We Have The Right

Here at home Jean Chretien was admitting that his legislation could be used to curtail legal protests even as Anne McLellan was saying that there would always be a terrorist threat. There is no suggestion of repealing the legislation under the Martin version of the government. In the US the government now has the authority to track which library books you take out. In Britain they use cameras originally put in to watch for car bombers to hand out parking tickets.

We talk about biometric identity cards and monitoring the internet and the possible benefits of racial profiling in fighting terrorism. Things have gotten pretty bizarre in just a couple of years and it has gone largely unnoticed. We are beginning to wake up to the threats to our rights and if we all scream at once there is a chance that Denis Coderre won't be able to force us to carry his silly and intrusive little internal passport. That's something, at least.

What does it mean in places that previously lacked our level of rights? What does it mean to people who never had rights? A few things. It means their governments, if they play their cards right, can escape international discipline for human rights violations. It means that we are likely looking pointedly elsewhere when somebody gets tortured. It means that things really haven't changed much for most of the world.

Western governments have always turned a blind eye to the human rights violations their foreign friends perpetrate. Client states are not held to the same standards as their political masters. They can't be. While a wealthy state can afford free elections, that same wealthy state cannot afford for those that supply its wealth and power to make their own decisions.

We see the results of these things in the news every day. Haiti, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Nigeria...these are countries that have all made headlines in the last week. The problems they are facing are the legacy of colonialism. The problems continue as wealthy countries continue to meddle in local affairs in an attempt to ensure that the wealth keeps flowing and nobody asks too many questions.

It is one thing for the headlines to be about violence bringing the Nigerian elections to a screeching halt. It is quite another when those headlines read, "We Did This." That is what those headlines really read though. More for some countries and some situations than for others, but if you are wealthy enough to own the technology to read this, you are part of that headline.

Which brings us back to human rights. We talk about them a lot. We like to feel badly for the people in countries who are having their rights denied. We might give some money to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, we might make some tut-tut noises while reading the paper, but we never seem to look deeper. Not as society, not as a culture, not as a nation nor as a group of nations.

Our dedication to human rights really stops at fighting for our own personal right to do as we please. If a country will trade with us and has something to offer that we want, we are willing to not complain too loudly about the way that nation treats its citizens. If a nation will be our friend, perhaps allowing us to stage troops on their land, then they are exempt from the rules. We say that we are improving rights in these places by working with them, but if that were true these nations would have met our standards of rights long ago.

Columbia is good example of this. They have been suffering from foreign interventions since the late fifteenth century. Lately they have been a major victim of the war on drugs. US and EU agricultural subsidies and trading practices caused coca to be the only cash crop that could turn a profit. The Columbian farmers, poor at the best of times, really had no choice but to begin growing coca in order to survive.

The US-backed Columbian government has tried to stamp out this practice publicly, even while profiting from it under the table. The guerilla fighters who opposed the government are more interested in drug money than the wants and needs of the people. The government, staunchly anti-union, staunchly pro-American, has routinely used both the war on drugs and the war on the insurgents as an excuse to chase people from their land, imprison, kill and generally violate people's rights. Torture is not uncommon, nor are unexplained disappearances. The Columbian people have, for all intents and purposes, no rights.

The Colombian government is currently discussing legislation, based on the USA's urging to fight terrorism, that would make it legal for the army to arrest and detain individuals, listen in on electronic communications without a warrant, and control the entire legal process. Not that this hasn't been more or less the reality up until now, but the urging by the US has made it possible for the Columbian government to make it official.

That all this is happening under the guise of fighting terrorism is supposed to make it palatable to us. It doesn't make the mainstream news and where it is mentioned at all the fact that American oil interests are concerned over the security of their pipeline is never mentioned. The ongoing attacks on union activists, often trying to organise workers in American-based corporations, are never mentioned. The war on drugs may be alluded to, but the reasons for Columbia becoming a major drug exporter are never examined.

That's just Columbia though. Similar things are happening on every continent. Africa is the continent that is in the worst trouble. A history of being controlled by colonial powers has caused what should be a group of prosperous and educated nations to be poor and largely uneducated. The ongoing policies of the developed nations of North America and Western Europe serve to keep them that way.

Asia, even the quickly industrialising portions of it, are also prey to colonialism. More and more the consumer goods of the western world are produced in the sweatshops of the eastern world. Under the guise of providing jobs large corporations have everything from running shoes to electronic goods made where the costs are the lowest.

Wealthy nations and the corporations that influence their governments benefit greatly from people in underdeveloped nations remaining poor and under educated. It keeps the price of raw materials down. It keeps environmental costs to a minimum. It keeps the governments easy to influence. It keeps the rich rich and ensures that the poor do not gain a foot-hold. That it destroys the basic human rights of much of the population of the world doesn't matter as long as we pick up a DVD player for next to nothing.

There is a solution, or rather there are a combination of solutions. The biggest single step is to work out a plan that ties trade deals to the upholding of human rights. It would necessarily have to have repercussions for both trading partners, the consumer and the producer, for trade to continue. It would have to be applied through the WTO and the UN.

Until we are willing to do that we are much closer to espousing the ideals of the Beastie Boys than the ideals expressed in UN's Declaration of Human Rights.

Recommended links:

Amnesty International

Human Rights Watch

United Nations