You’re listening to part one of an interview with the third place winner of the Catholic University Center for Human Rights Annual Human Rights Essay Contest by William Saunders, director of the Center for Human Rights. To read the award winning essays, go to humanrights catholic.edu.

 

Bill Saunders: Welcome to another edition of the Barefoot Lawyer Podcast. I’m William Saunders, and I’m the director of the Center for Human Rights, where Chen Guangcheng is a Distinguished Fellow. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Froelich. Jonathan, are you still a PhD student at Catholic University of America?

 

Jonathan Froelich: Yes. I’m finishing my coursework and now faced with the gargantuan task of taking my major comps in the fall. I passed minor comps last year, so major comps is the last thing to complete before I go into dissertation. So yes, I’m still a student. It’s slow going when you work full time and have two kids under ten, so it’s not as quick as I’d like, but I’m enjoying the journey so far for sure.

 

Bill Saunders: I assume your PhD, your dissertation, is not going to be about China, or is it going to be?

 

Jonathan Froelich: No, my concentration is the American government with a minor in World Politics that I’m getting a PhD in the politics department.  I’d like to do something related to national security, terrorism, something that dovetails with my full time job and my career. However, certainly any conversation you have about international affairs or almost anything, China inevitably comes up. This is one of the reasons I was drawn to this. I was telling Will before we got started that, if nothing else, this is proof that it literally pays to check out the bulletin board in Aquinas Hall, as you see some interesting things. This was something that I thought would be interesting to do. It certainly was an interesting journey just to kind of consider this issue, which I hadn’t really given a whole lot of attention to before. Thus, this is a good excuse to kind of delve into another area, which wasn’t part of my day to day, either academically or professionally.

 

Bill Saunders: Professionally, do you work in the National Security arena?

 

Jonathan Froelich: So I’ve been with the FBI for about, at the end of this month, it’d be 21 years. Since November, I’ve been detailed to the United States Army as the Army Intelligence Oversight Program Manager, so I manage intelligence oversight for the entire U.S. Army.

 

That’s part of a joint duty program. I’m still on the books with the FBI, but for all practical purposes, I’m an Army employee. That’s pretty much my entire post undergraduate career in criminal justice, law enforcement, intelligence analysis, and program management.

 

Bill Saunders: Let’s remind the listeners. The Center for Human Rights sponsors an annual essay contest where we invite people to reflect on a human rights issue connected in some way or another with the Chinese Communist Party and either its actions in its own country or its actions abroad. This year we asked to look at a human rights issue in China and to suggest how the United States might respond to it in a productive way. Jonathan’s essay, which was an excellent essay and one of the prize winners, has a great title to it. It says “This may sting a bit: A Practical Plan for Chinese Human Rights Intervention by the United States”. Jonathan, just reading your essay, it is clear that you have some sophistication in thinking about diplomacy and international relations. Could you frame the approach you took to this question and then talk a little bit about the human rights issue you decided to focus on?

 

Jonathan Froelich: Absolutely. Let me work backwards a little bit. I started by reading last year’s winners once I decided to participate on this little adventure. I viewed the ones that were available on the website, and many of them seem to be, not surprisingly, considering this is CUA, very spiritual and religious in nature. I certainly have a strong respect for that, as much as the term gained a negative stigma following the Vietnam war. I’m a big believer in winning hearts and minds, so I’m a huge proponent of spirituality and things of that nature.

 

I reflected on not only the essays from 2023, but also some kind of emerging, emerging international situations, whether it be the war in Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, and then, of course, as we’re talking about today, the Chinese human rights issue. I started with that, but then flipped it on his head a little bit and decided to go a more practical approach. As I said, you know, my entire career has been focused on very practical matters; not that I don’t try to use creativity in my work and my studies, but very practical.

 

What I tried to do is take this problem and try to apply a multidimensional, practical solution. I think when we’re looking at all of the situations that are going on in the world today, we have a tendency to have an emotional response. Perhaps that’s not the most apt word, but that’s the best I can think of right now. We tend to use these one dimensional approaches. I think we’re getting to a better place in Ukraine, where this is another topic for another podcast, another time, but I thought the new story that the United States has given Ukraine permission to attack targets in Russia with U.S. weapons should have been a bigger story than it was, but they don’t ask for my opinions.

 

I started to think that we need to be more creative with this approach. What is going to resonate with China? Certainly it’s not any sort of a moralistic lecture to them saying “You should do this, you should do that” with regard to human rights. What’s going to resonate with the Chinese government? The solution is certainly not a problem like Ukraine, where we’re just going to keep throwing money at it. It’s not a problem where we can, with all respect to the 2023 winners, if we can just throw the Gospel at them; it has to be something that’s multisided.

 

I’m a very practical person. That’s what kind of led me to the philosophy that I was employing throughout the essay was just, “Okay, what is really happening, and what is a good chance of working here? What is going on, what have we tried, and what has been successful? What haven’t we tried, and what might be successful?” The potential reason behind the title is that I think we might need to consider a cooperative approach, even though it may read like we’re condoning this behavior, which I don’t think we should do. I was reading recently that the G7 was scolding China for supporting Russia in the war and helping with that effort. Then we see Russia and North Korea getting together. We can’t handle all these crises all at once, especially from these countries, we have to get together.

 

The more we can do to try, and as painful as it might be, bring countries like China closer and take an incremental approach to solving these human rights atrocities, the better off I think we’re going to be. That was kind of my overall philosophy, and hopefully that frames where I’m coming from.

 

Bill Saunders: Sure. The second part of the essay was, “What can the US do to respond?” There’s no question that human rights and the approach that the Center takes, you have to identify the problems. I tell my students all the time, I’m not a lifelong academic. I’m a public policy lawyer who now has a program in human rights. The reason I tell them that is because the job of a lawyer is to craft a solution either for your client or for wherever it is you want to go. I think it’s great to be thinking very practically about how we can address and maybe be effective with a problem.

 

The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world class human rights experts, from former State Department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.