Robust Human Rights and Religious Liberty: Dr. Angela Wu Howard on Legal Philosophy, CEDAW, and Uyghur Oppression

In this interview, Dr. Howard discusses her view of international religious liberty, CEDAW, and the situation of Uyghur Muslims in China.

Women look on during a student protest against the military dictatorship in Brazil, 1968. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

By: David Rubinstein, staffer

Photo: Becket

Angela Wu Howard is a scholar and practitioner of international religious liberty law.  Dr. Howard serves as the International Law Fellow at Becket, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm focusing on impact litigation that protects the religious liberties of clients of all faiths.  She received her D. Phil. from University of Oxford, her D.E.S. in European Law from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where she was a Fulbright Fellow, her J.D. from Harvard Law School, and her B.A. from Northwestern University.  Dr. Howard has written and lectured on philosophy of law and religious liberty.  Prior to Becket, she worked for Oxfam America in Boston and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris and was an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York City.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.  

What methods of persuasion do you see as fruitful in convincing lawmakers from tolerance-based backgrounds to take a human-dignity approach to religious liberty?   

We might start by asking, what is the law meant to do?  In one view, the law is an instrument that should flow from an accurate understanding of the human person.  It should be oriented toward the common good of humans living together, in a way that allows those persons to flourish, both as individuals and as relationally-oriented persons—that is, living in a community.  A good legal order justly sets out the conditions and rules that allow humans to flourish.  Religious liberty that protects the ability to search for meaning and truth is fundamental to that architecture.

Tolerance captures a partial truth.  The truth is always attractive, and even a partial truth is attractive—it reveals a partial good.  But it shouldn’t be mistaken for the entire thing.  I remember reading a dictionary definition that to tolerate is to “endure with forbearance.”  (I hope I’ve got that right.)  But we think of endurance as a temporary state.  It’s not something to aspire to.  It doesn’t require enough of us.  If we were to end religious liberty at tolerance, at endurance, we would miss the richness that comes with charity, with generosity toward others—others who are vulnerable or different, and human dignity does capture that much better.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights aimed to apprehend a much thicker understanding of what it is to live together and who we are.

Let us turn to CEDAW.  Recently, members of Congress and some from the diplomatic and academic communities have called for the Biden Administration to ratify the Convention. What is your perspective on CEDAW ratification?

My view is always from the religious liberty lens.  Professor Nazila Ghanea’s report for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2017 is very good.   It ties together concerns that CEDAW attempts to address with religious freedom perspectives extremely well.

From one perspective, we do already have instruments like the UDHR and ICCPR that are meant to encompass a very broad-spectrum view of human freedom that should apply to every human person.  There is under-enforcement of many of the provisions of these existing instruments, and even underdetermination of some of these rights—there is more work that can be done.  We can spend more resources enforcing these existing provisions and investing in our society so that the vision of the human person that is put forward in the UDHR can come to fruition.

That said, CEDAW does address women’s and children’s issues that the UDHR and ICCPR don’t specifically address.  We could say that these issues are encompassed by broader statements of rights of the ICCPR, but it’s good to devote specific articulation to these issues, particularly because human rights violations have persisted against women and children despite the ICCPR.  There are particular practices that only, or primarily, women and children face:  female infanticide, underage or forced marriage, burning of widows, stoning of women, and a disproportionate subjection to human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking.  To the extent CEDAW allows more resources to be directed to these practices, that can accomplish a lot of good.

How could CEDAW do an even better job of accomplishing its goals?

CEDAW could bring more attention to sex-selective abortion of female fetuses.  Some CEDAW proponents resist this because they see the right to unfettered abortion, right through birth in some cases, as fundamental to women’s rights.  But the more rational, compassionate, and reasoned view is that all human beings deserve a full measure of protection as human beings, even when it requires us to sacrifice for one another.  Do people who are vulnerable impose burdens on others?  Absolutely.  But do we want to live in a world where we care for those who are vulnerable?  I think we do, because otherwise, we wouldn’t be having a conversation about human rights to begin with—if people could all fend for themselves, there wouldn’t be a need to be defending human rights.  So fetuses—or, once born, the disabled, or just those in infancy or childhood—deserve protection, perhaps particularly because of their vulnerability and their dependence on other human beings.  Whether we’re going to tolerate widespread sex-selective abortion is really about a very fundamental question of whether human beings—throughout all stages of their being, from conception to natural death—have rights that are dependent on, or regardless of, their capacities.

Whether or not you agree with that, we should all be able to work together to build a world where women don’t have to choose between their children and a flourishing life.  (Editor’s note:  Dr.  Howard recently did an interview with Catholic News Agency where she discusses her views on this at length).

What can we learn about religious liberty from the oppression of Muslim Uyghurs in China?

In the United States, we take religious liberty issues seriously because they touch on fundamental issues of who we are as a polity and how we respect each other, especially when we disagree with each other.  They are important battles, but they are not usually life-or-death.

The Uyghur situation is entirely different.  Millions of people are being stripped of their identity, forced into labor, separated from their families, and disappeared.  This is well documented by different governments, our own State Department, the New York Times, and other investigative journalism.

We saw this mass forced labor moment coming.  Religious freedom is the canary in the coal mine of human rights.  If you look at a country and see how they treat their least favored, least popular religious minority, you will know how robust their entire human rights system is.  Even before China got to this point, we had already seen Uyghurs’ religious freedom being targeted.  They were clearly being targeted for their Muslim practice, being forbidden from fasting during Ramadan.  And now, unsurprisingly, it’s gone beyond—the Uyghurs’ most fundamental right to life, to work, to family, is being violated.  It just happens that religious freedom is so often the first to go.

Even if you don’t care about religious liberty in particular, you should be paying attention to it.  It’s a huge indicator of the health of the polity.

David Rubinstein is a second-year student at Columbia Law School and a Staff member of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.  He graduated from Yeshiva University in 2018.  He was a legal intern at Becket in summer 2021.