Big Voice Wednesday

With Associate Professor Tara Van Ho

I was thrilled to have as my guest this week my friend Tara Van Ho. She’s an Associate Professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in Texas. Tara is an expert in international law and the sub-fields of business and human rights law and international investment law. Her work focuses on how businesses impact human rights, especially in conflict and post-conflict societies. Tara has invaluable insight into complicated international legal issues.

Tara is also a native Ohioan like me. We attended the same law school and, eventually, both sought advanced, post-graduate law degrees in international human rights law at the University of Essex in the U.K. Tara’s path to becoming an international legal scholar is quite interesting and inspiring. Her experience returning after 17 years from the U.K. to the United States and, in particular, to Texas gives me great hope. I hope you come away hopeful from our discussion, too.

For those who prefer to read the interview transcripts, I’ve included it below, edited for clarity, length, and flow.

Always remember that the smallest action can have a BIG impact!

One step at a time,

Ronda

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[Transcript]

Ronda Cress: Hey everybody. Welcome to this week’s Big Voice Wednesday. If you’re new to us, Big Voice Wednesday aims to break up the unrelenting news cycle by injecting some inspiration and hope—and sometimes a little humor—into your week so you can make it through the [rest of the] week and into the weekend. Big Voice Wednesday showcases ordinary individuals who I think are doing extraordinary things or using their voice in unexpected ways.

I’m very happy to introduce you to my guest this week. She’s a lawyer and law professor who specializes in international law—specifically how businesses impact human rights, particularly in conflict and post-conflict societies. So she knows a lot about international human rights law, international law, the laws of war and conflict, economics, and how our politics affect all of that. I’m very excited to welcome my friend, Tara Van Ho.

Tara Van Ho: Thank you so much for having me.

Ronda Cress: Hey Tara. Thanks so much for being here. And just in full disclosure, Tara and I go way back. Tara and I actually went to the same law school. She was a year ahead of me. I’m older than Tara, but she was a year ahead of me in law school because I went a little bit later to law school than most people do. So I don’t know how many decades now—almost 20, I think, or somewhere around.

Tara Van Ho: Twenty. It’s amazing—since we’re both 25, 27.

Ronda Cress: Right, exactly. I know we’ve aged so well. We’ve barely aged at all.

Ronda Cress: So we went to law school together, but not only that—after law school, Tara went overseas and I believe you got a doctorate. A doctorate in law, right?

Tara Van Ho: Correct. Yes.

Ronda Cress: And I ended up, several years later, actually following Tara overseas to the University of Essex, where she got her doctorate in law. I got a Master of Laws in International Human Rights Law. We’ve kept in touch off and on throughout the years. I’ve followed Tara’s career and her work, and I think that she’s an essential voice to hear from right now because she’s an expert in international law and business law.

And right now, in particular, with everything going on, this is a perfect time to have Tara on and hear from her. But before we dive into all of the substantive stuff that I want to talk to you about, I did just want to make sure that I didn’t miss anything in your intro. I know I didn’t say exactly what you’re doing right now. So if you want to share a little bit about that, please do, and then we’ll dive in.

Tara Van Ho: Hi. In June, after 17 years living in the UK, I moved back to the US and I am now based at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. I’m teaching Business Associations as a compulsory course, and then I have a variety of international law and human rights–related courses. So this semester I’m teaching Laws of Conflict. Last semester I taught Business and Human Rights.

Tara Van Ho: I’m still settling into the US again, I’ll admit. But my students and my colleagues have been wonderful in giving me a cushion for coming back to the US, which has been nice.

Ronda Cress: That’s great. And I was a little surprised, I admit, when I saw that you were coming back to the US—especially at this point in time—because part of me was jealous that you were over in the UK still when things started.

Tara Van Ho: A lot. And most of the students thought that I was crazy, and most of my friends in the UK equally had concerns about what was going on. But it was the right time professionally and personally—and also civically. I think having conversations around international law and human rights right now, in this administration, is really important. So I felt a responsibility to come home at this time.

Ronda Cress: Well, we’re happy to have you back. I will say that.

And so I think that’s a good segue into the more substantive discussions. One of the main reasons that I wanted to have you come and talk to us this week in particular is because of the events that are happening—or potentially happening—with Iran.

Ronda Cress: And just as a reminder to the viewers—I’m sure everyone already knows—the Trump administration deployed a large fleet of aircraft and warships to the area surrounding Iran, I think a week ago or two weeks ago, somewhere around there, to force Iran to make a deal on their nuclear weapons program. Of course, we already had a deal negotiated under President Obama and our allies before the Trump administration withdrew it during his first term.

But I digress a little bit. I just wanted to get your take—under international law, and being an expert on the laws of war and conflict—on using force, or the threat of force, to make a country agree to something.

Tara Van Ho: Right. So it’s illegal. The United Nations Charter has no gray area. There’s not a lot of nuance in this.

There is a prohibition—as a matter of a treaty that the US has ratified. And for those of you who don’t have to worry about this as your day in, day out, it’s important to note that treaties are actually, in the Constitution, part of the Supreme law of the land. So it’s the Constitution, federal legislation, and treaties. And collectively, those three areas of law make the Supreme law of the land.

And this has been a problem for a few decades. Most American lawyers just don’t study international law and they don’t necessarily understand international law, and that feeds over into the Constitution. So if you read the Times, it doesn’t mention treaties once, which is a really troubling development—if you actually care about why international law has developed the way that it has and what it does for the US as part of the international community.

Part of the UN Charter says there’s a prohibition—an absolute prohibition—on the use or threat of the use of force against another member state. International law recognizes you just can’t use force to get your way.

Tara Van Ho: So under the UN Charter, there is an absolute prohibition on the use or threat of the use of force against another member state. Iran is a member of the UN, whether we like it or not. And so that prohibition exists for us, and it’s an important prohibition. It’s not just something that people think about as aspirational. It actually has concrete responsibilities behind it—not just for the United States, but for other states as well.

Our allies aren’t allowed to help us when it comes to breaching an article like this. We are putting our allies in a really uncomfortable position, and we’ve seen that. In the last week, the UK government actually said that they weren’t going to allow the US to use their military bases to launch an attack against Iran because the UK doesn’t want to be breaching international law either.

So when you have that kind of strength of a prohibition, that means that a state like the UK is saying to us: actually, we can’t go along with this. We are in really uncomfortable territory, and it is a very clear breach of international law. As a consequence, it should be understood as a breach of our own Constitution as well.

Ronda Cress: I appreciate you making that point because I think it’s a very good point about how the Supreme law of our land—we always think of the Constitution and our laws, but we don’t think about international treaties and the fact that all three of those together make the Supreme law of the United States.

I’m also struck—especially this day and age—that when we were in law school, and it is still the case today, international law as a course was an elective course. It’s not something that’s mandatory or required, and it’s actually a bit surprising given how much more interconnected we are globally, especially with technology.

It’s yet another reason why having someone like you—an expert in this area—to break it down and help us understand that no, we can’t just do whatever we want. And that was a vital piece of the post–World War II order—having these laws and these treaties and agreements in place for these types of situations.

Whether something’s going to happen or not, we don’t know, but it is likely that even if there isn’t anything this time, this seems to be kind of a favorite technique or strategy that the Trump administration likes to use.

I actually wanted to get your take about Greenland because we saw him—he didn’t send a force over, but we’ve heard a lot of talk and suggestions about invading Greenland for security purposes. And so I wanted to ask you to talk about that a little bit, and whether there’s somehow an exception to international law or the laws of aggression for security purposes or other rationales.

Tara Van Ho: So there isn’t an exception for national security reasons. There’s self-defense, or imminence. So if you believe another state is going to attack, you can take measures—if it’s a reasonable belief—you can take reasonable and proportionate measures to protect your own national sovereignty.

There’s no exception for the aggressive use of force, which is where you’re going to take property from another state. And that’s what invading Greenland would be. It’s also what attacking Iran would be. Even if you’re not taking that land, that aggressive use of force is what’s prohibited.

And I think it’s quite significant that, again, we put our allies in a position where they were being forced to choose between their obligations under the NATO agreement and under the UN Charter versus their alliance with us. That’s not a position we should be putting our allies into. And I think that’s one of the things that the Trump administration sometimes misses: we sacrifice a lot of soft power when we do this to our allies, and we’re starting to see the real and significant impact of that.

We’re seeing Canada and the UK look for other partners globally. And who are they going to be looking for? They’re going to be looking to places like China.

Tara Van Ho: We’re also seeing states like Germany enhance their military and their investment in defense. That takes a little bit of the defense burden off of us, but it doesn’t take a significant burden. And the reason that they’re doing that is to create strategic independence from us, which means we’re losing our soft power there. So we are actually sacrificing a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I was on Texas Public Radio talking about Greenland, and somebody said, “Oh, Trump’s getting us a lot of really great deals. We should be thankful for him. This is just part of the negotiating tactics.”

And the thing is, you can’t negotiate with your friends with brutality. If I said to you, Ronda, “I want to sell you a car for $2,000,” and then the next day I said, “Actually, I’m going to sell it to you for $500 or I’m going to beat you up,” and then on the third day I say, “I’m not even going to sell it to you, I’m just going to beat you up,” and then on the fourth day I say, “Actually, let’s take it for $2,000”—is it a good deal for me if you say yes? And at what point do you say, “Actually, I’m not dealing with this anymore. I’m not doing this with you”? And what happens to our friendship?

And what do [we] sacrifice for the US when we offend our allies in that way? What we lose is their cooperation in a lot of ways that we need their cooperation with. So the UK cut off intelligence sharing around the Caribbean because they didn’t want to be complicit in our international law violations on Venezuela. They’re going to stop engaging in trade deals with us.

They’re under an obligation—and I have an article coming out in the next couple of weeks that touches a little bit on this—but they’re starting to face an obligation to curtail arms transfers to the United States, which doesn’t just implicate completed weapons, but also all of our supply chains. That’s important because something like the F-35 has thousands of suppliers around the world, and we’re compromising that relationship with them because the Trump administration has one tool in its toolbox of negotiation, and they don’t understand what we sacrifice when we do that. And so it’s really concerning.

Ronda Cress: It’s bullying under the guise of negotiating. And like you said, it’s undermining our standing. It’s undermining international law. It’s undermining our international standing, and it’s deeply troubling.

I wanted to stick with Iran just for a minute and use that as a segue into another topic. Aside from the talk of war with Iran, I want to have a discussion about Iran itself and the Iranian people and the broader topic of human rights and human rights law.

As you know, we have some mutual friends who are Iranian—who obviously don’t live in Iran anymore—who left and fled with their families and yet continue to work for human rights to be recognized in Iran and for democracy, which we know Iran does not have right now. They have an incredibly repressive regime. And yet we continue to see efforts of people in Iran rising up and pushing back.

It hasn’t broken through yet in terms of change to democracy or change to a recognition by the government of people’s rights, fundamental human rights, but it’s really been something to watch. And I think it’s unfortunate here because I think a lot of times when we’re talking about Iran, it’s always in the posturing of the regime—and we don’t hear enough about separating the regime from the people who, like everybody else, want to have a say in their government.

Ronda Cress: And it got me thinking about how the notion or the concept of universal human rights really is a relatively young concept. It doesn’t seem like it because we think, “Oh, well, democracy has been around for thousands of years since the ancient Greeks.” And yes, as a system of governance it has been, but even democracy has shifted over time—who gets a say? For a long time it was only men, or wealthy men, and so who gets to participate? Democracy has changed over time.

But this idea that everybody—that we all have rights inherent to us simply by existing—that is a relatively new concept when you look at our period of time. And I’m wondering if this global authoritarian movement that we’re seeing is maybe a pushback against that, and against the post–World War II order and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that came out of that.

Tara Van Ho: I do. I think one of the things that people need to understand about human rights is: it is always about the challenge to power. When power exercises speech, that’s not their human right—that’s an exercise of power.

So every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, the president’s just using his right to free speech.” The president doesn’t need to exercise a right to free speech because he is the president of the United States. It is the challenge to the president that needs free speech. It’s the challenge to members of Congress that need free speech. It’s the challenge to businesses or major corporations that need free speech.

And so when you have that at the core of it—when human rights is always a challenge to those in positions of power—you get pushback, and some pretty tough pushback. It is the oppression that we see in Iran. It is strategic lawsuits used to quiet critics of corporations. It is the bullying from the pulpit that we see from this administration. And that pushback is really an intention of retaining power for those who have historically had it, and suppressing dissent so they can continue operations as usual.

Tara Van Ho: And I think for human rights, the challenge is helping the average person understand that the right to challenge that power sits within them because of who they are. But it also means it has to sit with everyone else—that our rights and freedoms are really interwoven with everyone else’s rights and freedoms.

If somebody starts suppressing your right to free speech, it is not going to last very long before my right to free speech is also at risk. So we do have to be really mindful about how human rights works together, and how we are truly dependent on one another’s human rights and the protection of those human rights.

It is a young concept. It is very new. And it is all around challenging positions of power and making sure that we treat everyone not on the basis of some social hierarchy or political hierarchy that we’ve always had, but rather we treat people with equality because they are inherently equal. That’s an uncomfortable reality for a lot of people to live in.

Ronda Cress: It certainly is. But I think that’s an excellent explanation of it.

[Phone rings in background ] I mean, that was probably a student calling you with a question!

Tara Van Ho: That was a colleague.

Ronda Cress: Well, as you can tell, Tara is in her office—as you can tell by the amazing bookshelf back there. We already discussed that before we got live on camera. And I am in an undisclosed location. I don’t have my usual background this time either.

I want to shift gears a little bit now. One of the goals of my newsletter, The Little Girl with the Big Voice, is to encourage and help people to find and use their voices to make their lives and the world around them better—especially at this time in our history. I think a lot of people are struggling. I know I have some friends who are very concerned about whether we’re going to get through this, and what they can do, and they feel like there isn’t anything they can do—or that it won’t matter.

I want to shift now into your journey a little bit and how you came to be using your voice in this way. You’ve been an international lawyer—I assume, I don’t know—but I think that’s why you went to law school. You knew you wanted to do international law or international human rights law.

But how does someone who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio—and I grew up on a farm in Ohio—how does one come to that career path? How did you get here?

Tara Van Ho: Yeah. I was really fortunate in part with the parents that I was born into. They didn’t like the way things were operating in our local city. And so my mom ran for the school board. She wanted to make sure that the schools were really responsive to the parents’ and the students’ needs. And the board at the time had a lot of men on it who didn’t have any children in the school system. And so she felt like they needed parent representation. So she ran.

And that was kind of a start for my family of a much longer journey into politics. I have to admit, I don’t really enjoy politics. I care passionately about protecting people. The process behind politics sometimes I find really grueling.

But they got really involved in local politics. And then my mom was diagnosed with cancer for the second time. I was about 12 years old, and I started writing letters to Congress around support for breast cancer research, general universal healthcare, and the need to make sure that certain types of screening and certain types of treatments were protected for women.

There’s a lot around the personal journey that we don’t really have time to get into. But I will say that my mom was 60 days away from either not getting the treatment that she needed or from having this deemed a preexisting condition for which she couldn’t get treatment in the future.

And that short period of time is what saved her life. My dad got a job with health insurance at exactly the right time. She was 37 years old. They had made strategic decisions around what do they spend money on when they are two working-class parents raising three children—do they need healthcare? And so they went without it for a little bit. My dad finally got it through a new job, and my mom was diagnosed within 60 days. Had it gone much longer, it was an aggressive form.

Tara Van Ho: Had she been diagnosed before, we wouldn’t have been able to pay for the treatment. So at a very young age, the notion of human rights was a really tangible thing for me, but I didn’t have the language behind it. The people in my community didn’t have the language behind it.

And still today, when I come back, I think one of the biggest areas of culture shock for me coming back to the US is the number of friends and family who struggle with getting minimum access to healthcare.

I have a friend of mine that I went to high school with who is currently being treated for a brain tumor and strokes. And in the middle of her treatments, her insurance was cut because she couldn’t continue to work. And so now everything’s coming out of pocket.

I have other friends who are six months pregnant and suddenly the health insurance and the doctors are no longer in contract with each other. Now they have to find coverage.

That kind of a system is so fundamentally broken and unnecessary. And I knew that when I was eight. I knew it when I was 12. I know it now when I am in my later forties.

Tara Van Ho: And I want people to understand that, first, alternative systems exist. But also, healthcare—and so many other things—are just fundamental to our rise as individuals, and we don’t need to sacrifice that in furtherance of an economic system. We need to reclaim that as part of our rights.

So at a very young age, I started campaigning around that. I then learned that there were all these other human rights issues out there and all this other human rights terminology. And it was one of these things that I would walk away from for a little bit and then come back to and realize there was something more that I wanted to talk about.

There was the Rwandan genocide, and there was the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and I kept being drawn back into it.

When I went to law school—actually, before I went to law school—I did a study abroad my junior year of undergrad, and they sent me to England and I got an opportunity to work for Parliament. All of that is a huge fluke of history and life coming together that put me in an internship with the British Parliament.

And it was when Augusto Pinochet was facing extradition. He’s the former dictator of Chile. He was responsible for the torture, extrajudicial killing, and arbitrary detention of over 3,000 people. And the Spanish government wanted to try him—or the Spanish prosecutors wanted to try him for that—and they sought his extradition from the UK.

I just learned so much about the world in that semester that when I came back, I was like, I’m going to go to law school. I’m going to be an international lawyer.

Tara Van Ho: But the way law schools work, they often will tell you to go into corporate law afterwards to make money, to pay off your student loans, to do all of that. So I did that for three years, and I hated every moment of it. It was not what I was supposed to be doing with life. And I knew that.

And my family, to their credit, knew that and repeatedly were like, you need to go back overseas. We love having you here. We hated you being overseas, but now it’s time for you to go. You need to find your passion.

And so that’s when I went to Essex and started the journey into actually understanding international law and human rights in a really concrete way.

Ronda Cress: That’s incredible. I did not know the piece about the healthcare part when you were a child. I think I knew you had done the internship and things overseas.

And I would say—you said it was a fluke. My thing is: was it a fluke? I don’t know. Was it, or was it just serendipitous, or meant to be? I don’t know. I do think there are no accidents.

I am certainly glad that that was the path that you were called to, because I know you do really incredible work. And you have a knack for breaking complicated topics down in ways that people can understand.

Before we wrap up here, I just want to get your thoughts on how you’re feeling about the state of the world right now—especially in the United States—and some of the things that we are seeing: the erosion of our institutions and our rights.

Are you feeling distraught about that? Are you feeling hopeful? And if so, what gives you hope?

Tara Van Ho: I am feeling more hopeful than I thought that I would. It is always tough, and that is the place that we’re in right now. But I have a lot of reasons to have hope.

And coming to Texas—look, I’m going to admit, being from Ohio and living in Europe for the last 17 years, the idea of coming to Texas took a lot of deep breaths and a lot of courage. But I have been blown away by what it means to live in Texas properly.

The number of people around me who are committed to the rule of law, committed to human rights—who would not identify in the same political party that I identify in.

The number of students that I have who are first-generation students from really rich and diverse socioeconomic and political backgrounds—who came to law school because they want to make their communities better and they want to be a voice for people who are struggling to find their own voice. It’s incredible.

I think there’s a lot more commonality among Americans than the political divisions would have us believe. So things like people who want safe drinking water and safe food supplies—that transcends political party.

People who know that our healthcare system isn’t working—even if they don’t know what the alternative should be, even if they don’t know what isn’t working in particular—they know that it’s not working for us. And that transcends political division.

I think there’s a lot of commonality within our society—things we can transform if we give it an opportunity. And I think people are looking for that transformation, and they are finding new leaders in our society in really important ways.

[The] Texas Democratic primary right now—Jasmine Crockett versus James Talarico. My heart is—I know who I’m voting for—but I don’t care who wins the primary. These are both incredible leaders for our future.

Ronda Cress: I wish we didn’t have to make a choice.

Tara Van Ho: To have that as my options list in Texas—that gives me hope. It tells me that we are moving out of that deep, dark place that we’ve been in, into something that is going to be more prosperous in the future. So I am actually really hopeful about where we’re going as a society, and also in the state of Texas, quite frankly. Very hopeful.

Ronda Cress: That’s so good to hear. And it’s making me feel more hopeful.

I’m pretty hopeful anyway that we are going to get through this. I do think we are going to get through this and come out better for it, even though I think things are going to get a bit tougher before we do.

But especially hearing you talk about Texas—and some of the assumptions—I’m hoping throughout all of this that we can start throwing out some of our assumptions and realize they’re not working or they’re misguided, and we need to get rid of that and come back to the commonality, like you said. There’s so much more that many of us have in common, and we’ve stopped focusing on that. And some of that is deliberate. There are a lot of forces out there that don’t want us to focus on that. They want us divided and angry and at each other.

That’s wonderful to hear about Texas, and I hope that starts to apply all across the country. And I think it is—in terms of throwing out assumptions and seeing the commonality in our fellow citizens and human beings.

I think that’s a great place to end this.

Ronda Cress: Tara, thank you so much for being here. And I hope that as things develop with Iran or elsewhere—because, again, I have a feeling this is going to be a common tactic that we see—unfortunately—I hope you’ll be open to coming back at some point down the road if necessary and talking to us again.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us this week. Take care, and thank you to all of the viewers for watching. And remember that even the smallest action can have a huge impact. Thank you all. We’ll see you next time.