The actor George Clooney, when interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper about Clooney's famous 2024 opinion editorial in The New York Times calling for presidential nominee Joe Biden to step down as a candidate, was asked why, as a Democrat supporter, Clooney made scathing critical comments about both parties. "Because," Clooney replied, "we need to speak truth to power no matter who is in power."
Clooney is absolutely right. So how do we express that truth?
Telling the truth is easy when we're little. Then we learn that doing so can have consequences that hurt. Sometimes other people get hurt. And sometimes it's the person doing the telling that suffers the consequences.
This is why, when we are given the opportunity to celebrate those who have the courage to expose the truth despite the risk doing so poses to themselves, we should take it. We would therefore like to express our thanks to Mr Friend (Theory of Knowledge Coordinator, and Teacher of Global Politics), who arranged for the International School of Lausanne to host the Speak Truth to Power exhibit of photographer Eddie Adams' portraits of human rights defenders in our South Building, from the end of September till mid-December.
Since its opening in 2015, this unforgettable exhibit has been visited by thousands of of students and families in Switzerland. And, last Wednesday evening, the exhibit was formally opened at ISL with keynote speeches from Dr. Christopher Karlo, President of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, Switzerland, and Ms Cinzia D’Adamo, who joined the Foundation in 2020, and who is one of the founding co-presidents of the Youth Ambassadors Program.
Ms D'Adamo shared the story of how her own journey to becoming a part of the Foundation, which began when a teacher gave her a copy of Kerry Kennedy's book, "Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World", simply as inspiration for how Cinzia might layout a project she was working on. But for Cinzia, the moment was life-changing: "I grabbed the book, and began reading it with interest; the interest became a passion; and that passion led me to write an email to Dr. Carlo, the President of the Foundation."
"Life happens when you start paying attention to the things around you. Today, it is easy to always be distracted, and my greatest wish is that you will pause and pay attention. All of these activists started by paying attention."
We would like to thank Dr. Karlo and Ms Adamo for travelling to Lausanne to be with us, and for their wise and thought-provoking speeches. And, for the benefit of those members of our community who were not able to be there on the evening, we would like to share the speech with which Mr Friend opened the event. On hearing it, Dr. Karlo was clearly inspired to add an ad-hoc reflection to the opening of his own speech, stating ruefully that, "I wish I would have had a teacher like Ben (Mr Friend) when I was at school."
The following words from Mr Friend, delivered on the evening with verve, are a blend of heart and mind that make quite clear why Dr. Karlo believed that any student would be fortunate to be a part of one of his classes. They are an example of the kind of writing that is possible when extensive subject knowledge is combined with utter sincerity and impassioned eloquence. Thank you for putting such time and effort into writing this opening speech for us, Mr Friend, and for giving the whole ISL community the opportunity to discover these wonderful portraits of outstanding human-beings.
If we are to teach values, then offering role models who exemplify how those values can manifest in the material world has great power. Good role models provide an archetype of a life lived well, of worthy goals strived for, of a cause greater than oneself. They serve to humanise an abstract concept.
The subjects of the portraits in this exhibition are here, in image if not in person, because they stood up for, and embodied, a cause greater than themselves. Many stood up despite great personal risk. Some were protected, in the case of the hooded Sudanese activist, only by their anonymity. Others, such as Rigoberta Menchú, had to flee their home countries in fear of their lives.
All of them prioritised the wellbeing of others over themselves; sought the greater good, not personal gain; and stood for principle above practical advantage.
When considered in the context of many current role models that young people are fed by the attention economy, the contrast is stark.
If we, as a school, as a community, as students, parents, friends, neighbours, people, want to champion the values we espouse, there is power in celebrating those who have fought for them by telling their stories.
At the International School of Lausanne (ISL), we will seek to do this outside of the confines of our immediate community by launching an outreach programme, building on the excellent resources provided by the Foundation, and inviting students and teachers from other schools in the Swiss Romande to view the exhibition, and engage in learning and reflection centred on the activists pictured and the rights they have fought for. This programme is being run by ISL’s Human Rights service group, ably led by Anaiss (Year 13) and Vivaan (Year 12). It is a project run by students, for students. We wish them well.
As a teacher, I am so very pleased to welcome this exhibition because I teach human rights. Global Politics students will know that one of the key mechanisms of making human rights meaningful is promotion and normalisation. A right is no good if the person who needs its protection doesn’t know it exists. And the protection of rights can only be effective if it is generally believed that protecting them is the right thing to do; if it is an embedded social and political norm.
At the International School of Lausanne, we embed the teaching of human rights throughout the curriculum; implicitly and tacitly in the younger years, more explicitly and critically as students grow older and their comprehension of the complexities of the world deepens. The older students in the audience, particularly those who study Global Politics, will have an understanding of the complexity of the global rights regime. They understand the inherent tensions and, at times, contradictions between rights. They know about the contested origins of human rights, about the legitimate criticisms regarding cultural relativism, of perceived moral absolutism, of judicial creep, and the fundamental challenge of reinterpreting the work of previous generations to meet the needs of a modern world which the authors of the foundational instruments of the human rights regime couldn’t, nor didn’t, imagine.
There are a range of criticisms of human rights; many just, others more questionable. There are a host of limitations to the conception, codification, and implementation of human rights, not least the often-limited mechanisms of judicial protection and enforcement present in much of the world. As I too often tell my students, the central irony of human rights is that those most in need of their protection are the least likely to receive it. And yet…
The foundational human rights document, the Universal Declaration of 1948, was beget by the horrors of World War 2, by an acute and visceral understanding of the capacity of untrammelled state power plus industrial technology to unleash suffering on a previously unimaginable scale. Human rights were created to protect the individual from the state and to preserve human dignity regardless of colour or creed, gender or age. They were birthed as a spark of light against what felt like the impenetrable bleakness of humanity's darkest days, and remain the most potent manifestation of the, too oft repeated, cry of “never again”. They have evolved and expanded over the succeeding 80 odd years, but at their heart their function is to protect people from power. That is worth celebrating, and defending.
And considering who we need to defend human rights from, and their reasons for seeking to undermine them, should also add metal to our courage. If we view the critiques of human rights through the lens of power dynamics, it is never the disadvantaged party campaigning for their erosion. Is it the men with the water boards who reclassify torture as ‘enhanced interrogation’, the patriarchs who resist equal rights for women, nativist populists who declare other people to be aliens, those behind the targeting scopes who redefine who enjoys a right to life, and on what grounds it can be ended. When an institution that is created to protect the weak from the powerful is attacked by those it restrains, it tells us that it has legitimacy, it has power, it is trying to do its job. It tells us to stand behind it, to stand up for it.
And human rights are under attack precisely because they have power. Power not from the sword, but of the pen. They give a framework that those who suffer injustice can structure their claims within. They provide both cause and legitimacy for action. In the short term, the pen is mightier than the sword. But in the long term, swords rust, while the words of a pen can proliferate, they can be shared and believed. It is with words that we construct the human world in which we live, and the language of human rights can give words a special power. It may be no accident that the phrase ‘speak truth to power’ was coined by the Quakers. We must not confuse pacifism, the rejection of violence, with inaction.
When we view the portraits in the exhibition, the human rights defenders portrayed feel to be a long way away from us in the here and now. Although their stories resonate, we are separated by time and space; they fort, and fight, their battles in contexts which feel far removed from our lived realities. If we are honest, few of us would wish to trade places with them.
Yet today, there are powerful actors who seek to sideline, delegitimise, or discredit human rights that are closer to home. I was born in the UK, where two of the three largest political parties have stated their intention to withdraw from the ECHR. In the US, fundamental rights to a fair trial and freedom of arbitrary detention are being routinely ignored by ICE officers in response to Executive decree. The comforting, if illusive (and sometimes illusionary), moral certainties of the rules based international order are certain no longer. Across what we may characterise as the Western world, we are seeing a change in political climate: security is prioritised over liberty; rights are increasingly construed as contingent on nationality; ethnicity, or religion; minority groups are served up as scape goats - as human lightning rods for popular anger.
Although I dearly hope that the stakes that we play for, or the dangers we face, will never be as great as the subjects of the portraits in the exhibition, we still have a vital role to play. Human rights were created by humans, for humans; they exist because people believe that they exist, and are prepared to stand up for this belief. While the times we live in can feel increasingly bleak, our reaction must be to rise to the challenge, to add our voices to the choir, our names to the ballot. When I was roughly the age of the students I now teach, many moons ago, I had a handwritten quote stuck to the wall above the desk where I worked. It was from Carolyn Forchés’ poetry collection ‘The Country Between Us’, and said simply “you have no right to feel powerless. Better people than you were powerless”. I have not lived up to that sentiment, but I am still trying. We all, in whatever way we are able, must keep on speaking truth to power.