The Labour Government has promised to promote an ethical foreign policy based on human rights, and it means what it says. The former British High Commissioner to India applauds, but voices his reservations. What is coming to be known as Robin Cook?s ethical foreign policy was launched on 17 July, when the new Foreign Secretary staged a media spectacular at the Foreign Office and, in a carefully considered speech, committed the British Government to the support of human rights worldwide. Arguing that all nations now belong to the same international community, and that we have a responsibility to seek to secure for others the rights we enjoy ourselves, Mr Cook outlined 12 steps which he claimed would put Britain at the front of the drive to raise standards of human rights.

At the top of the list were pledges that Britain would support measures within the international community to express condemnation of regimes which grotesquely violate human rights; would support sanctions applied by the international community against such regimes; would refuse to supply equipment or weapons that might be used for internal repression, or to sell any weapons to regimes that deny the demands of their peoples for human rights; would support measures to ensure that increased trade did not undermine human rights by encouraging child labour; and would support non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International in raising the cases of individual prisoners of conscience. Britain would also support the establishment of a permanent international criminal court and find ways of supporting media under threat from authoritarian regimes. And to show that the Government was serious about human rights in its own backyard, Mr Cook pointed to the fact that it had lifted the ban on union membership for employees of GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, and proposed to incorporate the European Human Rights Convention into British domestic law.

Cynics familiar with Whitehall will be tempted to recognise in this catalogue the result of a trawl round Foreign Office departments to identify a range of measures already in hand which, together with some additional ones vague or minor enough to be harmless, can be presented (when laced with suitable rhetoric) as adding up to something dramatically new. I believe that would be unfair.

It is true that most of the elements listed by Mr Cook were in place, or at least under discussion, under the Conservative administration. Although they baulked at incorporating the European Convention into British law and were equivocal about interpreting the criteria for selling arms to foreign governments, they too were ready to join in international condemnation of grotesquely inhumane regimes, to support sanctions against Iraq and to work for the release of individual prisoners of conscience. They did not consciously encourage trade based on child labour and they professed to use the aid programme to promote good government (a tactful way of describing respect for human rights).

Mr Cook?s statement, however, is more than the sum of its parts. It is a declaration of intent by the new British Government to make concern for human rights a central factor in its dealings with foreign governments, and an invitation to judge the success of British foreign policy by the extent to which it helps to improve the lot of people in countries where human rights are currently being violated. No previous British government has nailed its colours to the mast of universal human rights with this degree of ostentatious determination. Since the potential embarrassments of doing so are obvious, Mr Cook is surely to be commended for his courage in going ahead.

Predictably, the first embarrassment has now arisen over the most explicit of Mr Cook?s 12 steps, the refusal to supply equipment which can be used for internal repression. Licences have been refused for the export of six armoured Land Rovers to Indonesia on the grounds that they are armoured personnel carriers, while contracts for the sale of Hawk jets and light tanks, concluded under the previous Government, are being allowed to go ahead.

Mr Cook?s refusal to interfere with contracts previously authorised is understandable. But are armoured Land Rovers (which, as the manufacturers claim, have no offensive capability and are used by BBC crews in Bosnia) to count as equipment which can be used for repression simply because the Indonesian police may (or may not) use them in East Timor? If they are, it is hard to see further sales of any form of defence equipment to Indonesia being allowed.

So does Indonesia belong in the category of regimes which grotesquely violate human rights? It appears to be true that its security forces have behaved with great brutality in East Timor, and that President Suharto?s rule has become increasingly autocratic and corrupt. So far, however, there is no sign of sanctions against Indonesia by the international community; and Mr Cook was careful to speak in his statement only of supporting measures taken within that community. But banning the sale of military equipment to Indonesia could prejudice future contracts across the board and thereby put Britain?s substantial and growing commercial interests there at risk, quite irrespective of any action by the international community. Is the Indonesian regime unattractive enough to justify this risk?

This may be an oversimplified analysis of the Indonesian case, but it highlights the problem of establishing hard and fast criteria for deciding just what equipment must be regarded as intended for the purposes of internal repression, as well as the potentially far-reaching consequences of unilateral British action over a relatively small contract.

It also raises the more interesting question of how to determine which countries are to be treated as violating human rights to a grotesque degree. In his statement of 17 July, Mr Cook mentioned Iraq and Nigeria, both of which are relatively uncontroversial targets of international disapproval. But there was no mention of China, whose behaviour in Tibet is about as outstanding an example of grotesquely brutal repression as could be found anywhere, (see article on p.1326) not to speak of Tiananmen Square. Nor is China tolerant of even the mildest international reproof over Tibet, as the German Government discovered recently when the Bundestag persisted in registering disapproval of Chinese behaviour there. Yet the British Government to which Mr Cook belongs has just made an act of faith in China?s willingness to respect human rights in Hong Kong by handing its people over to China lock, stock and barrel, without even offering them British citizenship as an alternative.

The hard fact is that China is too powerful a country for Britain to be able to bring effective pressure to bear against it. So on Hong Kong Britain struck what was arguably the best deal available, while on human rights the most Britain can do will be, in Mr Cook?s words, to support measures within the international community to express condemnation of human rights violations by China (assuming that the international community can be brought to take such measures) ? and even then, only at some risk to British commercial interests in China.

If China provides a particularly flagrant example of an aggressive violator of human rights which is to be tacitly recognised as beyond the reach of the new British foreign policy, what is to be the status of countries whose infringements of human rights are severe but patchy? In India, for example, a country whose democratic credentials are more impressive than most, the behaviour of the security forces in Kashmir or the police in Bihar has on occasion been outrageous; and the Indian constitution makes the advocacy of secession, even by peaceful means, a criminal offence ? a provision which, if applied within the United Kingdom, would outlaw the Scottish Nationalists as well as the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland, and be regarded as rather less tolerable than prohibiting union membership at GCHQ. Is India to be brought within the scope of the British Government?s disapproval, or are India?s human rights infringements to be ignored as being of small account beside India?s achievement in maintaining a functioning democracy against heavy odds?

Mr Cook in his statement dismissed the view held in some quarters that the human rights agenda is a form of cultural imperialism. But he would be wise to bear in mind that Britain itself is widely seen as having a less than impeccable human rights record. However unfairly, many people outside Britain think that British police and security forces are still violating human rights in Northern Ireland, just as many Muslims (we are told) believe that the British and French Governments contrived the death of Princess Diana, or republican sympathisers in Ireland apparently suspect that the recent bomb attack near Newry was fabricated by British Intelligence in order to derail the peace process. It may seem hard to understand the malignity with which the British are credited, but we have to face the fact that not everyone in the world accepts that Mr Blair?s shining new Government is entitled to advertise itself as an arbiter of human rights across the globe, especially if its strictures are necessarily going to be selective.

As British High Commissioner in India during the Gulf War, I often encountered the criticism that Allied condemnations of Iraqi aggression were the purest hypocrisy: the Allies happily tolerated acts of military aggression elsewhere in the world (for example by China against Tibet or by Pakistan in Kashmir) and were taking action against Iraq only because the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait threatened Western oil supplies. My reply was that no country or combination of countries was in a position to redress every act of military aggression that occurred in the world. In order to commit its own citizens to risking their lives in battle, a government had of course to have a just cause; but it also had to be reasonably confident that it had the capability to succeed; and it had to judge that its own country?s interests were directly threatened.

This last proviso is important, because governments are not in the position of individual citizens, each of whom may make any sacrifice, including laying down one?s own life, in the cause of right. A government is responsible for the welfare of its citizens collectively; and the protection of their collective interests is its primary duty. In the last resort, this may call for heroic action by the country as a whole in the face of inhumanity on a titanic scale: short of that, a government must always balance what is morally desirable against what is feasible, and what is in the interests of the wider international community against the narrower interests of its own people. That Britain was not in a position to go to war against China to protect the people of Hong Kong does not ipso facto mean that it was immoral for Britain to go to war against Argentina to protect the Falkland Islanders or for the Allies to go to war against Iraq to defend Kuwait.

Mr Cook may reasonably argue that his position on human rights is similar: it is in the wider British interest that human rights should be respected, just as it is in the wider British interest that aggressors should not be allowed to get away with their aggression. Because we are not in a position to bring China to share our view of human rights or do not wish to thrust that view too officiously on India, this should not debar us from influencing other countries in the right direction to the extent that they may be amenable to British pressure or British influence, especially if we have a majority of the international community on our side.

The difference, however, is that British governments have never had a policy of resisting aggression wherever it occurs. Since the days of Palmerston, they have never even had a policy of intervening militarily to protect individual British citizens abroad. Alliances apart, they have kept themselves free to take decisions about armed intervention as much on the basis of what they judged feasible (and consonant with British interests) as on the basis of abstract justice; and they have pursued a similarly pragmatic policy in relation to human rights, not without some quiet successes.

Mr Cook, however, has now taken a step beyond pragmatism. Admittedly, he has been modest in his expectations of what can be achieved; but he has committed Britain with a flourish to being on the side of the angels world-wide. No right-thinking person will withhold a degree of admiration for this boldness in a good cause. But it is right at the same time to be sceptical about his ability to deal head-on with the charges of hypocrisy, inconsistency and damage to British interests which the new policy looks bound to attract.

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