In the United States, there is growing discussion on social media about the phenomenon of white people calling the police when they see a black person doing something entirely normal, or when they perceive a black person not showing enough ‘respect’.
When Yale student Lolade Siyonbola fell asleep in the library while writing an essay, someone called the police. When Tenessee real-estate developer inspected a house in Memphis, someone called the police. When Oakland resident Onsayo Abram set up a barbeque in the park, someone called the police.
Today I saw a variation on the theme: someone threatening to call the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when he became annoyed by two women working at a cafe speaking Spanish to each other.
Many people have made the point that this is linked to President Donald J. Trump’s unpleasant rhetoric about ethnic minorities (and indeed, everything). He has set a terrible example which incubates racists attitudes and brings out the worst in people. Others say that this kind of racism was always present in the society and it is only thanks to social media that we know these incidents are systemic, not isolated (it is almost a decade since professor Henry Louis Gates Jnr was arrested for breaking into his own home).
But these incidents also illustrate something about civil rights that I had not understood until I started working for English PEN, and which I don’t think many other people appreciate, which is that ambiguous laws can erode our civil liberties. Continue reading
Tag: Human Rights (Page 5 of 40)
Terrible, terrible scenes on the border between Gaza and Israel. The IDF have massacred 52 protesters.
Meanwhile, social media is full of people seeking to justify and excuse this violence. The main line being parroted seems to be that Hamas provoked the attacks, because dead Palestinians are politically useful.
There may be some within the Hamas leadership who think like that, but that does not excuse or mitigate the violence by Israel, a country that is supposed to be a democracy, that is supposed to respect human rights.
What we need to remember in these situations is that blame is not zero sum. It can be possible for Hamas to have malign motives in staging the protest and putting people in danger. That does not remove moral culpability from the Israeli soldiers who pulled the trigger; nor the Israeli politicians who endorse their actions; nor the American politicians who in turn protect those Israeli politicians from accountability. Continue reading
Today, the Speakers Corner Trust publishes a debate between myself and Dr Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas over the proposition Political Correctness: Opening Eyes or Closing Minds? You can read it here.
Continue readingAdam 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
Earlier this week, Ratko Mladic was found guilty of war crimes.
It seems astonishing that, even after the Holocaust of the 1930s-40s, there could have been further genocides. Is it that people fail to recognise the warning signs that lead to such atrocities? Or that they lack the power and protection to stop the descent into barbarity?
A compelling new video from RightsInfo uses the testimony of three survivors of genocide to describe how these crimes against humanity came to happen.
The lesson is that human rights must be defended early and often. We should and we must defend our rights against even the tiniest encroachment. If we do not, whoever has violated those rights will surely return to erode them further.
See also: my interview with Anjan Sundaram, author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship.