The world looks to America for leadership on human rights. When America’s leader advocates forms of torture like waterboarding, supports attacks on journalists or gives police the OK to rough up criminal suspects, leaders of other countries pay heed. President Donald Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff, flippant remarks reverberates abroad as encouraging human rights abusers.
The world looks to America for leadership on human rights. When America’s leader advocates forms of torture like waterboarding, supports attacks on journalists or gives police the OK to rough up criminal suspects, leaders of other countries pay heed. President Donald Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff, flippant remarks reverberates abroad as encouraging human rights abusers.
When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, a former general who seized power after a 2013 coup, visited Washington in April, Trump heaped praise on him: “He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation.” In a subsequent meeting in Saudi Arabia, Trump even complimented the dictator’s shoes.
If flattery was somehow designed to make Sissi ease up on abuses, it didn’t work. Human Rights Watch issued a 63-page report last week saying the Egyptian president has given a “green light to torture with impunity” and that the country suffers from an “epidemic” of abuses. Egypt has, for decades, had a highly problematic human rights record. Billions of dollars in U.S. aid have always come with an admonishment that the record must improve. Trump doesn’t bother.
Trump praised Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte in an April 29 phone call, noting Duterte’s “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”
Human Rights Watch holds Duterte responsible for a “murderous” campaign in which police have been encouraged to execute drug dealers on the streets. As many as 7,000 have died in the police campaign. Duterte claimed to have personally thrown a drug suspect out of a helicopter to his death.
Duterte once compared and contrasted himself with Adolf Hitler, saying, “Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there is three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
In August, Duterte told police that if human rights organizers got in their way, “you shoot them.”
In contrast to Trump, the State Department says that, under Duterte, “concerns about police impunity increased significantly” as torture and extrajudicial killings persist. Yet Trump seems to be encouraging Duterte.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, formerly of the murderous Khmer Rouge, specifically cited Trump as justification for his crackdown on press freedoms. “Trump understands that (journalists) are an anarchic group. Anarchic human rights are rights that destroy the nation. I hope foreign friends understand this,” the premier said this year. Last week, the government silenced the nation’s 24-year-old English-language newspaper, The Cambodia Daily.
Likewise, Trump’s attacks on the news media have helped justify the roundup and harassment of reporters by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Trump also has praised.
We’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Words have consequences. The American president’s words have the power to destroy lives and get people killed in faraway lands. Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to think first, then speak, instead of the other way around?
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch