Human Rights for Export Only? Non-Elite Human Rights Advocacy in West Germany,1977–2000

Abstract

This article analyzes the non-elite human rights vision promoted by the Russell III Tribunal and the Committee for Fundamental Rights and Democracy (Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie, Grundrechtekomitee). The article centers on leftists who utilized human rights to challenge state power since the late 1970s. The III Russell Tribunal (1978–79) brought international scrutiny to the West German state's restrictions against civil employment for suspected subversives. Policymakers, politicians, and liberal public intellectuals rejected the use of human rights rhetoric to address domestic wrongs. In their view, the sobriquet ‘human rights abuse’ was befitting solely to the cruelties committed by the National Socialists and in countries in the Global South and Eastern Europe. Veterans of Russell III founded the Grundrechtekomitee in 1980 to challenge this limited understanding of human rights. The second part of the article focuses on the Committee's engagement against Helmut Kohl's asylum policy and domestic racism. While focused on West Germany, the Committee mobilized a cosmopolitan vision of human rights that mobilized Holocaust memory to advocate for the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. The article argues that Russell III and the Grundrechtekomitee saw domestic human rights advocacy as a bulwark against undemocratic and xenophobic tendencies in Germany.