining prisoners are accused of killing American, Australian, or French citizens in Afghanistan; their release has been blocked by lobbying from these countries, though other American officials pressured the Afghan government to speed the release of the prisoners. The Afghan government initially resisted the prisoner exchange, but relented under pressure from the Trump administration. Mujib Mashal and Fatima Faizi report for the New York Times 

The Trump administration is expected to nominate foreign policy expert and Naval Reserve officer William Ruger to the post of ambassador to Afghanistan. Ruger has called for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and his expected nomination could signal Trump administration plans to further reduce U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Ruger previously served in Afghanistan and is currently vice president for research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute. Rebecca Ballhaus reports for the Wall Street Journal.

A Russian national, Gregory Duralev, living in California with his American family is facing deportation proceedings due to what experts say is a politically motivated request by Russia for his arrest. Moscow used Interpol’s “Red Notice” arrest process to effectuate the request. Natasha Bertrand reports at POLITICO.

The post Early Edition: September 4, 2020 appeared first on Just Security.

Rather, Aug. 4 was the day of reckoning, “the apocalypse,” the culmination of what came before – the day 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate ignited in the port of Beirut. The explosion flattened the port itself, then rippled across the densely-populated neighborhoods of Achrafieh, Karantina, Downtown, and beyond, registering as a magnitude 3.3 earthquake. Doors and windows were torn out of walls – not merely shattered – by the force of the explosion more than a mile away. At least 180 people were killed and 30 remain missing; about 6,000 were injured. At least 300,000 lost their homes in the explosion. Six hospitals, 20 health clinics, and 120 schools were damaged, according to the United Nations humanitarian affairs office (OCHA).

Lebanon relies on Beirut’s port for 80 percent of its imports – and nearly all essential goods are imported. Even before the blast, the economic crisis and hyperinflation had led to critical shortages of imports during the past year, including medicine, fuel, and grain. The United Nations has appealed for $565 million in contributions from member nations for urgent food, shelter and health care and for reconstruction and recovery.

But as the international community conducts its donor conferences and plans its aid efforts for the short- and longer-term, the acute numbers capture only a fraction of the catastrophe. The fact that highly volatile ammonium nitrate had been stored for six years in the port through staggering incompetence or a criminal degree of negligence is but the latest, if most devastating and high-profile, example of how Lebanon has been crushed by its leaders since long before the explosion.

In a sad irony, the blast delayed the announcement of a verdict – finally – by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. After 15 years, the international tribunal convicted one low-level participant in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. If this result is any indication, accountability and justice for the negligence leading to the Aug. 4 explosion will be long-delayed, incomplete, and relatively inconsequential.

It will not be possible for Lebanon to rebuild into a fully functional state without both true accountability for this disaster and deep change to the structures that enabled it. Even saying “to rebuild” is misleading; Lebanon was not functional before the blast. The blast is not the cause of catastrophe in Lebanon, it is the result. To understand it, we must look to what came before, including the reality behind Lebanon’s much-celebrated resilience. And to avoid a similar future, the international community must join Lebanese demands for true justice.

Wheat and Wildfires

To untangle this catastrophe, perhaps we should begin one year ago, when economic freefall began. In early October 2019, bakeries went on strike. Crushed between imports purchased in dollars and customers who pay in lira, bakers protested that they could not afford to import wheat. The official exchange rate was pegged, as ever, at 1,500 lira to the dollar, but in moneychangers’ shops across the country, the price to purchase a dollar crept towards 1,600, 1,700, 1,800. Gas station owners called their own strike, protesting the ever-spiraling exchange rate and insufficient supplies.

The government patched the problem: wheat and fuel importers received a guarantee that they could exchange at the official rate. Bakeries reopened. The real exchange rate continued to climb.

In mid-October, wildfires ripped through villages across Lebanon. Volunteers battled the flames on foot while firefighting helicopters purchased and donated by citizens in 2009 sat inoperable at the airport – the funds to maintain them had been siphoned off by the vampiric political class. The fires were doused, but public rage smoldered.

Days later, confronting an impossible government balance sheet, ministers proposed a tax on the only accessible telecommunications service in the country, WhatsApp. It was a petty, regressive, and ineffectual suggestion – a final straw. Protests ignited through the country, from Saida to Tripoli and beyond. Thawra – revolution – had come.

A Crumbling Economic System and a Refugee Crisis

But we cannot tell the story of Lebanon’s October revolution without its broader economic context. Why was the lira sliding off its 20-year peg?

Lebanon’s economy has staggered for years. Growth in GDP dwindled from an average of 8 to 9 percent in the late 2000s to around 1 percent in recent years. Elites and politicians pursued the macroeconomic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme: attracting foreign capital (denominated in dollars, to support the lira’s pegged exchange rate) by promising huge interest rates – up to 14 percent on savings accounts for large depositors. Dollars circulated, thanks to the illusory interest rates as well as a thriving Lebanese diaspora that sent remittances home, a volatile but healthy tourist trade, and foreign aid.

Foreign aid – and interference – came in many forms as Lebanon played host to regional and global power struggles between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United States and Russia, Syria and Israel. But a huge portion of international aid flowed into Lebanon in exchange for border externalization – keeping refugees off European shores.

The war in Syria drove some 1.5 million refugees into Lebanon over the past nine years, on top of the 500,000 Palestinian refugees it has sheltered for decades. With an estimated total population of 6.8 million, Lebanon has the highest number of refugees per capita in the world.

The economic impact of this refugee influx is complex. The sudden arrival of millions of desperate – and employable – individuals disrupted the labor market, but an influx of labor is also an influx of consumers. Lebanese businesses employed and sold to Syrian refugees in equal measure. Likewise, the visible desperation of the situation – and the panicky nationalism taking hold throughout the Western world in the mid-2010s – opened floodgates of international aid from Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. In some respects, the refugee crisis thus depressed wages as the labor supply ballooned; in other respects, it spurred demand as refugees purchased necessities and international donors set up shop. The port of Beirut hummed with imports of cattle and cars and electronics (and few exports). In late 2013, an unremarkable cargo ship en route from Georgia to Mozambique made a stop in Beirut’s port. Its owners quickly lost interest in both the ship and its cargo; the latter was confiscated and stored in the port’s Hangar 12.

Meanwhile, the implosion of the Syrian economy, so long intertwined with its neighbor, reduced Lebanon’s exports by one third between 2012 and 2016 due to the simultaneous plunge in Syrian consumption and closure of trade routes to the Persian Gulf. Tourist dollars fled the regional instability, though the tourism sector had begun to recover somewhat in recent years.

And so the economy hobbled along. Dollars poured in and were siphoned off and the lira’s peg held. Until it didn’t. In 2019, GDP dropped to zero, and the revolution began.

Dividing the Spoils: Construction of the Ponzi Scheme

But to understand the roots of the economic decay that sparked popular protests, we must pull back further still. Who started this Ponzi scheme, and how?

The seeds of Lebanon’s political, financial, and physical systems were planted in the aftermath of the country’s 15-year civil war. Militia leaders surveyed the country and judged that there was nothing left to gain through arms, leading to the 1989 Ta’if Agreement. This accord was a careful division of political, material, and military power between the warring parties with the explicit aim of eliding responsibility for the war – summed up by the slogan “no victor, no vanquished.” After a spate of assassinations cemented the power of the surviving warlords, they turned their attention to dividing the spoils of war and maximizing the returns on their positions.

In the name of attracting capital to fund post-war redevelopment projects, successive governments sold bonds at steep discounts, offering ever more absurd interest rates; by 1998, debt service exceeded the yearly deficit. The vast majority of this government debt was held by Lebanese banks; 43 percent of the assets of these banks were directly controlled by politicians or their family members. The system was thus designed to efficiently siphon the resources of the state into the banks, owned in turn by those who made the policy of the state.

The most ambitious redevelopment projects were conceived by Rafik Hariri, a development tycoon who had spent the war years in Saudi Arabia amassing a construction fortune and returned to serve as prime minister from 1992-1998 and again from 2000-2004. Hariri spearheaded the plans to strip the ruined face from Beirut and build her back into a smooth, sophisticated fantasy, all plump and shining with architectural Botox and molded cartilage. In the process, he oversaw the consolidation of thousands of complex individual property claims into a single quasi-private company, Solidare, which was armed with eminent domain powers and owned, like the banks, by the upper echelons of power. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, this power allowed Solidare to expropriate or purchase (at heavily state-subsidized rates) the most valuable property in Beirut, demolish war-damaged buildings and erect sparkling apartment towers in their stead, again funneling the wealth of the state into the pockets of a few.

But after an initial flush of optimism, the crowds for which the towers had been built failed to arrive, leaving apartments and shops sitting hollow in Beirut’s flat summer sun. Until 2000, Israel occupied south Lebanon; Syria maintained its occupation of the rest of the country until 2005. Instability continually depressed tourism and thus the value of the downtown district. Meanwhile, the political winds changed.

Rafik Hariri, still a powerful political figure despite his resignation as prime minister in October 2004, was assassinated in a car bombing on Feb. 14, 2005. His murder led to an international investigation, the anti-climactic verdict of which was announced on Aug. 18. Massive popular protests followed the assassination, finally driving the visible elements of the Syrian occupation out of the country, but leaving its traces in tendrils of intertwined elite power and a culture of brutality among security forces.

Yet throughout these upheavals, the men in the seats of power remained remarkably consistent. Michel Aoun (current president), Samir Geagea (head of a major party), Nabih Berri (speaker of parliament), and Walid Jumblatt (head of a major party) had been there in 1989 to divide the pie. Others, such as Saad Hariri (son of Rafik), Hassan Nasrallah (head of Hezbollah since 1992) and Gebran Bassil (son-in-law of Aoun) later took up seats at the proverbial table too. By October 2019, these men still sat in positions of power , hands in a shrinking pie as the economy crashed and the revolution raged.

Thawra – Revolution

The revolution that began suddenly in October 2019 burned for months, even after Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his government resigned  and reforms were promised. The protests demonstrated the characteristic verve, humor, and creativity of Lebanon. Borrowing techniques from Hong Kong and Santiago, protesters adopted medical and gas masks against tear gas and reclaimed public spaces long privatized or closed. Public discourse flourished. In January, a new government formed.

But by the end of 2019, the Ponzi scheme had fully imploded. Between August and December 2019, the equivalent of $14 billion in lira-denominated deposits disappeared from the country’s banks. In January 2020, the real exchange rate hovered around 2,500 lira to the dollar, a loss of more than 66 percent in a country dependent on dollar-denominated imports for all essentials. Real inflation was estimated at 30 percent. Banks placed arbitrary, nebulous, free-floating capital controls on withdraws of dollars and then lira as a slow-motion run on the banks unfolded. Savings and salaries functionally evaporated. Consumer spending and investment cratered accordingly.

Protests continued, but tinged with exhaustion, fear, hopelessness, and growing rage. The faces of the political leadership had changed –Diab replaced Saad Hariri as Prime Minister in January. But the warlords, their progeny, and cronies –Berri, Aoun, Bassil, Nasrallah and, indeed, Saad Hariri – remained, pulling the strings.

Pandemic

On the last day of January, medical masks began to appear on pedestrians as well as protestors. At first, the novel coronavirus spread relatively slowly in Lebanon. Two factors worked in Lebanon’s favor: Lebanon is highly networked with the West, so the Lebanese diaspora in Europe and the United States witnessed firsthand – and relayed to relatives at home – the devastation that the pandemic could wreak even on functional and well-funded health systems. And the Lebanese – even politicians – knew that the country’s health system was far from functional. So the restrictions came quickly and drastically. On March 14, the government imposed a two-week lockdown. On March 16, it declared a state of emergency, with only 119 confirmed cases. On March 18, the airport closed; it would not reopen until July.

Yet these same necessary health measures snuffed out economic activity almost entirely. At least 55 percent of Lebanese workers are informally employed; the percentage is estimated to be much higher among refugees and migrant workers. The majority of these are day laborers whose income depends on finding employment each day. There is no unemployment insurance, no safety net whatsoever. When businesses shut, those they employ don’t eat.

For businesses already teetering on the brink of collapse because of the economic crisis, even a two-week shutdown was a death sentence. Hundreds closed permanently. Many of these had not paid their employees in weeks or months. Employees kept working on the faint hope that they might be paid a fraction of what they were owed, eventually, and the knowledge that they would not find another job if they quit their position. With the lockdown, their hope was extinguished.

The lockdown initially worked to slow the spread. Cases ticked up gradually. But the economic toll continued to mount. Unemployment – estimated at 11.4 percent in 2018-2019 – climbed to an estimated 30 percent at the end of May. On July 3 alone, two citizens committed suicide explicitly out of their despair at being unable to feed their families. And so the lockdown began to ease, as much out of economic necessity as public health. The infection rate began to climb again – as of Aug. 3, the total cases of COVID-19 infection reached 5,300, nearly tripling in 30 days. The economy continued its plunge.

On July 23, Lebanon entered hyperinflation, with food prices rising 190 percent in May alone. On some days in July, a dollar would cost you at least 9,000 lira, if you could find an exchange shop that would sell you any. The World Bank projected that 75 percent of the population would be living in poverty by the end of 2020 – an estimate that predated the pandemic. Thousands of Syrian refugees crossed back into Syria in the last year, not because it is safe for them (it isn’t) but because they can no longer survive in Lebanon.

Protesters returned to the streets. Bakeries again threatened strikes: even with official support, they could not buy wheat with dollars when customers bought bread with lira. The feckless government stored grain in silos at the port, as plans to create a strategic grain reserve stalled. On Aug. 3, the foreign minister resigned. He warned, “Lebanon today is sliding towards becoming a failed state.” An Associated Press article that day carried the headline, “Often on brink, Lebanon headed toward collapse.”

Shattered City: Crippled Hospitals, Scarce Fuel, Crumbled Silos, Flattened Port

The contours of the tragedy are well-known by now. The cargo of the ship that was abandoned in 2013 – 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a potent fertilizer and more-potent explosive – had been stored unstably in the Beirut port for six years. On Aug. 4, it ignited. With at least 30 people still missing and others in critical condition, the direct death toll is still rising.

But the human cost of this catastrophe will continue to climb even after all the bodies are recovered.

Coronavirus infections already had been escalating in recent weeks and were expected to surpass ICU capacity without drastic measures. In the blast, at least four of Beirut’s hospitals were severely damaged, including the St. George hospital, which was almost completely destroyed. There, the alleyway that had been converted into a drive-through COVID-testing site was converted again, into an emergency room to treat patients who were injured inside the hospital itself by the blast. New patients were turned away. Victims of the blast crowded on sidewalks in front of hospitals throughout the city, awaiting care while traumatized residents hugged each other weeping. Many wore masks; many did not. Containers of medical supplies recently imported to shore up the pandemic response were destroyed at the port, and hospital ICU and COVID-19 treatment capacity has been decimated. The virus lurks.

With the port destroyed, already scarce fuel for transportation and power generation will dwindle. Over the summer, Lebanon’s daily electricity blackouts have stretched from their usual three hours in Beirut (much longer in other areas) up to 20 hours a day in the capital. Residents who can afford them have long used diesel-run generators to fill the gaps in Lebanon’s inadequate state electricity supply, but even these private generator mafias have rationed fuel in recent months, leaving customers in the dark. These blackouts will lengthen in the coming months, including in hospitals.

The images of corn and wheat spilling from their tall silos by the sea after the explosion are ubiquitous by now. The ammonium nitrate appears to have been stored between a fireworks warehouse (or, perhaps, a cache of Hezbollah weapons) and the grain reserves of the country’s millers. The economy minister had planned to create a strategic reserve of grain to insulate the country against food shocks, but the plans were mired in negotiations. “Luckily we did not [create the reserve],” he is reported to have said. “It would have been destroyed.”

The country has only about one month’s supply of grain left. Emergency supplies are scheduled to be delivered through Tripoli, but that port lacks grain silos, and can handle only half the traffic of Beirut’s port. A project to expand its capacity was developed and financed in 2018, but failed to secure final government approval.

Thus, the acute tragedy of those killed on Aug. 4 will give way to a subsequent tragedy as medicine, fuel, and grain dry up. In the longer term, the disaster will multiply. In compounding crises of the past year, every emergency reserve for businesses and individuals alike has been tapped and expended. The liquid economic resources of Lebanon were drained before; they are non-existent today.

The physical capital of Beirut is likewise decimated. In images of the explosion’s destruction, it can be hard at a glance to tell the difference between its ravages and the 30-year-old scars of the civil war. Many of these scars remained on the capital – despite Hariri’s redevelopment plans – as a result of incompetence, greed, corruption, property disputes, and poverty, and they had become de facto monuments to the costs of the war in the absence of a public reckoning. These cherished survivors were shredded by the blast. The odds of rebuilding or restoring them in the next 30 years seem at least as dim as in the last 30.

The most vulnerable residents of Lebanon, including impoverished Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian refugees, migrant workers, and others, faced a critical humanitarian emergency even before the blast. At least 34 refugees were killed in the explosion, and an as-yet unknown number of migrant workers from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and elsewhere remain missing or have been confirmed dead. Now the surviving refugees, migrants, and marginalized Lebanese face homelessness along with the rest of the Beiruti population, but with many fewer resources. The explosion has already swelled the ranks of migrant workers abandoned by their employers; abandonment invalidates a worker’s residency permit, rendering the worker both homeless and undocumented. These workers may seek to return home, but find consulates and embassies unwilling or unable to help them.

A Growing Rage

As I speak to my friends and former colleagues in Beirut, their fury is as evident as their broken hearts. Within hours of the blast, protesters attacked the convoy of former Prime Minister Hariri as he attempted a photo op to survey the damage. On Aug. 6, French President Emmanuel Macron – the head of state of Lebanon’s former colonizer – toured the neighborhoods most badly affected by the blast. Residents mobbed him, screaming with fury, but not at him – rather at their own leaders. They begged Macron not to enrich the politicians with flows of international aid. New slogans have emerged: instead of last year’s joyfully profane “Hela hela ho,” protestors now chant “Hang the nooses” and erect mock gallows from which Hariri, Aoun, Nasrallah, Berri, and others dangle in effigy.

These leaders who knew exactly what was stored in Hangar 12 have offered shrill messages of solidarity on Twitter and placed customs and port officials under arrest. Blame is passed from one to the other. When asked about Hezbollah’s knowledge of the contents of Hangar 12, Nasrallah quipped, “We know more about the port of Haifa than the port of Beirut,” despite evidence of Hezbollah’s deep involvement in Beirut port operations. Gebran Bassil – the reviled head of Lebanon’s largest parliamentary bloc and former foreign minister– opined that the question was not why nearly 3,000 tons of high explosive was left in an urban port but why it had ignited.

On the night of Aug. 6, security forces had begun firing tear gas at protesters who had gathered in front of the Parliament building and other empty, shattered symbols of the state. As the protests swelled, security forces unleashed unprecedented force, using not only teargas but also clubs and sticks, handguns and shotguns. Protesters breached and briefly occupied four ministries and the Association of Banks. On Aug. 10, Prime Minister Diab’s seven-month-old government resigned.

But Diab was never more than a figurehead. For now, Aoun, Nasrallah, Hariri, Jumblatt, Berri, Geagea, Gemayel, Bassil, and the rest of their cadre remain in their positions of power, even as they swing in effigy from the gallows in Martyr’s Square. The warlords’ expertise at retaining power will be tested in the coming months, but they have survived for decades, and the millions of dollars of international aid now flowing into the country may provide them just the lifeline they need.

 “We Don’t Want to Be Resilient”

My friend Yolla Abou Elias is a fixture of Geitawi, one of many neighborhoods devastated by the explosion. She managed a small restaurant beside my old apartment near the port, in the same neighborhood as St. George Hospital. Her brother worked as a firefighter, and together their salaries supported her mother, aging uncle, and her younger sister, who could not find steady work. But in January, her employer could no longer afford to pay both wages and supplies, so he unilaterally cut wages in half, and then stopped paying them entirely. In March, the restaurant closed due to the coronavirus lockdown, eliminating any hope of recovering the lost wages. At the end of July, Yolla finally found a new job that allowed her to work remotely with a laptop, thus reducing the risk of bringing disease home to her vulnerable family.

On Aug. 4, Yolla messaged me: “Our house exploded … we [are] well my mom is bleeding but the hospital blew up.” The home the five of them shared and nearly all their possessions – including the laptop that linked Yolla to her job – were destroyed.

Yet Yolla has been lucky. After she was interviewed on a news program about the devastation, a friend in the United States organized a fundraiser for her family. Donations poured in. The family found a new house in a neighborhood further from the blast area and secured money for the first several months’ rent. Someone donated a new laptop. Her old employer even paid some of the wages he owed her.

The donations continued to accumulate and Yolla has reprised her role as a central figure in her community, distributing the donated funds and acting as a de facto hub for families in need.

But this is not a heartwarming story. Each donation, whether from abroad or from within Lebanon, comes with an implicit message: `We trust you, Yolla, to distribute these funds where they are needed. We would rather trust this stranger than the government.’ And while Yolla’s enormous social network has helped her to recover, it was also cracked by the blast. She will have to move out of Achrafieh, the neighborhood where she was born, survived the civil war, and has lived ever since. Her brother is now seeking to emigrate as soon as possible, joining thousands of other Lebanese who have left since the explosion. The rending of this social fabric is as significant as the shattered physical infrastructure of the city.

In the weeks to come, Lebanon will produce more images and stories of unfathomable generosity, bravery, resilience, for Lebanon is resilient, generous, and brave. Observers will describe Beirut as a phoenix, destined to rise again. But for Lebanese, the shallowness of these descriptions is more evident than ever. Interviewed after the explosion, a victim stated, “If I hear one more person referring to us as ‘resilient’, I will lose it. F**k resilience. We don’t want to be resilient. We just want to live!” Sara Mourad, a writer and professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, explained,

Resilience romanticizes our loss and dispossession. It brands our survival, making it an object of fascination for foreigners and inspiration for locals, advertising it as a valorized mode of attachment. Resilience is a marketing stunt for a political and economic system that runs on crises, that manufactures crises in order to sustain itself.  Resilience celebrates survival at the expense of justice. It is the rhetorical and symbolic symptom of the normalization of injustice.

Across Lebanon, the glaring absence and criminal ineptitude of political leaders has been answered by informal arrangements like those that now sustain Yolla. Acute humanitarian needs can, to some extent, be mitigated through private and informal generosity. Crucially, these arrangements are specifically designed to route money away from the irredeemable – and endlessly resilient – kleptocracy.

The subversion of traditional aid streams (with their diversions into political pockets) and the rejection of resilience narratives has the kleptocracy worried. The crackdowns against protesters have come quickly and with a brutality unparalleled in the past nine months of unrest. A state of emergency was swiftly approved by parliament, granting the army sweeping powers to “impose curfews, ban assemblies and impose censorship…”, and to expand the use of military tribunals to try civilians – familiar tactics of abuse in Lebanon.

This response should clarify for all international observers: Lebanon’s leaders have no intention of implementing the reforms that would lead to either accountability for the tragedy or the creation of a functioning state. Either move would be political and financial suicide.

What Lebanon needs from the international community is not only food, medicine, fuel, and dollars. The Lebanese people instead need an unflinching and sustained focus on the tactics that their leaders will use to silence them. These tactics will escalate, and be justified as necessary to maintain order, to enable Lebanon to “rebuild,” to “rise again,” to be resilient. The international community must not accept this excuse. Resilience has cost Lebanon too much already.

Image: Graffiti on Charles Helou highway, in front of the ruins of the Beirut port. Photo by Mona Mehdi. 

The post The Cost of Resilience: The Roots and Impacts of the Beirut Blast appeared first on Just Security.