At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights.

Leaving aside the absurdity of arguing that open societies can correct their own abuses while uncharged prisoners enter their eighth year at Guantanamo, Bernstein is misreading his own organization’s historical role. In Bernstein’s telling, HRW grew exclusively out of the work done by Helsinki Watch to promote liberalization in the Soviet Union. That’s partially true, but while focusing on Helsinki Watch’s work with Soviet dissidents such as Natan Sharansky (another human rights icon who holds Israel to none of the standards to which he held the USSR), Bernstein neglects his former organization’s early investigations of abuses by US proxies in Latin America. Americas Watch, launched three short years after Helsinki Watch, “critically examined the role played by foreign governments, particularly the United States,” in the Latin American civil wars of the 1980s, according to HRW’s own telling. In a June post at his blog Making Sense of Darfur, Alex de Waal writes,

Human rights activism is many things. Among them, it is a liberal practice that uses one of the core principles of the political right in liberal democracies—a commitment to individual rights and liberties—as a critique to dismantle the power of the right. (Equally, it has historically deployed the left’s principles against Communists in power.) During 1980s, Human Rights Watch did this brilliantly, taking the standards of human rights that Ronald Reagan used to condemn the Soviet Union and applying them to Latin America and the U.S.-backed military regimes there…

As in many areas, de Waal is spot-on here. From the beginning, HRW existed not just to take on autocracies, but to examine abuses by foreign powers with support on the American right. In the 1980s, this was El Salvador and Colombia. In 2009, this are the Olmert and Netanyahu governments.

New York’s brand new Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch gets around. Will the man who took down New York City’s Board of Estimate do the same with Albany’s Three Men?

In televised address on Wednesday, New York Governor David Paterson announced that he would attempt to break the month-long deadlock in the State Senate by appointing New York political elder statesman Ravitch as Lieutenant Governor, filling a position that had been vacant since Eliot Spitzer stepped down in March of 2008. The Lieutenant Governor’s position is largely ceremonial, but Ravitch will have the power to cast tie-breaking votes in the State Senate, allowing him to resolve the standoff between Senate Democrats and Republicans that has held up statewide legislation since June.

The appointment is controversial, and Republican Senatorial leaders are looking to Attorney General (and 2010 gubernatorial hopeful) Andrew Cuomo, who said on Monday that the appointment isn’t allowed under the state constitution. While the inevitable legal proceedings shake out, Albany’s not-so-proverbial smoke filled room sits empty. Destabilized by the narrow margin by which the Democrats took the State Senate after the November elections, the triumvirate the Speaker of the Assembly, President Pro Tem of the Senate, and the Governor that’s controlled all public business in Albany for decades is momentarily disbanded. In his column at Slate, Eliot Spitzer argued that this was an important enough development to made the rogue Democrats’ defections worthwhile. Wrote Spitzer,

The use of that power by two Democratic senators, though perhaps for questionable purposes, is emboldening others to use their leverage to bargain for worthwhile causes. State Sen. Tom Duane is reported to be negotiating with the Republicans to persuade them to bring a bill authorizing same-sex marriage to the floor. And the Republicans, perhaps knowing that their control of the chamber will be short-lived, passed some reform measures, that while less than what should be sought, are more than what they put in place during their decades of control, or what the Democrats had put in place during the past five months.

While Spitzer himself probably would have broken Pedro Espada’s kneecaps if he had tried to pull this sort of thing before the Ashley Dupré episode, the point is well taken.

Which brings us back to Richard Ravitch. Ravitch, 76, has held some of the most unenviable public offices imaginable, including the chairmanship of the MTA in the early 1980s and a position as the chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball just before the strike. He was also an early chairman of a 1988 charter revision commission convened in response to a federal lawsuit alleging that the New York City Board of Estimate, a governing body consisting of the Mayor, the Comptroller, the head of the City Council, and the Borough Presidents, violated the “one man, one vote” principle, and was unconstitutional. The Board, which had existed since 1898, was the most powerful body in the city government, controlling the city’s budget and land use. Citywide officials each had two votes and Borough Presidents each had one vote, meaning that residents of Staten Island were wildly overrepresented while everyone else was underrepresented. Ravitch made waves in 1988 when he was among the first to say that the board would most likely need to be entirely scrapped entirely. It was, and its power was shifted to the City Council.

It would be easy to make too much of the comparison between the Board of Estimate and Albany’ Three Men. The Board of Estimate, after all, was a legitimate elected body, while the Three Men are essentially metaphor for Albany’s dysfunction. Both, however, represent severe democratic deficits in which power rests disproportionately with citywide or statewide officials and leaders of legislative bodies, and in which local representatives are relatively powerless. And Ravitch, in both cases, appeared in the right place at the right time.

I don’t see any indication that Ravitch’s 1988 opposition to the Board of Estimates was ideological. Rather, he knew that the Supreme Court would eventually find against the Board and he did what he could to ease the transition. A similar approach in the case of the Three Men might very well take him in the opposite direction, away from more democracy and towards the status quo. The pressure from Paterson will be to achieve stability by whatever means necessary, a call which will almost inevitably lead Ravitch to use his vote to bring Democratic Senator Malcolm Smith back to power. Then again, Ravitch only has one vote, and there are at least three potential renegades still within the Democratic caucus. Perhaps the Three Men are already too far gone.

UPDATE Thursday, 5:00 pm.m

I stepped away from the computer around noon, and when I got back this post was outdated. Ah, blogging. Espada (lengthy profile here) is a Democrat again, but apparently has succeeded in usurping Malcolm Smith as Majority Leader of the Senate. What remains to be seen is whether a marginalized Democrat like Espada will be able to dominate the Senate in the manner of his recent predecessor Joe Bruno, one of the Three Men for 14 years. Signs point to no. Not that this had anything to do with Ravitch himself, of course. But his appointment, and the growing probability of a renewed Democratic majority, certainly forced a resolution.

I come to you after two years editing New Voices, a national magazine for Jewish college students. I’ll be working on this blog while serving as The Faster Times’ news editor. Feel free to contact me with tips and suggestions at joshnathankazis@thefastertimes.com.