French Mr. Clean: Cabinet-Level Voice for Human Rights

Claude Malhuret, derided by critics as the Mr. Clean of the French government, is a slight, soft-spoken physician with an ear-to-ear mustache that has made him one of the country’s most familiar faces.

He is also something of an experiment in government.

Since the conservatives came to power a year and a half ago, Malhuret has been Premier Jacques Chirac’s secretary of state for human rights.

As such, the balding, 37-year-old Malhuret is Paris’ official watchdog, frequently a rare voice of humanitarian reason in the political and bureaucratic quagmire of a modern Western government.

Nearly Unique Job

The job is nearly unique. Argentina and Canada have similar Cabinet-level posts. Others, where they exist, are lower positions, such as Washington’s assistant secretary of state for human rights.

It is an admirable commitment, most would agree, creating a top-level human rights overseer in a country with a long tradition of offering asylum to the world’s displaced or politically prosecuted. Several European countries are watching the experiment with interest. But at home, opinion is mixed.

Yves Jouffa, president of France’s League of Human Rights, which was created in 1888, has said that if a secretary of state for human rights were to do the job well, he would have to resign once a week.

“I think there is an incompatibility between a government and the defense of human rights,” Jouffa said. “The defense of human rights must be by the people, a sort of counter-power.”

‘He Serves Nothing’

Added Jean-Pierre Chevenement, an opposition Socialist candidate for president in next year’s elections: “Malhuret is the Mr. Clean of government they can bring out whenever they need him. He serves nothing. He is a political tool.”

Malhuret, not surprisingly, thinks that is hogwash, particularly since he has occasionally been an uncomfortable thorn in the side of his own government with frank, outspoken statements.

“I am here to do a certain number of things and to say a certain number of things,” he said “You can always say Mr. Clean, but it is a commitment on the part of this government.

“And it is an even larger commitment, because I say what I think and I don’t have any electoral afterthoughts.”

Product of Uprisings

If the job is unusual, so is the man.

Malhuret is a product of the 1968 student-worker uprisings in France that nearly toppled Charles de Gaulle and marked a generation of Frenchmen. A medical student at the time, he became a leader of a leftist student union, later joining the Unified Socialist Party, then on the extreme non-communist left.

After his internship, he immediately launched into a career of humanitarian work in the Third World, serving in a government-run aid program in Morocco in lieu of military service. That was followed by a World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication mission in India.

A turning point in his thinking came when he joined Doctors Without Borders, a French-based humanitarian organization that operates medical missions throughout the Third World.

Trip to Cambodia

“I went to the Cambodian border to help Cambodian refugees,” he said. “At first, I didn’t want to go. I was still on the left and I said to myself I didn’t want to help the bourgeois of Phnom Penh who had fled. I arrived and I discovered that the bourgeois had all been killed and that these were poor peasants.

“I didn’t believe it at the time. It was 1976. They explained to me what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime. It was unbelievable. But there was no way not to believe. I returned to France and I explained, and I was spit upon. People told me that it was not true, that I was playing the game of the right. It was not until 1978 and the Vietnamese invasion that everybody accepted what I was saying.”

After Cambodia came Afghanistan, Lebanon, Ethiopia and Poland.

“I saw that all I had defended when I was 18 years old, the demonstrations in support of Vietnam and Cambodia and all of that, had prepared dictatorships even worse than those I fought,” he said. “As a whole generation in France, I passed from an attitude of extreme left to an attitude of re-centered left. That was at the end of the 1970s.”

Rightward Slide

In 1980, he was named director of Doctors Without Borders.

His rightward slide went another step when Francois Mitterrand was elected president in 1981 and the Socialists decided to offer ministerial posts to Communists, people Malhuret had “discovered over 10 years were unacceptable, the totalitarians of our era.”

He became friends with a number of young, bright center-right politicians, such as Francois Leotard, now minister of culture, and Alain Madelin, current minister of industry. When the right took control of the National Assembly in March, 1986, Malhuret was asked to become secretary of state for human rights.

The left has always portrayed itself as the repository of French human rights and morality, an image the Chirac government would like to change. But neither Mitterrand nor his Socialist governments from 1981 to 1986 ever created a similar post. Mitterrand, long a champion of human rights, preferred to keep the field to himself.

Immediate Access

From the beginning, Malhuret insisted that his office be directly responsible to the premier, rather than attached to the foreign ministry, giving him immediate access and influence.

The easier part of the job is watching over human rights abroad, he said. More touchy is dealing with the situation at home, where there is a direct effect.

In the foreign sector, Malhuret’s biggest job is instilling what he calls a “human rights reflex” in France’s diplomats. That is, motivating them to think not only in political terms, but also making human rights part of their frame of reference. He claims some success.

“For example, the decision of France to support organizations working in the liberated zones of Afghanistan,” he said. “That was a big change, because the golden rule of diplomacy is the non-interference in the internal affairs of a country. But that is an interference in the name of human rights.”

Fine Line

Linking development aid to human rights also is a product of Malhuret’s efforts.

But the interference line is fine.

“Yes, it’s delicate,” he said. “When we decided to give this aid to Afghanistan, there were protests from Kabul, protests from Moscow, and there is always a price to pay. But I think this price is small.”

Internally, the situation is not the same because, as the secretary of state points out, people have recourse to the courts. And, despite Jouffa’s prediction, Malhuret has only threatened to resign once in 18 months--that was during what he terms his greatest failure or, rather, “a battle that I won too late.”

Student Killing

It was during the student demonstrations of November, 1986, protesting the government’s university reform bill. A student of North African origin, Malik Oussekine, was killed by police.

“The day that Malik Oussekine died, I told my friends Leotard and Madelin that if we did not withdraw the bill I would resign, because the death of Oussekine was an accident,” he said. “But on the other hand, if the bill continued, it was obvious that the following week the students would be even more radicalized in the street, that the level of violence would continue.”

The bill was withdrawn and the student agitation evaporated.

When the government, as part of its fight against clandestine immigration, put 101 Malians on a special charter for home, Malhuret stepped in and stopped any further such flights.

Delicate Issue

Terrorism is even more delicate, particularly when expanded powers given to police approach democratic limits.

“I have always said, since the first bomb that exploded in Paris last year, that it would be to fall into the trap of the terrorists to go beyond the law to fight them,” he said. “That’s what the terrorists want. They want the government to radicalize things.”

But, he said, terrorism is the greatest of threats, “a war against democracy. We have the right to go to the extreme limits.”

“If tomorrow there are new bombs, and if I had the impression that in one way or another I had, without imperious necessity, inhibited the action of the interior minister, I could not forgive myself,” he said.

His larger success of the job, in Malhuret’s view, is the “thousands of individual cases” the secretary of state has resolved for refugees seeking asylum, or people threatened with expulsion, people in an illegal situation or with particular social problems.