The exposure of Assad’s prisons in Syria highlights the stark gap between international human rights commitments and grim realities. While naming and shaming is a common strategy against human rights violators, its impact is often limited. This blog examines its challenges and suggests alternative approaches for meaningful and peaceful change.
Human rights are widely accepted as a universal principle, with nearly every nation endorsing key international declarations. However, in practice, significant gaps persist between these commitments and the reality on the ground. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria exposed prisons where tens of thousands of citizens were detained, tortured, and killed on an industrial scale. Similarly, in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, over one million Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education camps”. In Myanmar, the Rohingya Muslim minority has suffered mass killings, sexual violence, and forced displacement.
These atrocities serve as a harsh reminder of a troubling global reality: the gap between human rights commitments and tangible improvements on the ground. Given this reality, the international community has a moral duty to address such violations. However, the crux of the matter remains how an improvement can be achieved when central bodies like the UN Human Rights Council lack enforcement mechanisms.
With military intervention, including regime change, now widely regarded as a last resort due to its potential to escalate conflicts, endanger civilians, and the negative precedents set by the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, alternative approaches have gained prominence. In this context, soft power instruments have emerged as key tools for influencing state behavior without resorting to violence.
Among these, “naming and shaming” has emerged as a pivotal strategy. Deployed by international non-governmental organizations, state actors, and the media, naming and shaming aims to expose human rights violations, mobilize domestic and international pressure, and increase the political and economic costs for perpetrators.
Caveats of naming and shaming
But in fact, while naming and shaming offers a valuable non-violent tool to address human rights violations, it often falls short. The reasons are manyfold: To start with, the practice does not include a formal mechanism for holding target states directly accountable for rights violations. In addition, in countries where human rights violations are most severe, systematic suppression of dissent often leaves little room to raise political costs. This lack of biting force allows targeted states to continue their human rights abuses with little consequence.
Given this limited direct impact of naming and shaming on state behavior, its potential lies in influencing other states’ actions towards unjust states. Namely, damage to the state’s reputation and, in consequence, the cutting of aid, the reduction of the amount of foreign direct investment or economic sanctions. Yet, there are caveats here as well. First, it is undesirable from a humanitarian perspective, as it can have devastating effects on the population. Furthermore, it is also challenging to implement due to its potential negative impact on the domestic economy.
Second, with the US led liberal international order crumbling, dictators around the world can fall back on an alternative authoritarian network. Venezuela is a striking example. In response to human rights violations, the US imposed sanctions on the Maduro regime in 2014. Later, President Donald Trump closely linked US humanitarian aid to his attempt to overthrow Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. As international institutions also grew wary of investing in Venezuela in response, China, another authoritarian state, stepped in. China lent money without conditions to the improvement of human rights. But the Chinese government wasn’t the Maduro regime’s only lifeline. Cuba also came to their assistance by providing doctors and advising them on how to use shortages to their political advantage by distributing food rations primarily to their supporters.
A Path Forward: Building Peaceful Alternatives
While naming and shaming has its place and importance, the road to meaningful change requires a multi-faceted approach. One important step is for free (democratic) countries to work together to make reliable global news platforms such as Reuters more accessible in Africa or Latin America, so that people do not have to consume the voices of dictatorships like RT or Xinhua. And that, in turn, arguments on topics such as human rights are more present in public discourse. One example is the news outlet Kloop in Kyrgyzstan, which has promoted the work of independent journalists in Central Asia to offer people an alternative to the Russian-dominated media world in the region.
Another crucial approach involves dissidents and human rights advocates worldwide collaborating more closely to discuss effective counter-strategies, particularly by fostering forums for journalists, activists, and academics from both democratic and non-democratic regions to exchange insights.
