Adam Wagner is a human rights barrister and founder of Rights Info, and organisation that promotes public understanding of human rights. I’m a huge admirer of the project (and Adam!) and have written for the site in the past.
Following yet another Daily Mail headline that disparages the idea of human rights, Adam posted a couple of Twitter threads in response. The first was about why investigations into alleged human rights abuses by British soldiers is important and necessary. The second was about how the tabloids ‘frame’ human rights stories, and how fact-checking them is not enough if we want to ensure public support for our rights.
I’ve blogged about this communications challenge before, but I think Adam puts it particularly well. I anticipate referring back to this in the future, and make no apology for reproducing the entire series of Tweets below. Continue reading
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The Royal Court Theatre has cancelled a revival of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Andrea Dunbar’s 1982 play about grooming and sexual exploitation. The cancellation came after it was revealed in October that Max Stafford-Clark, who directed the original production and co-directed the revival, had been forced to resign as creative director of Out of Joint due to multiple allegations of ‘inappropriate behaviour.’
The venue had recently staged No Grey Area, an event in which 150 stories of sexual abuse and exploitation were shared over the course of an afternoon. The Royal Court’s artistic director Vicky Featherstone has called for the British theatre community to reckon with the abuses of power, just as Hollywood is doing now that the extent of Harvey Weinstein’s monstrous behaviour has been revealed. In this context, says the theatre, staging Rita, Sue and Bob Too is “highly conflictual.”
I spoke to New York Times correspondent Anna Codrea-Rado about the cancellation and am quoted in her report: Continue reading
This checklist for ‘surviving an authoritarian regime’, posted in January this year by the Polish journalist Martin Mycielski, is uncanny in its alignment with the first year of the Trump administration.
Attempts to delegitimise independent media? Check. Creating chaos and constant conflict? Check. Denial of verifiable facts? Check. Fabricated scandals? Check. Continue reading
I have finally started reading The Great Dissent by Thomas Healy. It’s history of how United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes came to write a famous defence (or should I write defense?) of free speech in the case Abrams v. United States. It’s a fascinating account of how someone with entrenched conservative views changed his mind, and also a useful potted history of the concept of free speech. I’m making plenty of notes and bookmarking several passages. Continue reading
In a dark, personal and fascinating essay on Josef Mengele, my former colleague Jo Glanville sticks a pin in a very particular feeling experienced by those of us who work in human rights campaigning:
Had I developed an unhealthy attraction to stories of the most extreme inhumanity? I asked myself similar questions when I left journalism to work in human rights. I often used to discuss with my colleagues the adrenaline rush that would come when we heard about a new case of imprisonment, prosecution or worse, giving us the energy to take action, but it was disturbingly close to a sensation of excitement. Perhaps my motives were irrelevant, since the work was clearly necessary: whether researching historic human rights abuse or campaigning for current cases. But the intellectual thrill that can accompany investigating or campaigning against the darkest events, alongside a repulsion at the atrocities, continued to disturb me.
I call this thrill Ungerechtigkeitfreude – ‘Injustice joy.’ But I do not see it as a negative emotion. The feeling of excitment comes from the recognition that a particular human rights violation—one that sits squarely within the mandate of your organisation—offers a clear opportunity to make a case that could catalyse change. It is the recognition of an opportunity to spin an act of destruction and oppression into something positive.
I imagine that scholars of fascism, genocide, and its intersection at the Holocaust, have similar muddled feelings. As one accrues a deep historical understanding of how something terrible came about, one also gains the ability to recognise parallels in our own time and place. Which in turn offers the opportunity to sound the alarm and divert the problem.
It is a recognition that, while we have no power to change the past, we do have an opportunity, every day, to change the future for the better.
I have realised that asking ‘Is there a German compound noun for…’ is just my verbose way of saying ‘TFW’ #translation
— robertsharp59 (@robertsharp59) May 11, 2016