A Human Rights Advocate

Graduations can be soporific events. Speakers talk in platitudes and the formalities seem endless. But I bolted upright as Dean Harold Koh of the Yale Law School spoke after receiving an honorary degree at the graduation exercises of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Dean Koh talked about human rights and how the influence of the United States had diminished round the world because of the American claim of exceptionalism regarding human rights. We should not have "law free zones" he said, and added that we should not have "law free courts called military courts."

He went on to quote Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court who reported that on his retirement from the Supreme Court the head of Israeli intelligence approached him and thanked him for the decision banning the use of torture, "You made us use our heads, not our hands."

Recently Dean Koh testified before a congressional committee regarding torture. A congressman challenged him arguing that terriorists had never signed the Geneva accords, thus implying that since terrorists felt free to use torture against Americans, we should use torture when detaining known terrorists. Koh smartly replied, "Whales have not signed the Whale Protection Act, but we act the way we do because it's the right thing to do." We don't use torture because that is the civilized way of behaving, not because we have some agreement with our enemies that they too will act in a civilized way. We can not give up our humanity just because we fight an enemy that behaves inhumanly.

Dean Koh, served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1998 to 2001. He argued that in the next eight years we had to work to undo the damage done to America by its violations of human rights and international agreements and insisted that this was not a Republican or Democratic issue. He charged the graduates saying that politicians listen to their public and it is only a vigilant public that can turn our human rights record around.

When he finished, Dean Koh was cheered with a standing ovation. I've rarely been to such a rousing graduation speech. Listen to the speech.