Democracy vs Ochlochracy

Simpsons Angry Mob

The Government’s hideous Rwanda asylum plan has been ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.

Under the plan, people who applied for asylum in the Uk after arriving via an irregular route would be deported to Rwanda, and have their claim processed there. Not everyone realised that successful applicants would be granted asylum in Rwanda.

My view is that the policy was wrong on the most fundamental level. We take far fewer refugees than we should, if they were dispersed proportionally throughout the world. And there are reasons why people choose particular countries for their asylum claim and it’s often to do with prior links to that country. It’s absurd that a person who already has family living in the UK, and who applies to the UK government for asylum, should be sent elsewhere.

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The Warning Signs

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.

A Framework for Countering Dangerous Speech

I’m bookmarking this Washington Post profile of Professor Susan Benesch, whose research looks at ‘dangerous speech’—that is, speech that can incite mass violence.

For Benesch, it’s important that people understand that the type of speech she wants to counter is different from hate speech, which she says is a broad category for which there is no agreed-upon definition. An advocate for free speech, she does not believe that hate speech can or should be silenced. In fact, it’s one of the central reasons she sought to differentiate dangerous speech.

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Podcast: Anjan Sundaram – Bad News

Earlier this year I recorded a podcast with the award-winning journalist Anjan Sundaram. We discussed his wonderful book Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, an account of the extinction of press freedom in Rwanda.
This week the podcast and an edited transcript of part of the discussion was posted in the PEN Atlas section of the English PEN website.  You can listen to it on SoundCloud or via the player below. Continue reading “Podcast: Anjan Sundaram – Bad News”