Public stance on human rights is mandatory

Canada’s recent dust-up with Saudi Arabia has revived a perennial question: when is it appropriate — if ever, some might ask — for our government to take a public stance on human-rights abuses abroad?

Like so many political firestorms of late, it all started on Twitter. But Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s tweet was no Diet Coke-fuelled, all-caps, 4 a.m. tirade. No, the minister’s simply expressed — in grammatical and measured fashion — her concern with Saudi Arabia’s jailing of women’s-rights activist Samar Badawi and its ongoing detention of Samar’s brother, Raif, a blogger and free-speech advocate whose SaudiCanadian wife and children live in Montreal.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry soon followed up with a similar tweet of its own. Neither message was particularly provocative, nor were they the first of their kind from a Canadian government.

To the surprise of the world, however, they drew an explosive response from Saudi Arabia’s recently elevated crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (or “M.B.S.”, as he’s widely known).

Theories abound as to why M.B.S. would seize on these tweets as he did, but there is near-universal agreement that his outsize reaction is calculated to send a message not so much to Canada but to others, within the kingdom and beyond, who might be contemplating their own acts of impudence.

Still, this hasn’t stopped Freeland’s domestic critics from piling on.

Generally, these critics fall into three broad camps. First are those who suggest Canada’s own long record of human-rights failures — and to be sure, there are many — must render us mute. To speak out against another country’s shortcomings when we still have so much work to do at home, the reasoning seems to go, would be grossly hypocritical.

Second are those whose charge of hypocrisy is rooted in a lucrative, but admittedly problematic 2014 arms deal that — if it survives the present row — will see Canada send $15-billion-worth of armoured vehicles to the very country it’s now chastising.

And in the third camp are those who see nothing prohibitively hypocritical in promoting human-rights issues behind the scenes, but who bristle at the slightest whiff of what they might derisively term bullhorn diplomacy, decrying it as unduly risky, unhelpful or downright counterproductive.

But it is wrong to attack Freeland in this instance.

By the time Samar Badawi was arrested, her brother had been behind bars for more than half a decade. As documents recently obtained by the CBC confirm, years of high-level “quiet diplomacy” were not bearing fruit.

In the circumstances, the minister’s decision to bring public attention to the siblings’ plights was the right one. Indeed, it was perhaps the only remaining option, for when it comes to addressing human-rights abuses abroad, public pressure is one of the few tools available.

Fortunately, it is a tool that sometimes works.

Several years ago, I was part of an international legal team fighting for the release of an Egyptian-Canadian journalist, Mohamed Fahmy, who found himself in a Cairo prison on trumped-up terrorism charges.

While repeated overtures to the Harper government and then-Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird largely fell on deaf ears, sustained public pressure eventually secured Fahmy’s freedom.

The lesson I take from Fahmy’s case is simple. Quiet diplomacy works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, there is a choice to be made: walk away, or try other, less quiet means.

In considering this choice, Canada must not be hamstrung by its own imperfections and contradictions — though we must always strive to do better and to atone for past wrongs, moral immaculacy cannot be a prerequisite for speaking up in defence of human rights.

Nor can we allow ourselves to be cowed into silence by the threat of absurdly disproportionate economic or diplomatic retaliation.

And finally, of course, we must be careful — as Freeland was — that our public positions are expressed in measured and noninflammatory language.

The tweets at issue walked this line admirably, M.B.S.’s eruption notwithstanding.