Human Rights Endangered
Trashing common decency
By Kate Gilmore
November 30, 2006
These are tough times for human rights. For while no other generation has enjoyed as much wealth, comfort and opportunity as we do today, we live nevertheless in an unsafe, endangered, unfair and deeply divided world. It is a world made unsafe by the proliferation of weapons, by the spreading of conflicts, by the horror of terrorist attacks and - sadly - by the actions of governments that flout the rule of law and undermine fundamental human rights.
In 2006, as Amnesty International monitors human rights in more than 100 countries, we can see clearly that we are living in a world dominated by fear and that fear is divisive. Some people find the most serious threat to their security is from armed groups and terrorist suspects. For many, however, the real sources of insecurity lie in poverty, in HIV and AIDS and with domestic violence. For some, liberty is the right to choose whichever newspaper they want to read; for others liberty is the ability to read a newspaper. But these differences of view and experience are linked. In this world you are buying your security at the expense of my liberty.
And, in this world global problems demand global solutions. Just as there exists no policy fortress that can exclude a particular country from paying the price of these global problems, so there is no legitimate policy response that can excuse a country from playing its part in the securing of global solutions. Our fractured communities will not be mended by the politics of division but by application of a glue to bind us together. Such glue is freely available and takes the form of a strong and unwavering commitment to uphold human rights. As Andrei Sakharov, the noted Soviet scientist and human rights advocate, has said: "The defence of human rights is a clear path, towards the unification of people in our turbulent world and a path towards the relief of suffering."
The tough reality, however, is that, while no government today would dare deny the existence of human rights, not all of them are willing to observe human rights standards. In far too many places, in far too many ways, human rights are abused, not promoted, are undermined, not led, are ignored and eroded. Instead of witnessing strengthened respect for global values, we find human rights under attack. Instead of global solutions, we have been given a pervasive and amorphous global war on terror that has forced us all within the borders of its battlefield. In this terrain, the wounding of the international human rights framework is merely incidental, the erosion of our basic freedoms a necessary casualty and the betrayal of rule of law nothing but a military tactic.
Its overlords, Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard, have created a political discourse that fictions distance into division; weaving the lace of contrived linkages, they draw for us battlelines from Afghanistan to Chechnya, from Iraq to Indonesia. They posit a war, characterised by an ill-defined enemy; nebulous aims, failing strategy, with no end in sight. And as is common practice in war times, there is a new and tailored propaganda.
Appalling practices are disguised by innocuous terms: "ghost detainees" are people who have been "disappeared" to be held and tortured in secret locations. "Stress and duress" is in truth torture, inhumane and degrading treatment and banned by international law. "Extraordinary rendition" is actually the practice by which suspects are effectively kidnapped, moved from one country to another in a legal limbo without judicial oversight and then handed over to regimes that practise torture.
Not every human rights abuse can be attributed to the war on terror but there is no doubt that it has given a new lease of life to old fashioned repression: arbitrary and secret detention, torture, unfair trial, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, ethnic persecution, suppression of political dissent: each directly or indirectly an attack on civil society.
These policies and practices have not won their advocates' nations security but rather, virus-like, they have spread to embolden abusive regimes and weaken human rights around the world, creating an environment in which torture, not security, is fostered. The much-vaunted ticking bomb of justification for torture is in reality a slippery slope of moral decline.
Even when our nation's physical security is at stake, our moral security matters. If we have learnt anything from the rule of 20th century tyrants, it is that there are grave consequences for human rights, and therefore for millions of innocent people, when legal systems operate at the convenience of those in power.
Fifty-eight years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights expressed the world's moral outrage following the horrors of the Second World War. Its preamble states that for people to be protected from unbearable tyranny and oppression "human rights should be protected by the rule of law". Some of the same countries that led efforts to frame this powerful statement of human dignity and entitlement, Australia among them, have become ambassadors for its violation, breaking its provisions, undermining its protections and betraying it with sophistry. But today, more than ever, Australians deserve an Australian government that is true to the values of human rights, and the world needs an Australia that mounts a clear and vigorous defence of these as universal rights. Then we really could talk without moral hypocrisy about Australian values and a fair go.
Kate Gilmore is executive deputy secretary-general of Amnesty International. This is an edited extract of her 2006 Chancellor's Human Rights Lecture, delivered at the University of Melbourne last night.
To read the original article from The Age, click on:
The Age
By Kate Gilmore
November 30, 2006
These are tough times for human rights. For while no other generation has enjoyed as much wealth, comfort and opportunity as we do today, we live nevertheless in an unsafe, endangered, unfair and deeply divided world. It is a world made unsafe by the proliferation of weapons, by the spreading of conflicts, by the horror of terrorist attacks and - sadly - by the actions of governments that flout the rule of law and undermine fundamental human rights.
In 2006, as Amnesty International monitors human rights in more than 100 countries, we can see clearly that we are living in a world dominated by fear and that fear is divisive. Some people find the most serious threat to their security is from armed groups and terrorist suspects. For many, however, the real sources of insecurity lie in poverty, in HIV and AIDS and with domestic violence. For some, liberty is the right to choose whichever newspaper they want to read; for others liberty is the ability to read a newspaper. But these differences of view and experience are linked. In this world you are buying your security at the expense of my liberty.
And, in this world global problems demand global solutions. Just as there exists no policy fortress that can exclude a particular country from paying the price of these global problems, so there is no legitimate policy response that can excuse a country from playing its part in the securing of global solutions. Our fractured communities will not be mended by the politics of division but by application of a glue to bind us together. Such glue is freely available and takes the form of a strong and unwavering commitment to uphold human rights. As Andrei Sakharov, the noted Soviet scientist and human rights advocate, has said: "The defence of human rights is a clear path, towards the unification of people in our turbulent world and a path towards the relief of suffering."
The tough reality, however, is that, while no government today would dare deny the existence of human rights, not all of them are willing to observe human rights standards. In far too many places, in far too many ways, human rights are abused, not promoted, are undermined, not led, are ignored and eroded. Instead of witnessing strengthened respect for global values, we find human rights under attack. Instead of global solutions, we have been given a pervasive and amorphous global war on terror that has forced us all within the borders of its battlefield. In this terrain, the wounding of the international human rights framework is merely incidental, the erosion of our basic freedoms a necessary casualty and the betrayal of rule of law nothing but a military tactic.
Its overlords, Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard, have created a political discourse that fictions distance into division; weaving the lace of contrived linkages, they draw for us battlelines from Afghanistan to Chechnya, from Iraq to Indonesia. They posit a war, characterised by an ill-defined enemy; nebulous aims, failing strategy, with no end in sight. And as is common practice in war times, there is a new and tailored propaganda.
Appalling practices are disguised by innocuous terms: "ghost detainees" are people who have been "disappeared" to be held and tortured in secret locations. "Stress and duress" is in truth torture, inhumane and degrading treatment and banned by international law. "Extraordinary rendition" is actually the practice by which suspects are effectively kidnapped, moved from one country to another in a legal limbo without judicial oversight and then handed over to regimes that practise torture.
Not every human rights abuse can be attributed to the war on terror but there is no doubt that it has given a new lease of life to old fashioned repression: arbitrary and secret detention, torture, unfair trial, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, ethnic persecution, suppression of political dissent: each directly or indirectly an attack on civil society.
These policies and practices have not won their advocates' nations security but rather, virus-like, they have spread to embolden abusive regimes and weaken human rights around the world, creating an environment in which torture, not security, is fostered. The much-vaunted ticking bomb of justification for torture is in reality a slippery slope of moral decline.
Even when our nation's physical security is at stake, our moral security matters. If we have learnt anything from the rule of 20th century tyrants, it is that there are grave consequences for human rights, and therefore for millions of innocent people, when legal systems operate at the convenience of those in power.
Fifty-eight years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights expressed the world's moral outrage following the horrors of the Second World War. Its preamble states that for people to be protected from unbearable tyranny and oppression "human rights should be protected by the rule of law". Some of the same countries that led efforts to frame this powerful statement of human dignity and entitlement, Australia among them, have become ambassadors for its violation, breaking its provisions, undermining its protections and betraying it with sophistry. But today, more than ever, Australians deserve an Australian government that is true to the values of human rights, and the world needs an Australia that mounts a clear and vigorous defence of these as universal rights. Then we really could talk without moral hypocrisy about Australian values and a fair go.
Kate Gilmore is executive deputy secretary-general of Amnesty International. This is an edited extract of her 2006 Chancellor's Human Rights Lecture, delivered at the University of Melbourne last night.
To read the original article from The Age, click on:
The Age
posted by Pax Christi @ Thursday, November 30, 2006
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