Now Rise business correspondent Ro Zidari also hosted a panel session with a theme, 'Which 2050 do we want?' where Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International UK, said the first 12 months of Donald Trump's second term in office are a perfect example of an authoritarian one. Here highlights from the panel.
All right, fantastic. Thank you all for your opening thoughts there. So, now we're going to get more specific. Zainab, how much of an impact should public policy have in shepherding us towards the 2050 that you want with all the things you mentioned that you want to see? How much does public policy—and you can also tell us with what you've seen with public policies living up to your standard?
When public policy doesn't respond to our needs, people get up, raise their voice, and they protest. And we see that everywhere. But sometimes if your country or the system that should govern you and respond to your needs doesn't respond to you but restricts you and you cannot protest, then you go and create or establish efforts, hidden or in the public, that can address your needs. And as an example, huge example, education is banned for girls above sixth grade in Afghanistan—not specifically but mainly for young girls. And the policy is not responding, regional efforts are not there, international law, nothing is responding. And it's a basic human right that's denied. So, what is happening is youth around the world, Afghans, non-Afghans, they are putting in efforts, creating platforms, using tools such as AI or other basic efforts to reach out to these girls through internet, through websites, through meetings to respond to their basic wish of getting education. And that's where I believe public policy fails because we as humans, not all of us, some of us fail to really center it on the people of that community.
Thank you for that, Zainab. Agnes, you've spoken about your worries over the spread of authoritarianism across the world. And Zainab was just talking about protests, and we've seen a number of protests flare up in different regions. As we march towards 2050, the protests seem to be matching—I'm going to put that to you. Do you think the protests are matching the spread of authoritarianism? And is authoritarianism essentially—is there a check on it in your view?
Well, authoritarianism is galloping, it's increasing. It's not just an Amnesty International finding, it's a finding of everyone who researches human rights, democracy, and so on. Some of the most long-term studies have concluded that right now we're back to 1985 level in terms of how many people in the world live in so-called democracies. So, we have lost some count since 1985, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. All the progress—we've seen a U-turn for people around the world. Authoritarianism is quick. Democracy takes a very long time to be established. Look at the United States, 12 months of Donald Trump in the White House and it is a playbook of how authoritarian practices get embedded into every institution—from attacks on freedom of expression, freedom of the media, academic freedom, freedom of association, attacks on dissent, creation of new militarized security forces that are unbounded, the attacks on migrants, on refugees, on trans, on women's—all of those things have taken place in 12 months. Can you quite grab that? How long does it take to create quality, a true sense and experience of safety, of security? All of that has been literally destroyed in 12 months. And I have many friends in the United States, I believe there are many friends who are brown people, black people, and the fear under which they live every day is palpable. Palpable. So, it's everywhere. And it's not just Donald Trump. You could believe that Donald Trump has brought us to that. No, for more than eight years Amnesty International has been denouncing the slow but true spread of authoritarian practices throughout Europe. Emergency legal decisions have become normalized. Policing has become grounded on practices and including linked to surveillance and facial recognition that have led to many abuses. Attacks on non-discrimination have become very commonplace. And what do we have to say about other places such as Iran, for instance, where thousands of people have lost their life in the last week combating one of the most cruel authoritarian regimes? So, we are all being impacted by the rise of authoritarian practices around the world. There is no easy solution to it. It's not just disrupting Donald Trump, it's not just resisting Donald Trump. It is also looking at our own society and unpacking the dynamics that have made those authoritarian practices possible, the fears, the anxieties including over AI, and how do we tackle it? I think that's a key question. So, I mean there is no doubt that it is unchecked, there is no doubt that it is everywhere right now. The key question that we need to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it? Because make no mistake, authoritarian practices lead to very bad things for a lot of people. And when it becomes a global phenomenon, it leads to, you know, what we saw in 1940. So, we really need—it is incumbent upon us to combat authoritarian practices wherever we are. We do not need to be in New York, we do not need to be in Paris, we do not need to be in Davos. We can combat authoritarian practices in our village, in our communities, in our families. And we must combat it because if we—there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the destination will not be 2050. Let's be very clear. We will not get to 2050.
You raised a very great point. Yeah, clap if you want to, go ahead. And I know we're running short on time but I have to follow up on this because you just mentioned the authoritarianism in the United States and the cruel regime in Iran. Well, what do you make of Donald Trump threatening strike—he doesn't like Iran, right? So, that's one authoritarian figure taking on another regime. And then with what happened in Venezuela, what does that—how does that muddle things up when one authoritarian—
Well, of course. I mean, everything is muddy, everything is gray. I can fully understand why many of my friends and colleagues from Venezuela have a lot of reluctance to denounce what was an act of aggression against Venezuela. And maybe if I was Venezuelan, I will say, 'Yeah, maybe it's not great for international law, but wow, 150 political prisoners have been released.' So, this is a reality. This is a messy world we live in. But do we need to sign a pact with evil in order to get something that we believe is going to be okay? And do we have any historical evidence of that kind of—well, we have just Afghanistan here. Do we have a lot of evidence where this kind of foreign aggression against a country is bringing lots of betterment in the long term for people? Actually, I don't have a lot of evidence to it. So, I think I'm going to resist being forced into a corner where I need to make a choice. And I want us to create and to claim the space of denouncing both, denouncing US aggression on Venezuela, and denouncing the crimes against humanity that have been committed by the Maduro regime against its own people. And that he will need to be held accountable for. But that is not going to happen in a New York prison. It should happen in a Venezuelan prison and he should render account to his people, not to God knows who in New York.
Well said. Thank you so much. Professor, I saw you raise your hand. I think I read your mind. If anyone wants to chime in, you don't necessarily have to go with the question I give. If you want to follow up on what's been said, that's fine. But Professor, go ahead. Do you want to follow up on that because I want to ask you about climate change and where we're going? Or did you want to comment on what Agnes said? Yeah, please.
Not very Davos, but I think at some level we actually have to talk about politics. I mean, when you talk about public policy, we need to talk about the politics that make public policy. When we talk about the long struggle for various types of rights in the United States, we have to talk about the political forces that conducted that struggle and who their opponents are. And though I take it—I think your point is right about the fragility of rights regimes and how quickly they can be broken. They're a little bit like ice. It takes a while to grow, and then you can break it. But we shouldn't underestimate the extraordinary persistence with which right-wing politics in the United States since the civil rights movement of the 1960s—which is the truly convulsive upheaval in American democracy, that still is working its way through our society today. Right from that moment onwards, a counter-movement began that now is finding its success. And we are hosting them here, and we are going to sit with them, and they are the legitimate and bona fide heirs of that generation, including the president himself and his family. At the very least we can do is speak openly about the history of the Klan and the history of the lynching and the history of Jim Crow and the history of segregationism and its apologists running all the way through to the '90s and the 2000s, who are deep inside the Republican Party. And I say this as a Democrat who lives in a highly segregated city. So this is not just about party politics. Racism in America can't be reduced to that. But we need to be clear about who it is has been trying to make change and who it is who's been trying to do the opposite and to undo it. And those cultures of violence that we see in ICE, they come from somewhere. Anyone who spent any time in America knows that people have reason to fear the police. They have reason to fear the police. As a white guy, I've never felt this before, but since I've lived in the United States, I've known at least around the edges what it means to fear people in uniform. Because it's capricious, and it's hyper-masculine, and it's deliberately violent, and it's deliberately abusive, and it's simply a fact that we have lived with in the United States forever, right? So at that level, this isn't new, but what's radical about it is just how uninhibited, how empowered, how shameless it is, and how little resistance, frankly, there has been to what's been going on. The big hope of the midterm elections in November, and everyone has just got their fingers crossed that democracy will work, and they will deliver a giant crushing rejection because American society has an overwhelming majority of decent people who, even if they are conservative, hate the sight of giant overgrown bully boy men hurling women to the ground and abusing children. Like it's that it isn't popular is one of the weird things about it. It's not actually a proper authoritarianism populism in that sense. It's quite sectional. It's very, very strange what's going on. But yeah, let's talk about climate. Yes, they do. In a staggering way, and in a way which has the same qualities, right? Because this time around, they haven't just politely withdrawn from the Paris Accords, which is Trump first one, right? Very gradually, he says cheerio, and then finally they exit in 2020. No, this time around, they've left every single UN organization, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which America brought into being under a conservative American president in the late 1980s. And then in the maritime organization, we know where there was an effort to clean up one of the great hard-to-abate sectors, which is maritime transport, we know they used literally mafioso methods of going into the negotiations and picking off the representatives of small countries and threatening them with personal sanctions, which is ruinous to anyone who moves around the world, right? Because it basically means you lose access to your bank, to your phone. You can't function, and they threatened the representatives of the smallest states so as to create a blocking veto minority that prevented us from moving rapidly towards the decarbonization of shipping, where we actually had WEF organized—let's be clear. Maersk, WEF organized first-mover business groups were pushing that. That has been one of the projects of this organization. And this American government that we are hosting, who has a house on the promenade celebrating 250 years of government knows what. Those people deliberately sabotaged these negotiations. We are still going to sit with them. I'm going to chair a meeting with Lutnick tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon. I am going to do my job as chair, but we should be clear about who it is we're dealing with. And they are taking those tactics of intimidation and personal threat into the climate space. And that is the reality that we're dealing with at this moment.
So much. I very much appreciate the passion of the panel. Taylor, I'm going to come to Australia, and it's still on public policy. You wear many hats. You also work on a lot of youth initiatives as far as the future of youth is concerned. I do want to ask you about the policy in Australia where under-16s are banned from social media. Moving forward to 2050, they're saying they're doing it because they're protecting the youth, and that's where your work is. How are you viewing that dynamic?
I have to say it's a really good sign when you're on a panel and you get so enthralled with what someone else is saying that you lose all comprehension for the fact that you're about to have to talk. Look, I request the grace of the room as I navigate what, at least in Australia, is a very political question. As someone who runs a non-partisan organization, humor me as I do some acrobatics. Look, I think the social media ban policy in Australia is an excellent example of long-termist-looking policy that maybe fails to look at the broader system. Now, if we break that down into three elements, you can think participation, policy, and people. So from a participation perspective, it maybe wasn't best practice the way that it was done. It was moved through incredibly quickly. From a lot of the youth networks that I work with, they didn't feel adequately engaged, and given that it is a youth-centered policy, that's a fascinating feature of this policy that's come to be. And the impact of that is not just on the outcome in the policy itself, which I'll get to in a second, but it erodes the sense of engagement and that civic infrastructure that we've spoken about. And I think that comes back to what are the things that we watched silently and allowed to happen because, as an Australian who feels way off in the corner away from the US, I've been trying to take it very seriously to say what of what I'm seeing over here do I see in small doses in my own country. And it's a fascinating thing to think about. The second thing that I would say is on the policy itself, do we need to get young people off social media? I would say unequivocally yes. I don't have an objection to that concept because I imagine in 2050 we'll view social media the same way we do many other drugs. I don't know many deeply happy, joyful, and fulfilled people who spend a large amount of time on social media. That being said, is it a systemically viewing policy that's looking at all of the factors to keeping someone safe online, which is the skills, your ability to interpret mis- and disinformation, your ability to build the supportive relationships if and when something damaging does happen online. And as a woman who's spent enough time on the internet, I can tell you it's probably—if you spend time on the internet for the duration of your life, at some point you will see something that is damaging to you psychologically in one way or another. And we need the skills, we need the relationships, we need the support networks in order to address that. And at this point, that policy in isolation without the systems view does not deliver on that. I have hopes and ambitions that we can build that around it, but it's an interesting maybe hamstringing of the policy as it stands. And then you've got to look at the people factor. When we're leaving people without the systemic support, the blame game will inevitably start to happen. And so what we need to be doing is trying to set ourselves up for success from the beginning thinking about who's involved in this decision-making process. It's a heartbreaking reality that democracy done well is slow, but it is that upfront investment for long-term payoff, and it comes back to the central truth of it—short-termism is the drug. We want the payoff, we want it quick, and we go for the sugar hit immediately, but what we really need to do is invest in the kind of robust policy and processes that can stand the test of time and be safeguarded against some of the frightening things on our horizon.
