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Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Robert A. Destro

Special Briefing
Office of the Spokesperson
Press Correspondents' Room
Washington, D.C.
December 16, 2019

MR BROWN: Hey, everybody. We are joined once again by our Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Rob Destro. He's going to give an opening statement that will be on the record.

Sir, go ahead.

ASSISSTANT SECRETARY DESTRO: Okay. Well, good morning, everybody. I guess – what time is it now? No, I guess it's afternoon now. So good afternoon, time for me to report back my show-and-tell for the whirlwind trip to Europe. We started on the evening of December 2nd and came back last Wednesday night, and we did quite a few things.

I mean, the first thing was to meet the human rights defenders in the parallel OSCE conference that was held in Bratislava, and so as a member of the U.S. ministerial delegation I joined Acting Assistant Secretary Phil Reeker and Ambassador Jim Gilmore, who is the U.S. Permanent Representative to the OSCE. And what we were trying to do is not only to, really now that I'm in place, trying to figure out how we work together to advance the overall agenda of protecting human rights, which is a – which is almost a constant job in that part of the world.

And then the second big objective was to speak at an international human rights conference in Berlin in which I was on the panel for discussing human rights and artificial intelligence, which was quite an interesting conversation in and of itself.

Okay, so let me just kind of run through quickly what we did in each spot. The – in Bratislava, we attended the parallel conference to the OSCE. So there was the official ministerial conference and then there was the parallel civil society conference, and this is where all the civil society human rights defenders come in, and so we have them coming in from Russia, Kirghizia, Turkmenistan – you name it, they were coming in.

And it was almost like – we would sit at a table like this, and the people on the other side would file in, and these are the folks from Russia, these are the folks from Belarus. And you got to meet some of – I have to say some of the most interesting, courageous people that you ever want to meet. I mean, the fact that they are kind of on the front lines the way they are, and I mean, one of them, who I was particularly impressed with, he's been at it for quite a long time notwithstanding the fact that his brother's in jail. So I mean, this is – it's – they're pretty impressive people.

I'd say the highlight in one respect was my meeting with Oleg Sentsov, who – the Ukrainian filmmaker who was imprisoned in Russia for more than five years, talking about the aggression against Ukraine, including Crimea. And I have to tell you that the stuff about Crimea was particularly upsetting. The militarization of Crimea. Crimea has really more or less, according to our civil society folks, has become an armed camp. And so either they're even sending soldiers into the schools, and so they're developing what is the reinvigorating, what might be termed the Young Pioneers from the Soviet times.

And it's a – so most of what they wanted to know from us is: Are we with you? And of course, the answer is yeah. And (b): What can we do to be useful? And then to – they get, as sometimes the foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers don't, that in order to really stave off the embrace of the Russian bear that they have to develop their own civil societies. I mean, what does it mean to be a Belarusian? What does it really mean to be a Tajik? I mean, and that these people have incredible stories; they have incredible resources, both human and natural.

And so the question is: How can we help them basically – I mean, we really do need to take this idea of self-determination seriously, and so how do we do that? And so that's the – that's kind of who we met. We also, on the official list were three – the three expert institutions of OSCE, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the representative on Freedom of the Media, and the High Commissioner for National Minorities. And they're all doing very, very interesting work, and I have to tell you, like I say, I come back to the human rights defenders. The media circumstances under which they operate, as I've mentioned before, the first time I ever had a classified briefing in my current role, I turned to the briefer and said, "Boy, am I glad I was born here." I mean, we really do have no idea of what they go through.

We – after Bratislava I went to Geneva, where we had some – Ambassador Bremberg set up a couple of meetings with ambassadors from the likeminded countries in the morning, and then we had an absolutely fascinating meeting about – with the ambassadors from several of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which I had asked to get set up, because I want to know – I wanted to know how we can work with the OIC in translating what we understand to be what many times they call Western human rights values. There are direct analogies in Islamic jurisprudence to the same thing, they just call it "justice." Just like in – just like in if we were having a discussion in Jewish law, we would talk about mitzvah, we have to talk about justice when we're talking about Islamic law.

And it was just – it was a fascinating discussion. I think we had some very frank exchanges. They really want us to come back into the Human Rights Commission. They miss us, which is a nice thing to know. And I repeated that which was said before: You know what the conditions are, so we'll talk about them when we meet.

Now, we also had – I was also reminding them that the Human Rights Commission is not the only multilateral organization in Geneva. We had a lengthy meeting with ILO officials, something which is – something which I opened that conversation with the speech I gave to the ILO 100th anniversary in – last month. And we sat down with Kate Gilmore, the UN Deputy Commissioner for Human Rights, and had a talk at great length in both the ILO and with Ms. Gilmore about the human rights situation in Xinjiang and other instances in which we're talking about forced labor. Because we're also talking about forced labor not simply at Xinjiang, but also in Africa.

And then after that, our next trip – I also gave them a shoutout, at least the UN a shoutout, because they have reopened their mission in Khartoum. Because we've all got to get together and work hard to help the Sudanese achieve their own goals, and I thank them for their factfinding mission in Venezuela, which I think was pretty successful.

We then went to Italy, where we – the primary goal of that trip was to meet with our friends and colleagues from the UN World Food Program. My view is that once you have looked at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, you get people fed, then you start worrying about how they can take care of their human rights issues. So I'd kind of like to see us do a little bit more kind of almost skating on top of what they do. And we've talked about, again, Sudan and Ethiopia but also some of the big refugee centers like Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.

So there's lots of really interesting and innovative things we can do. They're certainly on board, and I think we will be as well.

From that, I went to Brussels for a day of – a day of consultations with our counterparts from the EU. This is the first time we've done that meeting since – for five years. We only stopped a couple of times for sampling the chocolate, but that's – you can't go to Brussels without having French fries and chocolate.

QUESTION: And beer.

QUESTION: Mussels.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY DESTRO: So le moules as well.

QUESTION: Beer.

QUESTION: We have a whole meal. (Laughter.)

ASSISTANT SECRETARY DESTRO: No, I mean, in Belgium – we lived in Belgium for a while. And my daughter was – she was completely against the idea until she realized that chocolate's a food group there, and then she says, okay, we're fine.

All right. So that meeting – those really went well. We then went to Berlin for some meetings with – the German foreign ministry had a conference about kind of multilateralism, kind of what they called the multilateral – alliance of multilaterals. I think that's the name of it. And I was on a panel on the nexus between artificial intelligence and human rights, and that was far and away what most people were interested in. We also – my counterpart, my German counterpart had a lunch for the speakers afterwards, and that dominated the entire conversation at lunch as well.

So, and I guess my – we can talk about that at greater length, but my basic view is that we really don't have an adequate language to discuss the nature of what that human right issue is. When you realize that a Chinese policeman or some social media company – a Chinese policeman can look at his phone or her phone and know more about you than you know about yourself. There's not a good word for that other than "creepy." But this is what we're going to have to do.

But AI is with us. And as I said at the conference, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the railroads came in, they thought people would die if they went more than 25 miles an hour. So we're always adapting to new technology, and we're just going to have to make sure that the human rights message and imperative is built right into it.

And so my final stop was in London, where we just had some meetings at the embassy and were listening to all the speculation about what was going to happen the next day in the election, which is now behind us.

So that's the readout.