racism
Racism operates directly and indirectly to exclude people from real access to equality. Racism feeds unjust policies which deny people categorised as "other": their human rights. Racism can feed social exclusion within communities and in turn breed cycles of hostility and violence. Treating "non-citizens" differently to "citizens", apart from what else it amounts to - amounts to discrimination on the basis of race.
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The Anti-Immigration Era: What is going on in the United States?
What is happening in America? America is in turmoil on the issue of immigration. Some describe it as the new ‘civil rights’ issue. Laws are being introduced across the country to mark out people who are to be excluded. These laws impact particularly on people of Latino heritage, both migrant and not. Ordinary activities such as driving a car, going to school, picking someone up from the roadside: have all been regulated or criminalised to drive migrants out. Walls have been built to prevent people crossing the border. The border region between the United States and Mexico has been militarised. Across America there are 370 prisons where immigrants are detained and processed for…
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Do Foreigners Have the Same Human Rights as the Rest of Us?
At the core of human rights is the axiomatic truth that human beings have inherent rights: that all human beings are equal and possessed of dignity and that violation of such rights is both morally offensive and legally impermissible. An alternative ordering of human relationships is mandated by exclusive national citizenship. Implicitly and explicitly national citizenship counsels the primacy of the privileged ‘citizen’ over the ‘non-citizen’ ‘other’. Everywhere we see the manifestation of this ordering in gross, systematic and widespread human rights violations: in our laws, practices, attitudes and media. Some of ‘us’ are the privileged beneficiaries of those violations: and we violate the human rights of foreigners as if…
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Libya’s Migrant Slaves
Among the tragedies befalling the people of Libya, is the tragedy befalling its migrant workers. On 9 March the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reported that 30,000 migrant workers were forced back into Libya by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi to ‘return to work’ in Tripoli. This forced return amounts to slavery. It also violates international human rights in another way: Everyone has the right to leave any country … (article 14(2) Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Almost as soon as the uprising began in Libya the bonds that had held a multi-national community together fell apart. Although nationals and foreigners had lived together and shared their future before the uprising – after the uprising a person’s…
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Bartolome de las Casas: An early human rights worker
Bartolome de las Casas is one of those remarkable people in history who arose at the very beginning of the modern human rights movement. A great humanitarian; he learnt human rights in his encounter with the people of Central and South America during the sixteenth century European invasion of the Americas. He used his office as Dominican friar and later Bishop to uphold the human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Las Casas came to the America’s as part of the colonial expeditions from Spain, arriving in 1502 in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), at the very beginning of the encounter between the Europeans and the people of the Americas.…
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Government should take lesson from Christmas Islanders
It appears from all reporting that what makes the tragedy that occurred on the morning of Wednesday 15 December, 2010 on the shoreline of Christmas Island all the more tragic is that human beings had to watch (and listen) helplessly whilst fellow humans died just metres away. The stories of the traumatised witnesses have painted a horrific picture of what it must have been like … the rope that was dragging a victim from the water going limp; a man most desperately wanting to jump into the waves and rescue a little girl but being held back by others who realised the futility of the attempt; and the realisation that a baby and mother who had…
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Book Review: The Strange Alchemy of Law and Life by Justice Albie Sachs
The victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses whisper from the pages of this short book. They speak to us of their struggle to realize their own humanity and recognize the humanity of each other. For a judge The Strange Alchemy of Law and Life is an unusual book. But then Albie Sachs is an unusual judge. A member of the African National Congress and a legal adviser to it when it was still a revolutionary movement, Albie Sach’s life moves from barely surviving a state sponsored terrorist bombing, to which he lost an arm and an eye, to sitting on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. It is the kind of life that prompts reflection,…
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Only Water in a Stranger’s Tears
‘It’s only water in a stranger’s tears.’ I start with this line partly because I’ll always get in a musical reference if I can (it’s a lyric from the song Not One of Us, by Peter Gabriel), but also because it sums up to me what defining ‘the other’ (the foreigner) seems to be all about: denying the humanity of a particular group of people. And perhaps nothing defines our humanity as much as our tears, whether from grief, distress, fear, or even happiness. We shed tears when emotion, that quintessentially human experience, overwhelms us. We cry with sympathy, too, and not just for people we know. You’d be forgiven…
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On the nose: perfumer sparks racism furore
Last month, I discussed a problem of foreignness emerging from France. This month, coincidentally, I again turn to a controversy from France that has gripped the world’s attention—one that reveals how language can create and perpetuate notions of Otherness and foreignness. Jean-Paul Guerlain, who once worked for the famous high-end cosmetics line that shares his last name as its name, has fallen under the media spotlight for racist remarks he recently made in an interview on French television. Out of decency, I will not reproduce his remarks on this blog, but major news media sources across the world such as The Guardian are reporting them. There is no question that…
