Growing number of governments using counterterrorism to justify targeting dissidents abroad

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Instead of losing the extremity of responses that we saw after 9/11 — things like rendition, torture, misuse of counterterrorism against people who had nothing to do with the acts concerned — instead of that fading away over time, what we’ve had actually is copycat.

We’ve had states, particularly authoritarian and backsliding democracies, recognize that counterterrorism is their get-out-of-jail-free card. They can use the tools and measures that the US crafted and apply them to people who disagree with them, to journalists, to lawyers, to dissidents, and to civil society.

And so, the most egregious thing is that the War on Terror may have gone away in name, but that, in fact, it’s still with us, and it continues to create havoc for human rights defenders and the rule of law around the world.

I think that’s true. But I think the salient difference, post-9/11, is that two things happened. One is that we built an architecture of counterterrorism where states, in a way, get to call whomever they like a terrorist. The second difference is that instead of states picking on the dissident they don’t like at home, you see these lines of communication between states. And maybe the third piece of it is that it’s all undergirded increasingly by the use of new technologies and capacities that make states do that nefarious work better, stronger, faster. And I think that’s profoundly different from a pre-9/11 world.

I think it does. But, we have some very good ways to measure state security challenges. We have something called the Global Counterterrorism Index. It’s an independent tool that many countries use. Some countries have great challenges, but other countries are opportunists. And that’s, I think, the key point here. States are using this playbook even when they don’t have genuine security threats.

It’s a playbook. And the playbook we saw goes back to 9/11. The Washington Post article talks about the rendition of Gulenists from different parts of the world.

Exactly. And so the response, when faced with global large-scale kidnapping, is to respond that the US does this too. And, in fact, as we know, there are 30 men still detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 16 of them who’ve been cleared and told they pose no threat. So, if you’re a country being told you shouldn’t do this, you’re just going to turn right around and say, “Oh, but the US does this, too. Don’t lecture us. Don’t moralize at us about our tactics.”

Well, I can only speak to my observations of US policies to say that we’ve seen significant regret and recognition that the seeds sown 20 years ago do not serve the long-term strategic interests of the United States. If we’re a democracy and we want to promote democracy and the rule of law around the world, it doesn’t help us when our allies are, in fact, abandoning those fundamental tenets of an open and free society.

So, I guess I would fundamentally disagree with the proposition that we can’t define terrorism. We have 19 treaties on acts of terrorism. So, in fact, we have pretty good global treaty agreements among states regarding what constitutes an act of terrorism. But we’ve had this slippage in the last 20 years around not holding states accountable when they go outside of that framework. And so, I don’t think it serves us well to have anything called terrorism. For example, all of Palestinian civil society being called terrorists. Women [and] human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia are being prosecuted as terrorists. That does not advance the general well-being and ultimately, in my view, it doesn’t advance the security of states because there are real terrorists. There are fundamental acts of terrorism to deal with.

Well, I think two things are happening. One is the fear of many states that non-state groups or terrorist-designated terrorist groups will get access to these kinds of technologies. We already see that with drone technology, states will be less safe. But on the other side of that discussion is oppressive states using these tools actually to cower and repress their open societies. We see that particularly in surveillance technology. I spent the last year and a half traveling to many, many countries where journalists, lawyers, civil society actors, women and environmental defenders … all of them … are afraid that their phones are infected by surveillance tech.

Well, one thing I would start by saying is we actually do need states to agree to that definition of terrorism and pass a comprehensive treaty on terrorism at the UN. It’s been languishing for about 30 years. The second thing we have to do, and I think this falls heavily, the responsibility falls heavily on democracies, [is to] call out the abusers. Name and shame those states who are actually misusing these security tools because, in the long run, they’re making your democracy less safe. And I think the third thing we need to do is sort of cut back on this global infrastructure of terrorism [and] address the things that produce violence in society. These are not sexy. They’re things like feeding people, clothing people, and putting things like the Sustainable Development Goals in place. Those are long-term fundamental building blocks of creating societies where people don’t turn to violence.