Religion and Human Rights (31): Polygamy, Right or Rights Violation?

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In the U.S., 9 states – including Utah, the center of Mormonism – make polygamy a crime, while 49 states have bigamy statutes that can be used to prosecute polygamous families. Polygamy is only legal in North Africa and most of the Muslim world. Does it make sense to promote the right to same-sex, interracial and interreligious marriage, and at the same time oppose polygamy? (By the way, polygamy usually means polygyny: one husband, multiple wives – the opposite, polyandry, is extremely rare).

Marriage is a recognized human right, but does the word “marriage”, as it is used in human rights language, also cover polygamous marriage? From the texts of human rights treaties and declarations, it’s not even clear that it covers same-sex marriage – although it undoubtedly covers interracial and interreligious marriage. The word ”marriage” isn’t clearly defined in the texts. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration merely states the following:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Polygamy or same-sex marriage aren’t specifically mentioned as being forms of marriage that are included in the right to marry, but neither is it the case that sexual orientation or the numbers of partners are stipulated as unwarranted limitations to the right to marry. So the phrasing as it stands neither includes nor excludes polygamy or same-sex marriage as a right. Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights isn’t much clearer.

However, the case for same-sex or interracial marriage can be based on other articles, such as the non-discrimination provisions. Article 2 of the International Covenant states:

Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Sexual orientation is not mentioned but it is accepted that the list given here is a list of examples and not exhaustive. “Without distinction of any kind” is clear enough. Article 3 states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to ensure the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights set forth in the present Covenant.

And Article 26:

All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

It’s not clear whether polygamists can invoke the same non-discrimination provisions. Perhaps the right to privacy can help them. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence… Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Who Will Zuma’s first lady be? Pretoria News headline from April 11, 2009

However, apart from the question whether polygamy can be defended or not on the basis of existing human rights law, there are some good reasons why perhaps there shouldn’t be a right to polygamous marriage, even if it can be established that there is such a right. Wives may be pressured into polygamous marriages or prohibited from exiting them; they may suffer inequality and oppression in their marriage; and young girls may be forced to marry. The same risks exist of course in normal monogamous marriage, but are perhaps more important in polygamous marriage.

Moreover, polygamous marriage poses certain risks that are non-existent in normal marriage: excess boys in polygamous communities are often ostracized and condemned to a life of poverty and homelessness; and there’s a risk that marriage as an institution and as a general right may suffer when polygamy becomes widespread:

Polygamy is bad social policy for exactly the reason gay marriage is good social policy: everyone should have the opportunity to marry. Broad access to marriage is important not only for individual wellbeing but for social stability. And, to oversimplify only a little, when one man gets two wives, some other man gets no wife. There’s no better path to inequality, social unrest, and authoritarian social structures than polygamy. (source)

And yet, if it’s the case that

• polygamy remains a fringe custom
• polygamists are generally exercising their free choice and informed consent
• no children are forced to marry or are sexually abused
• and excess boys are not ostracized

then why would anyone oppose polygamy? Monogamous marriage isn’t illegal because some wives are beaten or because there are some cases of monogamous child marriage. One could oppose polygamy for religious reasons, but those aren’t sufficient in liberal democracies. Polygamy can only be problematic when it’s a practice that regularly and intrinsically leads to rights violations, as it does when child brides are common, when wives are commonly forced into marriage or when widespread polygamy makes it very difficult for men to find brides and marry.

Another thing to consider is gender equality. Even if polygamy is rare enough not to deny men a reasonable chance of marriage, and even if all polygamous wives are adults who freely consent to their marriage and who have equal standing within their marriages, then it’s still the case that the practice itself can signal gender inequality and hence perpetuate it. The reason is that polygyny, by its very nature, signals that men have more rights than women: a man can take several wives, but not vice versa. A legal right to polygamy would of course also entail a right to polyandry, but it’s unlikely that the risks to gender equality created by polygyny would be offset by many cases of polyandry. The more likely result is that polygyny fosters preexisting misogynistic prejudice because polygyny will always be more common that polyandry.

So, in the end a lot depends on how often polygamy results in rights violations. Is polygamy more like child marriage, which by definition is a rights violation (it involves pedophilia, the denial of education, health problems resulting from pregnancy at an early age etc.)? Or is it more like monogamous or same-sex marriage, which may produce rights violations such as domestic violence, but not intrinsically so? If some practice by definition violates rights, it should obviously be prohibited. If the practice only does so by accident and exceptionally, then it should in general be protected, especially when the practice itself is a human right. I claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with polygamy, as long as it’s not set up in such a way that it violates rights – as long as in most cases the wives consent (in an informed way), children are left alone, boys aren’t ostracized, and the practice isn’t so widespread that men can’t marry or that women feel they are second class citizens.

In this respect, polygamy is similar to hate speech. In the case of hate speech we are also dealing with a presumptive right, but one that can be abrogated when its exercise becomes too widespread with negative consequences for the rights of others. When a small black minority for instance is overwhelmed by hate speech, to such an extent that black people can’t go outside for fear of constant insult, then their right to freedom of movement should trump the speech rights of the haters.

For a more pessimistic view on polygamy, go here. Below a map showing the prevalence of polygamy/polygyny:

Ironic Human Rights Violations (15): Anti-Child-Labor App

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Kids at stoplights offering to wipe a windshield for a few coins, or little ones hawking goods at produce markets: In much of the developing world, it’s common to see children as young as eight or nine hard at work.

And it’s no different in Colombia, where an estimated 1.5 million children between the ages of five and 17 work in such situations for more than 15 hours a week. Nearly nine percent of kids aged five to 14 work, a 2011 government census found. Though the government was able to document the scope of child labor in Colombia, finding lasting solutions to end the practice, which can keep kids out of school and place them in dangerous work environments, has proved challenging around the globe.

But in Colombia, a new smart phone crowdsourcing application is helping authorities and researchers tackle the problem. Whenever users see a child working they can take a picture with their phone and log the location, which the app sends to the country’s child welfare agency. …

“It’s a tool that puts the power to report child labor in the palm of anyone’s hands,” says Mauricio García, of the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF), which receives the information, including photos, global positioning system coordinates, and other details, sent by users.

Since ICBF started using the information gathered by the app last February, about 3,800 reports have been filed, and not all of them from cell phone users in Colombia.

“We’ve gotten reports from Asia and Africa, because anyone can download the app from their phone’s app store,” says Claudia Aparicio, head of Fundación Telefónica in Colombia, the organization that spearheaded the crowdsourcing project as part of a broader campaign to fight child labor in Latin America. The organization maps all reports but only in Colombia is action taken at this time.

Colombia is not, by far, the worst country in the region in terms of child labor. Bolivia for example has rates as high as 40 percent. …

Once a child laborer is identified, officials verify whether the child is enrolled in school, and may call the parents and children in for counseling. (source)

It seems it hasn’t occurred to anyone that children have a right to privacy. Poor people’s privacy is already disproportionally at risk, so no reason to make it worse. If some good came out of it, one might call that an acceptable price, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

More ironic human rights violations here.

Political Graffiti (224): Surveillance

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And then there’s this one, which I find highly amusing:

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Also this one by Banksy:

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And, finally, this by Fra.Biancoshock:

More on CCTV and privacy. More political graffiti.

Political Graffiti (211): CCTV

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More on CCTV. More political graffiti.

The War on Terror is 11 Years Old Today, With No End in Sight

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The War on Terror, started by the U.S. government as a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and later joined by other governments, is 11 years old today, with no end in sight. It has had and continues to have grave consequences for the human rights of people worldwide. Osama is dead, and the war in Iraq is over, and yet people are still stuck in Guantanamo, drone strikes are more numerous than ever before and the internal security forces of Western states are increasingly powerful. It’s a high price for an uncertain gain.

However, before I discuss the consequences for human rights, I would like to make it clear that I believe, as any rational human being, that terrorism is evil, that it has to be stopped and that democracies have a right to defend themselves against violent, anti-democratic fanatics (see this post for example).

I also believe that democratic governments should be especially vigilant because the freedoms that they are elected to protect, offer opportunities for those who hate freedom, opportunities that do not exist in other political systems. Potential terrorists find it relatively easy to enter a democracy and operate in it. A democracy is a very vulnerable form of government because of the freedom it gives to everyone, even those who don’t mean well.

The freedoms of a democracy can be and are abused, but this, it seems, has frightened democratic governments to such an extent that they have decided to limit these freedoms up to the point that they are in danger of abandoning them altogether, and hence doing the work of the terrorists for them. It can be acceptable to limit certain rights for the protection of other rights (see also this post), but the right to security seems to have taken on an absolute priority, at the expense of many other rights. There is no reasonable balance anymore.

1. Civil liberties

Governments try to defend their countries against terrorist attacks by limiting civil liberties in their territories.

• The right to privacy has been limited: CCTV has become ubiquitous, DNA databases have been created, eavesdropping and wiretapping have been legalized etc.
• “No-fly-lists” have come into force, limiting the freedom of movement of even those who have written critically of the government or attended peace-protests.
• Hate speech laws have been voted to silence jihadist hate preachers, silencing others at the same time.
• “Racial profiling” by the police has turned innocent people into possible suspects, often inverting the burden of proof.
• Habeas corpus has been limited, periods of detention without charge extended, sometimes indefinitely (for “enemy combatants”).

However, in spite of all this, the constraints on a government’s actions within its territory are sometimes still considered to be inhibiting:

• “Extraordinary rendition” has been covertly practiced, allowing suspects to be tortured outside of the territory by professional torturers in other countries.
• Extra-territorial prisons have been created, in Guantanamo, but probably elsewhere as well, where suspects can be tortured or held indefinitely and where the Geneva Conventions supposedly don’t apply.

2. Mentalities

The war on terror has also changed people’s minds and attitudes.

• The media have started to censor themselves. Solidarity with the government at war and the commander-in-chief, or the fear of being perceived as unpatriotic, appeasers, “useful idiots” or even open allies of the enemy have turned many in the media into uncritical supporters of the war.
• Citizens have turned on Islam and Muslims. Xenophobia and more specifically islamophobia have undermined the ideals of tolerance and multiculturalism, and have in certain cases even led to hate crimes against Muslims.
• A ”culture of fear” has been created by the terrorist but also nurtured by irresponsible western politicians. This fear has damaged democracy. Not only have the media relinquished their traditional role as watchdogs. Politicians as well, and especially incumbents, have abused the fear of terrorism to harness support. Alert levels seem to go up just before elections.

3. Preemptive war

The US government has elaborated and implemented the strategy of preemptive war, a war

waged in an attempt to repel or defeat a perceived inevitable offensive or invasion, or to gain a strategic advantage in an impending (allegedly unavoidable) war. (source)

The Iraq war was deemed a preemptive war because Iraq was allegedly about to attack the US with weapons of mass destruction, or supply these weapons to terrorists. Whatever the merits of the case against Iraq – and with the passing of time these seem to become weaker and weaker – the war has been framed, correctly or not, as a necessary stage in the ongoing war on terror. It has, however, resulted in massive numbers of casualties on both sides. The human rights violations caused by the war stand in no relation to the violations caused by terrorism or the violations that could have been caused by Saddam.

In any case, you can’t solve the problem of terrorism by violent means only. Terrorism has causes, and there will be terrorism as long as these causes exist. (Mind you, I don’t want to excuse or justify terrorism).

4. Counter-productive

It is now widely believed, even in US government circles, that the war on terror is counter-productive. Especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture in Abu Ghraib and the detentions in Guantanamo have produced a backlash and have increased rather than reduced the terror threat. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate issued the following among its “key judgments”:

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. (source)

The war on terror has created and exacerbated resentment, hatred of the West and anti-americanism. And with anti-americanism often comes hatred of democracy and freedom, as wellas Islamic radicalization. Apart from the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, there is no evidence that any of the strategies in the war on terror has done any good (source). Any even this tiny success seems to be far from certain.

5. Misnomer

There is something fishy about the concept of a “war on terrorism”. This “war” is in fact no such thing. There is no well-defined enemy. Anyone can at any time become an enemy. For this reason, there is no conceivable end to the war. And if you claim to wage a war on terrorism, you might as well claim to wage a war on carpet bombing. Both are tactics or strategies, not something you wage war against.

If you insist on calling anti-terrorist actions a war, then you give too much credit to the riffraff you’re opposing. Rather than deranged criminals they can call themselves soldiers. And soldiers defend something. You legitimize them. You turn a crime into a two-sided struggle in which each side defends its positions. This in turn leads to the view that the war on terror is a war of the West against the rest, bringing back images of colonialism, imperialism and the crusades, again legitimizing the terrorists, helping to consolidate their often internally opposed forces, and making them honorable in the eyes of some ordinary citizens.

I can understand that the concept of a “war on terrorism” is useful for some Western governments, because an executive that is at war has more powers, less oversight, more popular support and less criticism, but it’s a meaningless and dangerous concept. Let’s give it up, or let us at least declare victory in the one we’re now fighting for 11 years.

(This post is hoisted from the archives and slightly revised. The original was published on August 6th, 2008 and is unfortunately still relevant today).

Hate (8): Tolerance and Hate Speech

1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith is murdered in an Illinois prison by a lynch mob; soon after, many of his followers migrate to Utah

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Jeremy Waldron claims that tolerance is more than merely the absence of violent assault on people who have adopted beliefs and practices we don’t like, and more than simply abstaining from persecution and legal sanction. He says that tolerance also implies the absence of hate speech and a legal prohibition of hate speech. Members of minority groups whose beliefs and practices are strongly disapproved of by the rest of society, have a right to go about their lives without the threat of constant hatred, vilification, insult and humiliation. They have a right to visit the shops and restaurants they want to visit, and to generally interact with others without being treated as pariahs.

And, indeed, that sounds quite reasonable. People undoubtedly have and should have such rights. But others have rights as well: hate mongers have a right to free speech, and racist shop keepers and restaurant owners have a right to ban whoever they want from their private property, under certain circumstances.

When the rights of the haters and the rights of despised minorities come into conflict, the different rights have to be balanced. I argued before that the right of private property of racists, or the freedom of association of prejudiced groups wanting to exclude homosexuals for example, should no longer be protected when these racists and bigots have become so numerous and authoritative that the objects of their racism or bigotry no longer have any alternative options and risk having their own rights violated. In the Jim Crow era, for example, it was very difficult for blacks to move around, find decent housing etc. because there were so many transport companies and landowners discriminating against them that their options were seriously diminished. Hence their rights were violated, and violated to such a degree that limitations on the rights of their tormentors were justified.

Similarly, in our current example, hate speech should only be banned and the right to free speech of hate mongers should only be limited when there’s an impact on the rights of their targets. Claiming, as Waldron seems to do, that a tolerant society generally requires such bans and limits will not do. That’s just not enough as a justification. For example, writing blood libel on an obscure blog that nobody reads should probably not be prohibited. On the other hand, burning crosses in the front yards of black people and forcing them to move elsewhere is a violation of their right to freely choose their residence. The same is true if people dare not walk the streets because of the risk of being constantly cursed at. These two cases of expressions of hate speech can and should be banned because they result in rights violations. Other expressions of hate speech should be protected. A general claim that tolerance requires not just constraints on coercion and violent persecution but also a general respect for people’s dignity and a social atmosphere free of hatred, insult and defamation, goes too far. It would be nice if the world was free of hate and if respect for dignity was the normal attitude, but there’s no right to such a world. Nor should there be.

If we were to adopt such a right, we’d run the risk of terminating debate altogether. If tolerance includes a general ban on hate speech it’s likely that it will also imply banning vehement discussion of other people’s supposed errors. You don’t need to engage in hate speech in order to have a vehement and lively discussion and criticism of others, but a lot of such criticism can be readily understood and perceived by its targets as an expression of hate and an insult to dignity. These targets can then use the power of law to shut down the debate, and that’s not something we want. Ideally, specific instances of speech should not be judged as inadmissible instances of hate speech and proper objects of legal sanction simply on the basis of the feelings or perceptions of the targets, but only on the basis of the objective consequences for the rights of the targets. Tolerance that includes a ban on all hate speech is a tolerance that in the end may silence us all.

More on tolerance, hate speech, defamation and insults. More posts in this series are here.

Limiting Free Speech (49): Residential Picketing

(source, photo by TBSteve)

Residential picketing is a common form of protest. First you identify someone you don’t like – say an abortion doctor, a bank CEO or a pedophile. Then you find out where she lives, show up with a group of protesters at her home, and stage a long running protest just outside of it. Maybe your group shouts insults or curses every time she goes in or out. Maybe you stay at night as well.

The general rule is that you are allowed to do this. You’re in a public space and you can speak freely, even if your speech is insulting. However, this type of residential picketing can in some cases go so far as to violate the rights of the person who is picketed. Her freedom of movement, her right to privacy and her freedom of residence may suffer. She may feel intimidated, a feeling that forces her to stay at home or away from home. See may feel under siege and no longer safe in the privacy of her home. She may even believe that it’s necessary to move.

The protesters should accept some types of limitation of residential picketing rights when this picketing violates other rights. For example, if they are forced to respect a buffer zone around the residence, then they can still disseminate their message. Their alternatives are much easier and less costly than the alternatives for the person who is picketed. However, they know full well that their message will have a much stronger media impact if it produces some controversy, and harassing someone by keeping her a virtual hostage under siege in her own house is bound to be controversial. Hence they’re not likely to scale down the protest and respect a buffer zone.

The point is that free speech rights are not automatically prior or superior to other rights, especially not if those speech rights are used in such a way that they must violate other rights and that alternative uses are rejected. There’s no hierarchy among human rights and all rights are equivalent. That means that when rights are in conflict with each other, the decision to favor one or the other must take into account the respective costs to one or the other. In this case, the cost to privacy, freedom of movement etc. of allowing free speech is clearly higher than the cost we impose on free speech when we want to protect privacy, movement and residence rights. The protesters can still express themselves outside a buffer zone and in myriad other ways. The person who is picketed can also move to another house, but that is much more costly and possibly futile (given a certain level of persistence among the protesters). The right to free speech does not include a right to maximum impact speech.

The US case law in question is Frisby v Schultz. Something on the related topic of the duty to listen and free speech zones. More posts in this series are here.

Annals of Heartlessness (12): The Right to Masturbate

Gustav Klimt's Woman seated with thighs apart (1916)

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While you might think of masturbation as a sort of last refuge for the incarcerated — a truly inalienable freedom, given the happy proximity of the sex organs — that is not the case. In fact, a number of state prisons regard jerking off as a rule infraction. … [Such restrictions are “well-entrenched” in the correctional environment [in the U.S.]. (source)

And probably elsewhere as well. The rules apply even when there’s no indecent exposure. In the 19th century, some U.S. prison officials even

chloroformed masturbators and implanted metal rings through their foreskins. (source)

These days, prison officials often turn a blind eye and don’t enforce the rules. But sometimes

prisoners do … get in trouble for engaging in autoerotic behavior. Early on the morning of May 16, 2000, in South Carolina’s Lieber Correctional Institution, Officer Patricia Sinkler saw inmate Freddie Williams “in the front entrance of the shower, curtains open, with his left hand propped up against the wall, turned sideways, making back and forth movements with his right hand on his penis,” according to a court document. Sinkler filed a disciplinary report recommending that Williams be charged with sexual misconduct, and he was brought before a hearing officer and convicted. Williams appealed multiple times, insisting he had not intentionally exposed himself; the officer had simply walked past when he was going at it. He lost and had to relinquish 240 good-time credits.

A similar case occurred in Florida in 2006: Broward County inmate Terry Lee Alexander was sitting alone on his bunk masturbating when a female deputy who was monitoring him from a central control room more than 100 feet away took exception to Alexander’s “blatant” exertions and wrote him up. Alexander was charged and convicted of exposure, with the jury determining that a cell is “a limited access public place.” The same deputy had also filed reports on seven other locked-up masturbators. When Alexander’s attorney asked the deputy in court if she had considered calling a SWAT team to halt his client’s activity, she replied, “I wish I had.” (source)

Whether all this means that prisoners – or the population in general – should have a legal right to masturbate, is another matter. Probably not I guess. Not every prohibition on government intrusion should necessarily be translated into a right. The right to privacy should be sufficient to protect the act of masturbation and a specific right to masturbate is superfluous. And yes, inmates shouldn’t lose their right to privacy just because they’re in prison, even if some limitations of that right are inevitable in their case.

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Especially for the general population, a right to masturbate is utterly superfluous, since people normally enjoy enough privacy beyond the prison walls in order to be able to masturbate without government intrusion. Prisoners, however, may not always be granted enough privacy, as the cases cited above make clear. But instead of claiming a right to masturbate, inmates should insist on their right to privacy.

What about the right to be able to consume pornography? Again either for prisoners only or for the general population. For the latter, this right is covered by free speech. For the former, such a right would entail the additional right to be given pornography, as prisoners can’t go about procuring it themselves in the free speech marketplace. A prisoners’ right to pornography is not covered by free speech. However, I doubt it would be a good thing to have it. It may be good policy if prisons make porn available, but that doesn’t mean prisoners have a right to be given porn. Which doesn’t mean that prison officials have a right to take pornography away from prisoners once they have it. People don’t lose all their rights when they are incarcerated. And that includes private property.

In any case, taking away prisoners’ porn or their right to masturbate is likely to be counterproductive, as it will create unrest and lead to an increasing number of sexual predation cases among prisoners.

More on porn and masturbation. More in the annals of heartlessness.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (86): “We Inflict an Injustice Upon You, and Then We Make You Pay For It”

Two horrible cases of government officials treating people unjustly and then making them pay for it:

1.

According to the Las Cruces Sun-News, “A Las Cruces woman has been charged $1,122 by a local hospital for a forcible body cavity search ordered by the Metro Narcotics Agency that did not turn up any illegal substances.” The search was conducted pursuant to a search warrant, based on what the police said was “‘credible information from a reliable source’ that the woman was concealing up to an ounce of heroin”…

Fortunately, a story a couple of days later relates that the county did indeed pay — which I think they’d have to do, since I see no legal basis for holding the woman responsible for a procedure that she didn’t seek and didn’t benefit from. The involvement of a lawyer, though, suggests that it took some work and expense to get the county to pay, work and expense that the woman shouldn’t have been put through (even assuming the search itself was justified). (source)

2.

The Arizona Department of Corrections is charging people money to visit their loved ones in prison. … New legislation allows the department to impose a $25 fee on adults who wish to visit inmates at any of the 15 prison complexes that house state prisoners. The one-time “background check fee” for visitors, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, has angered prisoner advocacy groups and family members of inmates, who in many cases already shoulder the expense of traveling long distances to the remote areas where many prisons are located.

An Arizona official confirmed that these “background check fees” will not actually pay for background checks, but are instead intended to make up part of the state deficit. This policy not only places an unfair burden on those who wish to visit prisoners, but is bad for public safety. According to the ACLU’s David Fathi: We know that one of the best things you can do if you want people to go straight and lead a law-abiding life when they get out of prison is to continue family contact while they’re in prison…Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish. (source)

And for those of you who think incarceration isn’t inherently unjust, read this, this and this. More absurd human rights violations here.

Ironic Human Rights Violations (10): Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Surveillé

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More on CCTV and privacy. More ironic human rights violations.

Poverty and Privacy

"Orphans" by Thomas Benjamin Kennington (1856-1916)

The poor suffer certain specific violations of their right to privacy, and it’s fair to say that in general poverty means less privacy. Being poor often means having substandard housing. Without a proper house, or without a house at all, it’s much more difficult to be private. Furthermore, poverty often implies that people live together in “extended families”, perhaps even with others who aren’t family at all, strictly speaking. And this also reduces privacy in several ways (most obviously the intimate side of privacy).

In addition, being poor means being dependent on government welfare. But in order to benefit from welfare payments, tax credits, subsidies etc. the poor have to prove that they are indeed poor. Hence they have to divulge personal information to the government, and the government has a right to check this information. Some governments even have the right to do home searches in pursuit of welfare fraud.

If you view abortion as an aspect of privacy, then there’s an additional way in which poverty hurts privacy: the poor, because they have less access to birth control, will want to engage in abortion more often, and will therefore have their privacy violated by anti-abortion laws. Because the poor use public transportation more often, they are more likely to be tracked by police surveillance systems. They represent a disproportionate part of the prison population, and prison life obviously isn’t good for privacy. The poor are also more likely to be illegal immigrants, and therefore subject to control by the competent government agencies.

On the other hand, being poor allows people to avoid some types of privacy invasion: they use the internet less and hence are less at risk of internet related privacy violations; the poorest of the poor are less likely to take credit (credit means telling the bank about your income, spending, previous credit scores etc.) or to enroll in fidelity schemes (in which the use of a fidelity card tells the shop what you consume). Perhaps they won’t be taxed as much – or at all – and therefore don’t have to divulge private information to the tax authorities.

Still, on balance poverty is likely to have an adverse effect on privacy. Some even say that the poor are targeted by the government and that they are discriminated in their right to privacy simply because of their poverty. For instance, the way in which governments do home searches in pursuit of welfare fraud would be unthinkable if it were directed at other purposes and other social classes. It seems that the poor don’t only lose their privacy but also their right to privacy.

And poverty often also means the forfeiture of other, non-privacy rights. Simply begging or being homeless can still land you in jail and can get you kicked out of public places. In most countries, the days are gone when poor people were sterilized against their will, excluded from the vote, their children taken away from them etc. But in many parts of the world, poor children are still discouraged from going to school and forced into labor or warfare. Healthcare for the poor is still a problem, even in some developed countries, making it less likely that their health rights are respected. So don’t tell me poverty isn’t a human rights issue.

More on poverty and on privacy.

What is Democracy? (53): Secret Ballot, or Public Vote?

The secret ballot has become so common in modern democracies that it’s hardly ever questioned. And yet, there are good reasons why a democratic vote should be public. So, let’s go over the pros and cons of the secret ballot, and see where that gets us.

Advantages of the secret ballot

• The desire to avoid voter intimidation or bribery is the obvious and most commonly cited justification of the secrecy of the ballot. If people in power know how an individual votes, then this individual may be pressured to vote in a certain way. And “people in power” should be understood in a broad sense, including employers, dominant husbands etc. This justification is based on certain key features of a democracy, namely equal influence, one-man-one-vote etc. The risk of coercion is present even in societies where the general level of coercion is low and democratic values are widely shared. And it’s often the least advantaged who will be coerced, because they have most to gain from changing their vote to please someone else, and most to lose from not doing so.
• The risk of pressure can also be present in other, more subtle forms. For example, it has been shown that people are afraid to publicly oppose authority figures. Tests have shown that when an authority figure speaks first, there’s less dissent afterwards. An open ballot can lead to forced conformity.

Disadvantages of the secret ballot

• Implicit in the doctrine of the secret ballot is the assumption that the electoral process is no more than the aggregation of individual preferences which have been fixed previously and independently of the electoral process. However, the voting process is, ideally, also formative of preferences, and not merely an arithmetic process based on fixed preferences. That means that people deliberate and discuss about the best way to vote, about the best candidates and policies. But that also means that people have to present their positions and preferences in public. Maybe the ultimate vote can still be secret, but the initial voting intention can’t be if we want democracy to be a lively debate. But if the voting intention can be public, why not the actual vote?
• An open ballot allows representatives to know exactly whom they are representing. One of the advantages of this knowledge is that it allows for some efficiency gains. Representatives know who has to be convinced. Those efficiency gains should improve the electoral process.
• When you vote in an election for representatives or in a referendum, this vote has real consequences. Taken together with the votes of your fellow citizens, your vote is likely to change the lives of a number of people, and sometimes change these lives dramatically. Moreover, those people are likely to be minorities, and hence relatively powerless. It’s therefore important that voters are accountable to their fellow citizens and that they explain and justify the reasons they have for voting in a certain way. This horizontal accountability is incompatible with the secret ballot.
• Why should we have secret ballots for voters and at the same time open votes in parliament, as is usually the case? After all, the justifications for a secret ballot for voters also apply to representatives. They also may be subject to pressure when it’s known how they vote. Maybe to a lesser extent than some parts of the electorate, since they tend to be wealthy and generally powerful, but still. Representatives are less numerous, and hence it’s easier and more effective to use pressure in order to manipulate a vote. Also, the public nature of representatives’ positions makes them vulnerable to specific kinds of pressure that can’t be applied to ordinary citizens (e.g. they may be blackmailed for indecent private behavior and thereby pressured to vote in a certain way). Of course, representative bodies are different from electorates, and therefore not entirely comparable. For example, it’s hard to see how a representative body can be accountable to the electorate when it votes in secret. Voters have to know what the individual representatives have accomplished, or not, so that they can “throw the bums out” at the next election if necessary. Also, this threat of non-reelection can pressure the representatives to act in ways desired by the electorate. So, pressure – at least some kind of pressure – is part and parcel of the representative process, whereas it’s incompatible with a popular vote. However, even if a vote by representatives isn’t entirely comparable to a vote by the people, it still is somewhat comparable, and people arguing for a secret ballot in a general election will have to explain why their arguments don’t also apply to votes in parliament.
• Open ballots, both in representative bodies and in general, force people to restrict themselves to preferences and arguments that they can justify to others. If you vote in a certain way, and are seen to be voting in a certain way, people will ask you why. And if you’re pressured to answer this question and to justify your vote (or voting intention), it’s a lot more difficult to be motivated, or to be seen to be motivated by self-interest only. Hence, the open ballot will make voters more sensitive to the general interest, which is a good thing. Also, this public justification tends to improve the quality of preferences, since people have to think about them, argue about them with others etc. That’s the logic of the marketplace of ideas.
• And, finally, open ballots make electoral fraud a lot more difficult, if not impossible.

A New York polling place

Obviously, not all of these advantages and disadvantages have the same importance, and they don’t make it instantly clear whether a secret or an open ballot should be preferred in principle. Much depends on the specific circumstances. For example, in a country with a lot of economic inequality and gender inequality, the case for a secret ballot for voters is relatively strong. In general, a mixed system is probably best. However, we don’t have such a mixed system at the moment. Most modern democracies strongly favor secret ballots, and seem to ignore the real problems resulting from such a system. I believe some more attention should be given to these problems and to possible solutions, which obviously doesn’t mean that we should go to the other extreme and deny people’s right to keep their opinions to themselves if they so wish. There can’t be a duty of free speech.

More about secrecy here and here. More about publicity here. More posts in this series are here.

Limiting Free Speech (43): The Consequences of Hate Speech

(source)

Some of the consequences of hate speech are human rights violations; others are not. Only the former are good reasons to criminalize hate speech and carve out an exception to the right to free speech. Rights can only be limited for the sake of other rights or the rights of others (more here). Let’s go over the different possible consequences of hate speech and see whether or not they imply rights violations.

Hate speech lowers self-esteem in the targets. People who are repeatedly subjected to hateful remarks or jokes about their race, gender, sexual orientation etc. tend to develop feelings of inferiority, stress, fear and depression. Of course, there’s no right not to be depressed, fearful, stressed etc. Therefore, we can say that hate speech should be protected speech when its consequences are limited to these. These are harmful and brutal consequences, but not harmful or brutal enough to be rights violations. We should be concerned about them and try to do something, but this “something” doesn’t include limiting free speech rights. However, people who are extremely intimidated and stressed and who have a deeply negative view of themselves tend to isolate themselves. Isolation isn’t a human rights violation, but couldn’t we argue that willfully isolating people means violating some of their rights? Isolated people don’t speak, assemble, associate etc. In that case, we could argue for limits on the rights of hate mongers.

Hate speech often has even more extreme consequences. Targets of hate speech may feel compelled to leave their homes and move elsewhere, to quit their jobs, and to avoid certain parts of town and public areas. This is a direct violation of their freedom of movement, freedom of residence, right to work and possibly even their right to a certain standard of living. It’s obvious that the free speech rights of the haters should in such cases be deemed less important than the many rights of their victims.

(source)

Hate speech can also means invasion of privacy, for example in the case of repeated phone calls, hate mail, or stalking.

Violations of property rights are another possible consequence of hate speech. Hate speech sometimes means vandalism, graffiti (sometimes even inside the homes of the targets), cross burning in someone’s front lawn etc. These cases of hate speech already start to resemble hate crime.

The line between hate speech and hate crime is even thinner when speech is not just hateful but an incitement to violence. For example, hate speech can provoke race riots; it can help hate groups with an existing tendency toward violence to attract new recruits etc. (a larger group will feel more confident to engage in hate violence). And what if hate speech allows hate groups to gain control of (local) government? That would probably lead to discriminating policies and laws.

This overview of possible and actual consequences of hate speech should concern those of us who care about more human rights than just freedom of speech, and who know that different human rights aren’t always in harmony with each other. In some circumstances, some rights need to give way in order to protect other rights. That’s an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the value pluralism inherent in the system of human rights.

Read more posts in this series here.

Related Articles

• Rashad Robinson: ‘Dr. Laura’ Is No Free Speech Victim (huffingtonpost.com)
• Media Watchdogs Ask FCC to Track Internet Hate Speech (reason.com)

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (26): Are False Beliefs Useful For Human Rights?

I would say yes, but only some. For example, if we go around and successfully propagate the theory that wrongdoers will burn in hell, then this may have a beneficial effect because fear may inculcate morality (as all deterrence theories about crime have to assume). Similarly, false beliefs about the efficacy of law enforcement and the honesty of law enforcement officials also help.

Many false beliefs about high levels of risk can produce risk-averse behavior which in fact lowers the risk and makes it more likely that human rights are protected. For example, if people wrongly believe that their privacy is threatened in certain circumstances, they will take action to secure their privacy and make their privacy more secure than it already was. (More about human rights and risk here).

Human equality – “all men are created equal” – is obviously a false belief when taken as a fact, and in the quote it is taken as such. People are born with different abilities, talents, endowments, advantages etc. And yet we act as if the phrase is more than just a moral imperative. It seems like it’s easier to convince people to treat each other as equals when we say that they are equals.

Certain forms of self-deception also seem to be beneficial from the point of view of human rights:

Self-deception … may be psychologically or biologically programmed. The psychological evidence indicates that self-deceived individuals are happier than individuals who are not self-deceived. … Lack of self-deception, in fact, is a strong sign of depression. (The depressed are typically not self-deceived, except about their likelihood of escaping depression, which they underestimate.) Individuals who feel good about themselves, whether or not the facts merit this feeling, also tend to achieve more. They have more self-confidence, are more willing to take risks, and have an easier time commanding the loyalty of others. Self-deception also may protect against a tendency towards distraction. If individuals are geared towards a few major goals (such as food, status, and sex), self-deception may be an evolved defense mechanism against worries and distractions that might cause a loss of focus. Tyler Cowen (source)

We can claim that, to some extent, happiness, self-confidence, achievement and risk taking are indicators of and/or conditions for the use of human rights. Happy and confident people who are willing to take risks are more likely to engage in public discourse, to vote, to associate and to exercise their human rights in other ways. If that’s true, and if there’s a link between happiness, confidence and self-deception, then self-deception is another example of a falsehood that is beneficial to human rights.

I could go on, and I also could, very easily, list several counter-examples of falsehoods that are detrimental to human rights (take the 72 virgins for instance, or communism). The point I want to make is another one: should we actively promote certain false beliefs because of their beneficial outcomes?

Most of us believe that there is something like a benevolent lie and that lying is the right thing to do in certain circumstances. A strict rule-based morality is hard to find these days. Few would go along with Kant who said that we shouldn’t lie when a murderer asks us about the whereabouts of his intended victim (“fiat justitia et pereat mundus“). People tend to think that the expected consequences of actions should to some extent influence actions and determine, again to some extent, the morality of actions (“to some extent” because another common moral intuition tells us that good consequences don’t excuse all types of actions; most of us wouldn’t accept the horrible torture of a terrorist’s baby in order to find the location of his bomb).

On the other hand, we should ask ourselves if such an enterprise, even if we deem it morally sound, is practically stable. Some false beliefs have proven to be vulnerable to scientific inquiry and public reasoning (hell could be one example). It’s not a good idea to build the system of human rights on such a weak and uncertain basis. But perhaps we should do whatever we can to promote respect for human rights, even if it’s not certain that our tactic is sustainable.

And yet, actively promoting falsehoods is in direct opposition to one of the main justifications of human rights, namely epistemological advances (I stated here what I mean by that). We would therefore be introducing a dangerous inconsistency in the system of human rights. We can’t at the same time promote the use of falsehoods and argue that we need human rights to improve thinking and knowledge. So we are then forced to promote the use of falsehoods in secret – which is necessary anyway because people will not believe falsehoods if we tell them that they are falsehoods – but thereby we introduce another inconsistency: human rights are, after all, about publicity and openness.

(image source)

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (23): Privacy, Justifications and Objections

Charlie Brown having some privacy

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The right to privacy has become increasingly important and contested. Here are just a few examples of areas in which violations of privacy have become more common over the last decades:

• Public safety: many governments claim that the war on terror requires the following limitations of the right to privacy (just as it requires limitations of other rights):
  • wiretapping
  • CCTV surveillance
  • data mining
  • airport security checks
  • drone monitoring
• Medicine:
  • the debate on abortion is now commonly framed as a privacy issue
  • there’s also the issue of genetic patenting
  • there’s mandatory drugs testing
• Employment:
  • background checks
  • monitoring of workers’ activities, either for safety reasons or for productivity reasons
• Transportation and road safety:
  • GPS tracking
  • Google Streetview
• Criminal justice:
  • sex offender registers
  • satellite tracking for criminals as an alternative to incarceration
• Commerce: sales tracking using fidelity cards or credit cards
• Etc.

Since it’s always good to cite the Universal Declaration when talking about human rights, here’s the article about privacy (#12):

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Types of privacy

Privacy is what is called a cluster concept: it covers many different things, things which may seem unrelated at first sight. So, before I go on, here’s a short and tentative typology of different kinds of “privacies” (I’ll mention later what they have in common):

• Domestic privacy. People have a right to remain secluded and alone in their homes, to keep what happens in their homes and houses to themselves, and to repel intrusion. That’s mostly what is protected by the Fourth Amendment in the US. Issues related to obscenity or pornography laws for example also fall under this type of privacy.
• Personal privacy. People have a right to keep their thoughts, opinions, or feelings to themselves. The secrecy of postal communication for example falls under this type, as does the secret ballot.
• Physical (or intimate) privacy. People have a right not to expose their bodies, as well as a right to repel physical intrusion into their bodies. Abortion and some security checks belong here.
• Informational privacy. People have a right to control what happens to information about themselves (or their families), and to limit involuntary distribution or disclosure of such information. Information here means facts, whether embarrassing or not, rather than opinions. The latter are part of libel law. Information about sexual orientation or salaries is an example of informational privacy.
• Relational privacy. People have a right to keep some of the details about their relationships to themselves. This includes whom they have what type of sexual intercourse with. Sodomy laws violate this kind of privacy, as do laws regulating the use of contraceptives. People also have a right to decide without interference on the type of relationship that suites them best. This covers laws regulating interracial marriages, same-sex marriages etc.

(There’s also the concept of private property, but I think this can be separated from privacy issues, although private property of a home is obviously a necessary condition for domestic privacy, for example).

(source, source, work by Will Varner)

All these types of privacy have something in common: they are all about independence. Privacy protects an individual’s interest in making independent decisions about her life, family, home, lifestyle, relationships, behavior and communication. All these types of privacy are also about the restriction of access or intrusion. Privacy gives an individual the right to deny access or intrusion by others, more specifically access to or intrusion in her body, her home, her relationships, her mind and certain facts about her life. It’s a right to be let alone.

Justification of privacy

Privacy is justified because it restricts access. Some restrictions of access are necessary for personal identity. There is no “I”, no person, no individual without a border between me and the rest of the world. Such a border is an absolute requirement for the basic human need of personhood and individuality. If people have unlimited access to each other, then there simply won’t be any separate people left. People understood as separate entities require some level of privacy protection. The exact level of privacy and the justified intrusions into people’s private lives are not yet determined by this argument, but the need for some level of privacy and some limitations of intrusions is clear. Other justifications of privacy could be based on the interest people have in intimacy, close personal relationships etc. It’s clear that a world without privacy or even without strong privacy rights would be a horrible world indeed.

Objections to privacy

Some argue that there’s nothing special about privacy and that the concept doesn’t merit an independent existence, let alone legal protection. The many different interests protected by privacy can indeed be protected by other means, such as a right to private property, liberty, bodily security and integrity, or independence.

However, I’m not sure that this is true for all the interests protected by a right to privacy. And an independent notion of privacy gives at least an added protection, partly because of the strong roots of the notion in common language and belief.

Karl Marx

Some go even a step further and consider privacy to be detrimental rather than merely superfluous. Marx, for example, viewed privacy as a symptom of an atomized and selfish society, intent on protecting the material self-interest of the haves faced with a possible revolt of the have-nots.

Some feminists as well have forcefully argued that privacy is detrimental to women because of its use as a shield to protect male domination, superiority and abuse. However, it’s not because a right can be abused that it loses all meaning. There wouldn’t be any rights left if that were the case. The challenge is to avoid intrusion in people’s private lives that go too far, while at the same time allowing intrusion that counters abusive private actions. The right to privacy is therefore not an absolute right. But it is a right, and feminists should remember that intrusions into the private sphere can also be detrimental to women (e.g. abortion legislation, forced sterilization etc.).

More here and here.

Related Articles

• The Fourth Amendment: It Has Got to be About More than Privacy (reason.com)
• Q&A: How Do You Define ‘Privacy Harm’? (blogs.wsj.com)

Political Graffiti (130): Surveillance Society

Well, not exactly “graffiti”, but street art in the general sense of the word:

(source, source)

More about CCTV, big brother and privacy. More political art. More political graffiti.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (22): Private Property Rights, Justifications Based Not On Their Origins But On Their Purpose

I guess a few clarifications about the right to private property are in order (this older post was rather unsatisfactory).

Property is the set of rules governing people’s access to and control of things. Three types are traditionally distinguished: private property, common property and collective property.

Types of property

1. Private property

In the case of private property, an individual agent (usually persons, but also families, businesses etc.) has a right to private property if he or she has a right to control the object and to regulate access. Control means sole decisional authority: the individual agent is the only one who has a right to decide what should be done with the object or what should happen to it.

This right allows the owner to decide, to some extent, to do things with the object that affect other people. Private property rights include the right to use property in ways that disadvantage other people, as long as these disadvantages do not include violations of the rights of other people. For example, a factory owner can decide to close her factory. A rich person can decide to buy and own a large house even if some other families would benefit more from living there.

However, a factory owner deciding to use his factory in such a way that it harms the health of workers or of neighboring families violates the rights of these people, and her property rights do not include a right to violate the rights of others. In such cases, rights have to be balanced and the more important right (depending on the circumstances) should prevail.

2. Common property

In the case of common property, the purpose is not individual control and exclusive access, but, on the contrary, equal access to all. Common property of a park or a common grazing field, for instance, is meant to stop certain people using it as if it was private property and as if others were precluded from using or accessing it. If farmers are allowed to use a common field for their cattle, common ownership would imply that no farmer overuses the field and brings so many cattle that there’s no grass left for the cattle of other farmers. Farmers who violate this rule of common property act like the field is their private property because they exclude others from using it. (That’s also called the tragedy of the commons, to which I will return below).

3. Collective property

In the case of collective property (sometimes also called joint property), the purpose is not only equal access to all but also equal control and decisional power. The community as a whole determines, through systems of collective decision making, how the resource is to be used. Each individual’s use is subject to a decision process to be concluded to the satisfaction of each of the co-owners – or of a majority, depending on the type of collective decision procedure. Collective ownership of a farm, for instance, means not only that all farmers belonging to the collective have an equal right to access the farm (as in common property), but also that all farmers have an equal say in the management of the farm. The latter is not (always) the case in common ownership: equal access to a commonly owned park does not (necessarily) imply an equal say in the management of the park.

When does property make sense?

In many cases, talk of property only makes sense under conditions of scarcity. In the case of private property, there would be no reason to demand exclusive control over and access to things if these things were so numerous and abundant that no one else would want to control or access what you want to control or access.

And yet, in the case of intellectual property for example, which is by definition, in our age at least, anything but scarce given the means of reproduction, we still talk about private intellectual property in the sense of exclusive control of access. But in general, it makes sense to view private property as meaningful only in circumstances of scarcity. (Perhaps that’s a good reason not to talk about “intellectual property” at all). The same is true of common property: if the whole wide world were a park, there would be no risk of some people excluding others from accessing it, and hence no need to talk about the common property of the “park”. And the same is true for collective property.

What does property require?

First, it requires rules. It only makes sense to view types of ownership as rule based. Property is in essence a rule. You can’t say that something is your property simply because you have it, hold it, exclude others from it etc. You have property because there are social rules granting you property of something and granting you rights to defend it. People should not rely on their own strength or willingness to cooperate in order to defend their holdings.

Because the state intervenes in the enforcement of property rules and rights, it’s important to have a morally sound justification of those rights. Hence, property also requires a justification. We wouldn’t want the state to use its power for immoral or unjustified ends. I’ll focus on the justification of private property in the remainder of this post because that’s arguably the most common type and the one that most often raises moral issues.

Some of those issues are the morality of taxation and eminent domain, the needs of the poor, the justification of redistribution, the property we’re allowed to own (guns?) or sell (organs?), the things we’re allowed to do with our property (shoot our gun at people? suicide?) etc.

Justifications of private property

What is the point of private property? It must have some moral value, otherwise the moral issues just cited wouldn’t arise in the first place and private property wouldn’t receive legal protection. From the discussion above, we know what private property is, which other types of property there are, which rights property entails, when it is likely to make sense, and what it requires. But we don’t yet know why there should be private property. Some would say that there’s no way for property rights to come about or to be justified because if you go back far enough in time – and sometimes that’s not very far – all “property” is in fact the result of theft of commonly owned resources.

John Locke

John Locke is famous for his attempted justification of private property. My body is my own and my property, and hence I also own the power of my body. Through labor I incorporate the power of my body in the goods I produce. By working on an object, I mix my labor with the object. If someone wants to take this object away from me, he also takes away my labor, which means that he takes away the power of my body. He therefore uses my body, which is incompatible with my right to possess my own body.

However, justifications like these tend to be very shaky. Hence, I think it’s better not to focus too much on the ways in which, historically or theoretically, a right to private property has/can come about in a world that’s originally equally owned by all. We should rather think about what would happen when a right to private property, taken as a given, would disappear, and distill a justification from that (in other words, trying to look for a consequentialist justification).

We can, in fact, without much trouble, list a number of harms that would result from the elimination of a right to private property. Kant defined property as “that with which I am so connected that another’s use of it without my consent would wrong me”. What wrongs would that be? Here’s a tentative list:

• Private property is a means to protect the private space. Without private property, without your own house or your own place in the world, and without your own intimate and personal things, it is obviously more difficult to have a private life. The four walls of your private house protect you against the public. Without private property, there is no private world (another example of the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights).
• Just as there is no light without darkness, there is nothing common to all people and no public space without private property. So private property protects publicity, commonality etc. Freedom of speech, one of the most public acts, is difficult to imagine without privacy and secrecy, and hence without private property.
• Independence, self-reliance, autonomy, and therefore also freedom, are important values, and these values rely heavily on private property.
• Private property is also important for the creation and maintenance of relationships. You have your own house and your own place in the world, but not in the world in general. You live in a particular world, in a very concrete social context of friends, enemies, neighbors and other types of relationships. A place in the world is always a place in a particular community, even if you have to transcend this community now and again. And it’s difficult to imagine a place in a particular community without you own home and hence without private property.
• Private property is an important tool in the creative design of your personality, especially, but not exclusively, when you are an artist.
• It is obvious that without private property there can be no help or generosity. Generosity and the absence of egoism are important for the preservation of a community.
• Private property prevents the tragedy of the commons, referred to above. If everyone has free access to a piece of land for example, then no one has an incentive to avoid over-usage. Every additional cow an individual introduces for grazing brings full benefits to the individual, whereas the costs of overuse resulting from the additional cows are shared among all individual users of the land. Conversely, the benefits of any individual’s self-restraint will accrue to all the other individuals whether or not they also exercise self-restraint. Individual self-restraint is ultimately useless unless all cooperate, which is unlikely because the benefits of self-restraint for each individual are outweighed by the benefits of overuse. Only private property allows people to reap the benefits of self-restraint.
• The right to private property, and in particular, the right to your own house, is linked to the freedom to choose a residence, which again is linked to the freedom of movement (again another example of the indivisibility of human rights).
• As already mentioned above, you also own your own body. Your body is part of your private property. It is something that is yours; it is the thing par excellence that is your own. It is not common to several people and it cannot be given away. It cannot even be shared or communicated. It is the most private thing there is. Owning your body means that you are the master of it. Other people have no say in the use of your body; they should not use it, access it, hurt it or force you to use it in a certain way. This underpins the security rights such as the right to life, the right to bodily integrity, and the prohibition of torture and slavery. It also implies the right to self-determination, and therefore, the right to die. You carry prime responsibility over your own body and life.

Property is therefore an instrumental value, one which serves the realization of other values.

All these advantages of private property are advantages for everyone. Hence, everyone should have a right to private property, which may imply the need for some kind of redistribution benefiting those people who don’t have enough private property to realize all the benefits of private property (for example the homeless). Hence, the right to private property can be an argument against redistribution, but also one in favor of redistribution.

Private property as it is described and justified here is of course an ideal. The real existence of private property, and its actual distribution in the real world never matches this ideal, as is the case for all human rights. Property is often used to oppress others, and many people can never reap the full benefits of property. In the words of John Stuart Mill, the laws of property and the actual distribution of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of property rests.

But even in the ideal world, a right to private property is not absolute, nor is it absolutely beneficial, as I stated in the definition in the beginning of this post. Property can conflict with other values. There’s no way to escape value pluralism.

Related Articles

• Property Rights, Eminent Domain and the “Ground Zero Mosque” (volokh.com)
• Kagan’s Testimony on Property Rights (volokh.com)

Ironic Human Rights Violations (8): Using a Woman’s Naked Image to Protest the Use of Naked Images

I see that the ACLU has become the latest organization to use a by now very familiar image in its campaign against the body scanners used during airport security checks:

screenshot of the ACLU website showing a TSA body scanner image

(source)

I used the image myself on this blog (see here) and of course now I’m using it again. However, I can’t help but feeling that this is self-refuting. It seems that the woman in the image in unrecognizable, but perhaps that’s because I don’t know the woman. Most of us don’t know her. But some people do, and maybe they recognize her. Also, she’s carrying a gun (look at the other image taken from her backside) making it likely that she’s a TSA employee who has done this for test purposes or something. So even if she’s not recognizable, people who know her may still know it’s her because they are aware that she did something like this.

So, if she’s recognizable in some way, it’s strange that people – such as the ACLU and myself – who decry the invasion of privacy resulting from body scanners, would want to disseminate this image, and do so over and over again, making the image almost iconical. Disseminating this image is itself an invasion of privacy.

And even if no one recognizes her, the woman in question probably knows that this is a picture of her and knows that its doing the rounds. That would be enough to make most of us feel very uncomfortable, which is a harm in itself.

Of course, it’s understandable that this is done. If you want to advocate for a cause, or merely write a blog post, it helps when you can use images, and it certainly helps when you can use images of naked people. This is the internet, after all.

Something similar happened in this case. More ironic human rights violations are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (24): Privacy Group Demands Public Disclosure of Private Data

(source)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) – a nonprofit group focused on civil rights and privacy interests – has brought a FOIA case to demand the public release of thousands of body-scan images of air travelers.

I realize that the goal of the public release of thousands of images is to influence public opinion on the use of body-scanners. I gather the idea is that by forcing the government to disclose the images, more people will get upset about them. In turn, that can help lead to a change in policy in which the body-scan images are less likely to be made in the first place. Still, this strikes me as a somewhat odd step for a privacy group. (source)

In the meantime, a judge has ruled that the government has no obligation under the Freedom of Information Act to produce the images to the plaintiffs.

More on airport security here. Something on the importance of the right to privacy is here. More human rights nonsense is here.

Related Articles

• Human Rights Nonsense (22): The Right to Exorcise (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• D.C. Judge Blocks Release of TSA Body Scan Images (legaltimes.typepad.com)

Statistical Jokes (20): Privacy and the Internet

(source)

More on privacy, and on the internet. More statistical jokes.

Related Articles

• Internet Privacy Rights – Six Guideposts For Employees (livecrunch.com)
• Schmidt’s Solution to Street View Privacy Concerns? ‘Just Move’ (searchenginewatch.com)
• White House Enters Online Privacy Fray with Privacy Subcommittee (socialtimes.com)
• Google ‘Mortified’ Over WiFi Data Gathering (informationweek.com)
• Statistical Jokes (17): The Illusion of Precision (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (71): Arrested for Having a Suspicious Bagel on a Plane

arrest of Ognjen Milatovic

A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment. That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.

Ognjen Milatovic, 35, was flying from Boston to Washington D.C. on US Airways when he was escorted off the plane for disorderly conduct following the incident.

Monday’s incident is another example of other passengers essentially becoming the authority on terrorist activity on planes.

Recently, passenger complaints have resulted authorities taking action against innocent passengers who went to the bathroom too often on a flight and who were just being annoying.

In the hyper-sensitive world of flying, sneezing too often could get you kicked off a flight and questioned by the FBI.

Milatovic, who is a mathematics and statistics professor at the University of North Florida, was minding his business when other passengers turned into super sleuths.

Passengers reported hearing strange noises coming from a plastic bag. State police said later that the bag contained a set of keys, a bagel with cream cheese, some other small food items, a hat and a wallet.

When confronted by the US Airways crew about his “suspicious package,” Milatovic got on his cell phone. The crew asked him to hang it up and sit down. When he refused, he was cuffed. Milatovic was also charged with interfering with the operation of an aircraft. (source, image source)

More absurd human rights violations are here. More on the war on terror here. More on airport security here.

Related Articles

• I want to stop flying (professorbainbridge.com)
• The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (67): Shot in the Butt Over Saggy Pants (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (68): Advocacy Equals Insanity (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (69): Arrested for a Tweet (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

Limiting Free Speech (42): Reporting the Names of Suspects and Defendants

illustration by Matt Mahurin

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In many countries it’s quite common, and legal, to include some very specific information about suspects in crime reporting. Newspapers, television shows and websites publish the names, photographs and even addresses of people who are arrested on suspicion of a crime, even if it later turns out that these people were completely innocent. By that time, of course, their reputation, privacy, livelihood, social relationships and perhaps even family life may have been destroyed beyond repair. One can argue that this practice is unjust and an abuse of freedom of speech, even in the case of people who, after the trial is over, are deemed to have been guilty rather than merely a suspect. Criminal punishment should arguably not include such far-reaching consequences. A fortiori, the harm done by such publications to people who were wrongfully suspected is even more unjust because it amounts to punishment before conviction.

That is why some people – including myself – are in favor of limited restrictions on this type of news reporting, even if it means limiting journalists’ freedom of speech. The names, addresses or photographs of suspected criminals should not be made public until after a conviction, and in some cases not even then (there’s the example of the Bulger murder). That is obviously a limitation of the freedom of speech of the journalists engaged in such reporting, but a justified limitation (read the whole series of blog posts for other examples). Before I argue why it is justified, let me reiterate my strong support for free speech in general and open justice in particular. Justice must not only be done but also seen to be done. Open trials have many advantages and can help to avoid miscarriages of justice. They are necessary in order to avoid witness or expert fraud, they make it possible for new evidence to show up and they make it more likely that society accepts the outcome and retains confidence in the justice system as a whole. Evidently, the media play an important role in making trials truly public and open, and hence they should have access and freedom of speech. (Read more about why an open trial means a fair trial here).

Now, why do I think this access and speech shouldn’t necessarily or always include the identity of the suspects? Because there is, in most cases, no real need for that. It’s perfectly possible for the media to play their part in the openness of trials and therefore the fairness of trials without disclosing the identity of the suspects. Some exceptions may be necessary, for instance when a successful prosecution depends on “crowd sourcing” (e.g. to find out the whereabouts of a suspect), but those should remain exceptions. The default should be anonymity. Most of the time, when the media disclose the identity of a suspect, it’s not in order to assist the prosecution, but to pander to the most basic instincts of the public: hate and voyeurism. Unfortunately, newspapers sell and websites are visited when they have stories about gruesome crimes supposedly committed by someone belonging to a minority already covered in prejudice and when these stories contain all the fine detail, including names, places and pictures.

Obviously, amoral commercial exploitation of basic instincts isn’t a sufficient reason to limit freedom of speech (and neither is it a reason to defend it), but we do have other reasons. Why should the rights of one – the media in this case – automatically trump the rights of another – the privacy of suspects, their livelihood etc.? Rights need to be balanced against each other, and when there’s no strong reason to uphold one right – as is the case here (reporting can be done perfectly well without identification) – it should yield in order to protect the other right.

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Some would say that the role of the media in the openness of trials isn’t the only possible argument in favor of disclosing identities. Another argument goes as follows: if the media can’t disclose enough details, their stories will lose human interest and become vague and abstract treatises. No one wants to read that, and consequently the media will stop writing about the Courts altogether, and the social debate about criminal justice will suffer. I think that argument is mistaken. You can write real human interest stories about real people without printing the names, addresses and photographs of possible suspects.

Others would say that I exaggerate: the public is quite capable of distinguishing between suspects and convicted criminals. Maybe, but does anyone honestly think that excessively invasive crime reporting never harms suspects or never imposes disporportionate harm on convicted criminals? I think that would be an extremely naive position to take.

Now, as I said, there have to be exceptions: sometimes a successful prosecution requires the disclosure of a suspect. I can also be argued that people who hold a prominent position in society should also, in certain cases, not benefit from anonymity during prosecution. But that should be the exception and only in cases where there is some public good involved in knowing the suspect. We should not let hatred, voyeurism, Schadenfreude or the commercial interests feeding on these instincts, ruin people’s lives.

More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• Canada’s Supreme Court upholds right of defendants to seek ban on reporting of proceedings (foxnews.com)
• Anonymity plan for rape accused (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Supreme Court upholds blanket publication ban for bail hearings (theglobeandmail.com)

Human Rights Facts (58): CCTV

Banksy graffiti

There are now 32 CCTV cameras within 200 yards/183 meters of the London flat in which George Orwell wrote his book “1984″.

More on CCTV here. More Banksy here.

Crime and Human Rights (10): Does Being Tough on Crime Reduce Crime?

The human right issues created by incarceration are evident, I think: locking people up means taking away a number if not most of their liberties, most obviously their freedom of movement, freedom to work, political freedom in some cases, and privacy. Other rights violations are also common, even in the prisons in rich countries such as the U.S.:

• juvenile incarceration
• the substandard conditions in which many prisoners are kept (Federal prisons in the U.S. hold 60% more prisoners than they were designed for)
• the forced and unpaid labor prisoner often perform
• the common occurrence of prison rape (see here and here).

Some people clearly deserve to be put in jail, and often that is what is required in order to protect the human rights of their (possible) victims.

However, I mentioned before that the “tough on crime” policies enacted in the U.S. and the resulting explosion in the numbers of U.S. citizens who are in prison (the U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world) go beyond what is required for public safety and the rights of victims. The causes of this explosion are numerous.

• There’s the war on drugs, of course, which leads to excessively tough penalties, sometimes even for victimless crimes (the illegal sale of prescription painkillers for instance). Some of the penalties for drug “crimes” are tougher than the sentences for violent crimes.
• There are other acts that are in essence victimless and need not be criminalized, and yet result in incarceration in the U.S. (e.g. importing rare orchids).
• Sentences in the U.S. are too long. Many crimes come with mandatory minimum sentences, taking away judges’ discretion and their ability to take into account the specific circumstances of a crime. “Three strikes and you’re out” lead to life sentences for sometimes trivial crimes.
• Some laws, especially laws regulating the conduct of businesses – are so vague that people have a hard time steering away from crime.
• Prosecutors are often allowed to slice up a crime into a series of different crimes, each coming with a minimum sentence.
• Parole conditions have been toughened, and people are regularly put back in jail for non-criminal violations of these parole conditions.

The cause of all this is probably the race to the top going on between politicians who are all promising to be tougher on crime than the next guy. Some judges in the U.S. are elected and engage in the same kind of bidding.

Image via Wikipedia

The question is: what are the benefits of this toughness, and what are the costs? Regarding the benefits, the homicide rate has been going down in the U.S., but it has since two centuries and it’s not clear that the tough policies introduced during the last decades have contributed much to the decline.

Bert Useem of Purdue University and Anne Piehl of Rutgers University estimate that a 10% increase in the number of people behind bars would reduce crime by only 0.5%. In the states that currently lock up the most people, imprisoning more would actually increase crime, they believe. Some inmates emerge from prison as more accomplished criminals. And raising the incarceration rate means locking up people who are, on average, less dangerous than the ones already behind bars. (source)

Regarding the costs: the prison system in the U.S. is extremely expensive, sucking away funds that could be used much more productively elsewhere, particularly on policies protecting human rights such as education. It’s also money that can’t be spent on better crime detection and better policing. It’s well-known that swift justice and high “catch rates” deter more crime than harsh penalties. If you want to be tough on crime, you shouldn’t necessarily choose the option of putting a lot of people away for a long time. And questioning the high incarceration rates in the U.S. doesn’t mean you’re weak on law and order.

High numbers of inmates also reduce the chances of rehabilitation: more prisoners means relatively less prisoners who can take advantage of the limited resources dedicated to vocational training and other activities that make it more likely that prisoners can become normal and non-reoffending members of society once they get out. Together with the phenomenon of prison as a “school for criminals”, this is likely to create a perverse effect: being tough on crime can actually increase crime. People should think hard on the way in which they choose to be tough on crime, and should consider if some crimes need to be crimes at all.

Related Articles

• The Limits Of Locking People Up (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• Too many laws, too many prisoners (economist.com)
• Goodbye Prisons; Hello GPS? (blogs.wsj.com)

Freedom of Expression and the Internet

cartoon by Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

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The internet is undoubtedly a huge boost for freedom of expression, and not only a quantitative boost. It has certain qualitative characteristics that older media don’t have, which make it particularly beneficial for free speech.

A first reason why the internet promotes free speech is its relative cost: it has made speech much less expensive. You even don’t need to own a computer since you can, with relative ease, use a public one. And even the cost of a computer pales compared to the cost of many older media.

Another reason is that governments find it much more difficult to censor speech on the internet. Speech is no longer bound to a particular carrier which can be easily confiscated or destroyed, or to a particular territory where a state can exercise its power. People can publish on websites in other countries without being there. Of course, governments do retain some considerable censorship power over the internet, as is demonstrated by the case of the Great Firewall of China, but it’s safe to say that this power is relatively weak compared to government’s powers over traditional media, precisely because of the international character of the internet.

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Unfortunately, we see that private actors sometimes replace the government as censors. The discussions on net neutrality for example result from some cases where internet providers have blocked access to competitor sites or favored access to friendly or related sites (see the case of Telus blocking access to a labor union website). One could also claim that Google, for instance, despite the good it does for free expression, also in a way limits it, since it systematically channels people towards speech that already has much exposure and freedom, and “buries” all the rest (read more about this here). There is still domination and inequality on the web; the question is whether on average the internet has done more to limit it or to advance it. I believe the former.

A third reason why the internet promotes free speech is the gradual disappearance of middle men. You don’t need editors, publishers or peer review to publish your views. In traditional media, these middle men normally filter out a lot of speech, often to the benefit of the public but never to the benefit of speech.

cartoon by Pat Bagley

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So these are three reasons (among many others) why the internet expands the amount of speech and promotes free speech in a quantitative way. But it can also be argued that the internet has improved speech in a qualitative way. That may be a counter-intuitive claim, given the amount of bullshit that’s present on the web, and yet I think it’s true for many pockets of the internet. Because the internet creates a quantitative boost for speech, it also produces a qualitative one. The internet has allowed more people to speak, listen and discuss, and it’s a common argument in philosophy that widespread participation in discussions tends to improve the quality of people’s opinions, under certain ideal circumstances. I won’t make the detailed argument here, since I’ve done that many times before. In a few words, the argument boils down to this: the freedom to speak, the equal freedom to speak, and massive use by large numbers of people of this freedom, result in the appearance and confrontation of a large number of points of view and of perspectives on issues. It means that a proposal or opinion or policy is subjected to intense scrutiny and criticism. If it survives this, it is bound to be of better quality.

More on the internet, on censorship and on freedom of speech.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (53): No Seduction of Unmarried Women Please

The Michigan Penal Code § 750.532, provides that any man who shall seduce and debauch any unmarried woman shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not more than 5 years or by fine of not more than 2,500 dollars ….

One story on the subject reports that, assistant Ingham County Prosecutor Sam Smith … explained that in the case that appeared in the newspaper, simple seduction wasn’t the original charge. The man was charged with a more serious offense. The seduction plea became, as Smith put it, the “resolution” to the case. That’s most often how it’s employed, Smith said — as a “reasonable resolution.”

Smith stopped short of saying that consensual sex between consenting unmarried adults would never be prosecuted as a crime, but admitted it would be rare. Of course if one of the parties is married, the crime becomes adultery, but that’s rarely prosecuted, either, Smith said. (source)

More on sex and human rights. More absurd human rights violations.

Discrimination (3): Libertarianism and Private Discrimination

Prominent libertarian politician Rand Paul recently caused a stir by claiming that he didn’t support parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically the parts applying non-discrimination legislation to private businesses. Like most libertarians, he believes that if private restaurant owners, for example, want to prevent blacks from eating there, then that’s their right. Similarly, banks should be allowed not to lend to blacks, real-estate agents not to sell to blacks, private homeowner groups should be able to band together and keep out blacks etc. Same when the targets are Jews, gays, immigrants and so on.

The standard libertarian position is that only government enforced or government protected discrimination is wrong. Private actors should be allowed to discriminate. A private restaurant owner for instance should be allowed to refuse to serve blacks. However, government rules forcing restaurant owners not to serve blacks are not allowed, even though for the blacks in question the results are much the same.

It’s not that most libertarians think this kind of discrimination is acceptable and would engage in it themselves. They reject legislation against private discrimination because they consider the right to private property and the sovereignty of property owners much more important than the fight against private discrimination. They also argue that market mechanisms, which they also like a whole lot, will – over time – weed out such discrimination. A restaurant owner who refuses to serve blacks will do a lot worse than his competitors who are more open minded. He will lose benefits of scale, will have to raise his prices and ultimately also lose the bigoted white customers who detest eating in the presence of blacks but detest even more paying unreasonable prices.

Here’s a good statement of the libertarian position by a self-confessed libertarian:

(1) Private discrimination should, in general, be legal (this includes affirmative action preferences, btw). Many libertarians would make exceptions for cases of monopoly power, and most would ban private discrimination when the government itself ensured the monopoly by law, as with common carriers like trains; (2) The government may not discriminate. If necessary, the federal government should step in to prevent state and local governments from discriminating; (3) The government may not force private parties to discriminate, and the federal government should, if necessary, step in to prevent state and local governments from forcing private parties to discriminate; (4) The government must protect members of minority groups and those who seek to associate with them from private violence. If the state and local government won’t do so, the federal government should step in. (source)

Note the mention of violence in this quote: private violence against blacks isn’t allowed, private discrimination is. Why the difference? Again, property rights. Laws against violence don’t usually violate anyone’s property rights.

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Now, what’s the problem with this libertarian position? Property rights are obviously very important. You don’t need to be a libertarian to believe that. I argued strongly in favor of property rights here. Likewise, the free market does an enormous amount of good. The problem with the libertarian view is absolutism and a rejection of value pluralism. There are many values in life, and many different strategies to realize them. And sometimes, some values or strategies come into conflict with each other. When that happens – as is the case here – you have to be willing to balance them and see which one should take precedence. Privacy and free speech, for example, are both important, but what do you do when a journalist exposes the private life of a public figure? You balance the right and wrong: which value is better served by publishing? Free speech or privacy? In some cases, we may believe that free speech is more important than the right to privacy (for example when the politician’s private life has relevance for his functioning). In other cases privacy will trump speech (for example when the facts published have no political meaning). Such decisions can only be taken case by case because the specifics always differ. Doctrinaire and absolutists positions in favor of one value or the other won’t do. And unfortunately many libertarians, and certainly Rand in this case, seem to think that their preferred values – property, freedom and the market – should always have priority over all other values.

Is legislation such as the Civil Rights Act an infringement of property rights and the freedom to do with your property as you want? Of course it is. Are such infringements always wrong? Of course they aren’t. Sometimes they are a necessary evil to gain a greater good.

There a resemblance between the libertarian views on private discrimination and the more widely accepted view in the U.S. that free speech rights and the First Amendment can only be invoked against the government, as if private actors can’t violate people’s right to free speech. The dominant U.S. free speech doctrine reflects an antiquated view of human rights as exclusively vertical. Of course, the government probably does most of the violations, particularly of a right such as free speech, but probably not in the case of the right not to be discriminated against. That’s more of a private monopoly, and markets, protest marches, boycotts, activism etc. won’t solve that problem by themselves. Just look at the market: it didn’t solve segregation, and neither would it have had it been more free. In fact, it’s likely that bigoted white customers who detest eating in the presence of blacks, will not find themselves in white only and hence more expensive restaurants, but will band together and boycott non-segregated restaurants which then lose far more business among whites than they gain from allowing blacks. Such boycotts are absolutely in line with property rights and the free market, which shows that the market can make discrimination worse instead of destroying it. (For a more sympathetic view of the power of the market, go here).

Strangely, Rand Paul himself invoked the parallel between private discrimination and free speech, but twists it to serve his goals:

INTERVIEWER: But under your philosophy, it would be okay for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?

PAUL: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things… It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior. (source)

So we have to tolerate discrimination that actually harms real people, just like we tolerate awful speech that most likely doesn’t hurt a fly? Words don’t equal behavior, although sometimes there may be a thin line between them (which is why hate speech laws can sometimes be justified).

More on libertarianism, segregation, Jim Crow and discrimination. And there’s a post here on the related question whether racist political parties can or should be forced to accept members of another race.

Religion and Human Rights (27): Muslim Headscarves – Between Religious Liberty and Gender Discrimination, Ctd.

Once more on the issue of Muslim headscarves (see here and here for previous posts), because the controversy doesn’t seem to be going away. Belgium, my home country, has the dubious honor of being the first western country outlawing the burqa. Other countries like France seem set to follow, or have already interpreted existing laws on masks or police checks creatively in order to impose fines on women wearing a veil. Forcing Muslim women to show their faces is no longer a fringe xenophobic fantasy.

First of all, and before you get upset that a human rights activist such as me doesn’t take a more outspoken position against the veil, let me stress that I do worry a lot about gender discrimination (as regular readers can attest). I do believe that the veil – especially the complete face and body veil such as the burqa or the niqab – is an expression of a culture in which equal rights for women are – to put it mildly – not a priority. That doesn’t mean that every woman who wears a veil does so because of coercion or discrimination, or because she doesn’t have a right not to. Some do, but others wear it voluntarily, although the degree of “voluntariness” is something that’s always difficult to establish given the subtle effects of social pressure, tradition and education that are often difficult to notice – even for the self. However, it can be argued that also those women who wear the veil in a truly voluntary way – if truly voluntary can be something real, which I hope – contribute to an ideology of female inferiority and make it harder for other women who would like to remove the veil to do so.

Moreover, there can be different motives for wearing the veil voluntarily. Women can believe that this is a requirement of their religion (the Quran only seems to require “modest dress”), and that disregard of such requirements amounts to sin. Or women can decide to wear the veil for strategic reasons. They may believe – correctly I think – that wearing the veil enhances their freedom, for example their freedom of movement. One can argue that this strategic use of the veil isn’t truly voluntary, but that doesn’t make it wrong. I’m personally open to the argument that a prohibition of the veil can result in de facto house arrest for some women: their husbands may decide to force them to stay at home if they aren’t allowed to wear the veil in public. Now you might say that one evil doesn’t excuse another, but there is something called a lesser evil (I’ve made a similar point about sweatshops not so long ago). If wearing the veil allows women to venture outside of the home that is undoubtedly a positive side effect of something that in general may be a moral negative.

What about the arguments in favor of prohibition? Some of them are very weak indeed. It’s not because the veil makes some people uncomfortable that it should be prohibited. It’s not difficult to imagine the horror of the place where everything that makes someone uncomfortable is outlawed. Security risks also aren’t a very strong reason for a general ban, since women can be required to lift their veil in specific circumstances. The argument that modern democracies should be “secular” and that this requires the banning of religious symbols in public is indefensible in view of the human right to freedom of religion.

Some claim that the ban on the burqa is just one of many existing and undisputed restrictions on how people can dress in public: people can’t walk naked in the streets; or wear stockings on their heads inside bank buildings etc. But this confuses types of dress that are not religiously inspired with types that are. Religion does receive special protection in the system of human rights, and this special protection should be recognized if human rights are to be respected. Conflating religious dress with dress in general does not allow you to fully respect human rights. That doesn’t mean that the burqa can’t be banned in specific circumstances where there’s a good reason to do so – in Court rooms, in schools etc. But these exceptions don’t justify banning it altogether. (The justification for a ban in Court rooms is obvious and doesn’t need spelling out. A ban in schools – for both teachers and pupils – is justified on the grounds of the need for adequate education. In addition, there’s a phenomenon of peer pressure in some schools, where girls who wear the veil force others to comply).

How about the argument based on gender equality? That seems a lot stronger at first sight. But isn’t it true that gender equality wouldn’t be advanced a whole lot by a burqa ban? (Maybe a ban would even be bad for gender equality, if it forces women to stay home). And isn’t it also true that other measures in favor of gender equality, such as better education, stricter laws and better enforcement on domestic violence etc., would prove much more effective?

There’s another argument in favor of a ban, and it’s a pretty strong one, although you hardly ever hear it. A democratic community requires a common citizenship and a public space in which people can deliberate freely on their preferred policies. If democracy was just an exercise in voting, it would be compatible with the veil. It would even be compatible with complete solipsism and individuals never meeting each other. But it’s more than that. The burqa and niqab are – to some extent – incompatible with deliberation. One could argue that this only justifies a partial ban, namely a ban in places where deliberation occurs, and when it occurs. Just like the partial ban in Court rooms is justified. The question is of course whether proponents of the veil can accommodate a partial ban. Perhaps their religious belief requires the veil in all circumstances. However, we are allowed to require some level of flexibility of them. Rights often come into conflict with one another (take for example the right to free speech of the journalist wishing to expose the private life of a politician). And that’s the case here: the right to democratic government and the right to religious liberty should be balanced against each other, and maybe the former should take precedence. After all, not everything is justified on the grounds of religious liberty: for example, no one in the West argues that mutilation as a punishment for crime is justified, not even when it is prescribed by a religion.

More on headscarves, gender equality, dress codes, migration and religious liberty.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (35): Nicaragua, No Abortions, Ever

Although I’m ambivalent on the issue of abortion, this strikes me as absurd:

The cruelty of Nicaragua’s extreme abortion ban is undeniable in the case of Amelia (an alias), a 27-year-old woman with cancer. Passed in 2006, the law criminalizes abortion, even if the woman’s life or health is at risk. Amelia, who has a 10-year-old daughter, needs to have an abortion so she can undergo treatment for the cancer, which may have metastasized in her brain, lungs and breasts…

From a statement from … organizations [advocating on behalf of Amelia]: Even though the treating physicians concluded that the patient requires an abortion to initiate chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, the young woman has been hospitalized since January 29th without being able to receive an abortion and therefore, without receiving any kind of treatment to stop the cancer.

Under these circumstances, Amelia is in imminent danger of losing her life, given the impossibility of accessing an abortion. Under current Nicaraguan law, women in need of therapeutic abortions to save their life or protect their health are in fact, sentenced to death. Additionally, in this case, her minor daughter would be orphaned. (source)

More on Nicaragua. More on abortion. More absurd human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (31): Big Brother Discovers Flying Drones

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers [people dumping trash illegally], in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police…

Five other police forces have signed up to the scheme, which is considered a pilot preceding the countrywide adoption of the technology for “surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering”. The partnership’s stated mission is to introduce drones “into the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies” across the UK. (source)

More on privacy, CCTV, Big Borther, and drones. And here are some more absurd human rights violations.

Human Rights Nonsense (12): Protecting Human Rights Against the Antichrist

From The Washington Post, a story about a bizarre reaction to an odd proposal:

The House of Delegates [of Virginia] is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a bill that would protect Virginians from attempts by employers or insurance companies to implant microchips in their bodies against their will. It might also save humanity from the antichrist, some supporters think.

Del. Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg), the bill’s sponsor, said that privacy issues are the chief concern behind his attempt to criminalize the involuntary implantation of microchips. But he also said he shared concerns that the devices could someday be used as the “mark of the beast” described in the Book of Revelation.

“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Cole said that the growing use of microchips could allow employers, insurers or the government to track people against their will and that implanting a foreign object into a human being could also have adverse health effects. “I just think you should have the right to control your own body,” Cole said.

Microchips, which use radio frequency identification, have been used in pets to identify and track them. Proponents suggest that such chips could be invaluable in making people’s medical records portable and secure and in helping to identify and find missing children. Others have urged they be used with Alzheimer’s disease patients.

But the growing use of microchips has collided with the Book of Revelation. The biblical passage in question is in Chapter 13 and describes the rise of a satanic figure known as “the Beast”: “He causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

David Neff, editor of the magazine Christianity Today, said that some fundamentalist Christians believe that bar codes and implanted microchips could be used by a totalitarian government to control commerce — a sign of the coming end of the world.

“This is part of a larger attempt to constantly read current history in the light of the symbolic language of the Book of Revelation,” he said.

While the chip story is indeed slightly odd and suspect – people should be in control over what happens to their bodies, and they shouldn’t have microchips implanted in them because these chips could potentially be used to track them and invade their privacy – it’s absolutely nonsensical to interpret it in the light of the Apocalypse. That will only serve to drown legitimate criticism of such proposals. It’s also weird that Christians suddenly start to worry about individual self-determination, when their opposition to euthanasia, assisted suicide, suicide in general, and abortion rests on complete disrespect for it. Human rights have enough enemies, no need to go and add the Beast.

(source for the x-ray image)

Other posts in this series.

Human Rights Facts (50): Internet Filtering in China

Some more information on internet filtering in China, following this older post on the same topic.

More about the Golden Shield Project – also called the Great Firewall of China – here. More about the Green Dam Youth Project here. Since China’s obviously not the only country limiting access to the internet, there’s an interesting paper here on global attitudes towards internet filtering. More on China and human rights. More on free speech, censorship and privacy in general.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (18): Rectal Terrorism

President Sarkozy’s new domestic intelligence directorate (DCRI) learnt of an attack in Saudi Arabia in which the bomber detonated … a device in his rectum.

Al-Qaeda gave video publicity to its new method tested by Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, a 23-year-old terrorist, who blew himself apart at a meeting in Jeddah in late August with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi anti-terrorism chief. The Prince was slightly injured in the blast, but al-Asiri, who used a mobile telephone to trigger the bomb, was ripped into 70 pieces, the DCRI report said.

Such a blast, though limited in force, could be catastrophic in a pressurized airliner, say experts. Counter-measures would be draconian. As well as taking off shoes and handing in liquids, passengers could be subjected to X-ray screening or be required to hand in all electronic devices because they could be used as detonators, police commanders told Le Figaro newspaper. (source)

More on airport security, privacy in general, the war on terror, the link between the war on terror and the right to privacy, suicide bombings, and terrorist attacks. More absurd human rights violations. More scatological human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (16): Privacy at Work

smile check machine in Japan

If the workers at Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company seem unnaturally cheerful for drizzly autumn mornings, it is because they are being watched. The firm has installed cameras with special scanners at 15 of its stations to measure employees’ smiles, ensuring that harried commuters are always greeted with a grin, however forced.

It may seem extreme to Western eyes but it is just one example of a business that is booming: employee monitoring. Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means. …

Managers trying to decide who to make redundant can use forensic software to catch that slacking YouTube addict red-handed. … Monitoring software can also be used to spot “presenteeism” – employees who turn up in the office every day but then do nothing [a kind of absenteeism]. (source)

On the technical aspects of the Japanese “smile check machine”:

Workers will be required to smile into a camera and have their mug subjected to software analysis of their happiness. The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer. For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen. Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it. (source)

More on privacy. More on Big Brother. More on the related topic of free speech at work. More absurd human rights violations.

Economic Human Rights (31b): Certain Objections and Counter-Objections

M.C. Escher, hands drawing each other, symbolizing cooperation and mutual assistance

(source, and here is more M.C. Escher)

Economic rights are a subset of human rights. Put very briefly and simplistically, they are what could be called anti-poverty rights: for example, there’s a right to a certain standard of living, to social security, to work, to fair wages, to healthcare, housing etc.

It’s an understatement to say that there’s no universal consensus on these rights. Some say that these aren’t “real” human rights, even some who believe that poverty is a real problem (like Bill Easterly for example). Others say that these rights are useless or even harmful. Here are a few of the most common objections raised against economic rights, and my counter-objections.

The big state criticism

Economic rights are believed to require invasion of privacy and hence violations of an important freedom right (freedom rights such as free speech, privacy, habeas corpus etc. are usually distinguished from economic rights, political rights etc.). In order to verify whether people have a right to social security benefits or healthcare benefits, the state has to check people’s income (legal and illegal), their family composition, their health, their medical consumption, their lifestyle etc.

The assumption behind this criticism is that the state is the only or the main party responsible for the realization of economic rights. This is not the case. People in need can call on other people to help. And these other people have a moral responsibility to help. The duties of mutual assistance, charity and philanthropy point to a horizontal aspect of economic rights. People in need do not only have a vertical right to assistance, or a right directed at the state. Their economic rights can be addressed at their fellow citizens, and these have a duty to respect and protect these rights. It’s only when horizontal duties fail that the state should intervene. If we think of economic rights in this way, the dangers of an overbearing state don’t look that ominous anymore.

The rule that economic rights should – in part – be realized by citizens has another advantage as well: economic rights tend to foster community spirit and feelings of solidarity and belonging.

But this insistence on solidarity shouldn’t obscure the rule that people have a responsibility to help themselves and support themselves. This kind of independence is a part of freedom and an important good. Solidarity comes into play only when self-help is unsuccessful or impossible, and the state comes into play only when solidarity is unsuccessful or absent.

Different kinds of duties

Another objection: some say that economic rights, if they are rights at all, are radically different from “normal” human rights – also called freedom rights – and can therefore be given a lower priority (and maybe aren’t even real rights at all). Freedom rights imply duties of abstention or forbearance, whereas economic rights require duties of active help, involvement and intervention. In the case of violations of freedom rights, the remedy is easy: stop doing what you’re doing. In the case of violations of economic “rights”, the remedy is often very difficult if not impossible. If there is no work, no one can give it to me. If a country is poor, no one can raise the standard of living.

When freedom rights are violated, the victim can go to a court and a judge can force the violator to stop his or her actions. When economic rights are violated, it’s useless to go to a court. Not only isn’t there an obvious violator who can be stopped, there is often no one who can stop the violation from happening. Hence it looks like these rights are unenforceable and often have no remedy. Rather than rights, it seems that they are aspirations or policy goals, often long term policy goals.

However, there’s again an erroneous assumption underlying all of this. The distinction between the two types of duties – forbearance and active assistance – isn’t clean-cut. Freedom rights require active intervention by the state in order to enforce forbearance. They require an efficient judiciary and police force. For some states, this may be as unattainable as prosperity. In fact, it’s precisely because of a lack of prosperity that many states are unable to guarantee protection for freedom rights. Of course, the fact that economic rights are a prerequisite for freedom rights isn’t a sufficient reason to call them rights. But neither is it a reason not to call them rights.

Conversely, economic rights often require more forbearance than active intervention. Economic rights in China during the Great Leap Forward would have been better served by state forbearance. All types of human rights require forbearance and intervention. Perhaps economic rights generally need more intervention, but that is a difference in degree and not in essence, and it isn’t a sufficient reason to reject the label of “rights” for the aspirations inherent in economic rights.

Ought implies can

There’s another criticism of economic rights, related to the previous one. Economic rights are said to violate a general rule for rights: ought implies can; there can be no obligation to do something if there is no capability to do it. You cannot have a duty to help someone who’s drowning if you can’t swim yourself. Hence the person drowning doesn’t have a right to be assisted by you. The same is said to be true of economic rights which therefore aren’t real rights. If a poor country doesn’t have the resources to help its poor citizens, then these citizens don’t have a right to be helped.

However, we don’t follow the same logic in the case of freedom rights. Freedom rights also require resources, as we have seen. When a state doesn’t have the resources necessary to protect its citizens’ freedom rights, we usually don’t say that the citizens of such a state have lost their freedom rights. People have rights irrespective of the probability that they can be protected. Or better: the less people’s rights are protected, the more important it is that they have rights (see here). And anyway, violations of economic rights don’t occur because there are insufficient resources but because of an unequal distribution of resource, nationally or internationally. So the “can” part of “ought implies can” isn’t as fanciful as the critics of economic rights believe.

Economic rights are superfluous and useless

This is supposed to be the case because free markets should automatically produce a certain standard of living for everyone that is high enough to realize the goals inherent in economic rights. Free trade, deregulated markets and low taxes cause profits to rise, which in turn means more investments, which in turn means more and better jobs and higher incomes. All boats rise on a rising tide.

Now, it’s my belief that history – and especially recent history – has shown that this isn’t enough. Free markets are beneficial, but they don’t automatically provide high standards of living for everyone.

Economic rights are harmful and counterproductive

This is a stronger version of the “useless” argument. Economic rights are believed to require a big state (see above), high taxes and intrusive regulation. All of this hinders the economy and the creation of wealth. As a result of economic rights, there is less wealth to redistribute, and economic rights therefore undo what they want to achieve.

They are also harmful in another way: they violate freedom rights, especially the right to privacy and the right to property (because of redistribution). We’ve already seen that we can mitigate this risk when we include horizontal duties. But even if this risk is real, why should property and privacy automatically rank higher than the absence of poverty? If we assume that economic rights are real rights, then it’s not surprising to see that they can contradict other rights. Contradictions between human rights are very common. The right to privacy is often in conflict with free speech for example. Sometimes one right has to be limited for the sake of another. So why should this be a problem when dealing with economic rights?

Of course, one shouldn’t dramatize. Economic rights and freedom rights are generally not incompatible. On the contrary, they are interdependent. Freedom for the poor often doesn’t mean a whole lot. But, on the other hand, the squeaky hinge gets the oil: poverty has to have a voice if it is to be eliminated.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (14): Arrested for Excessively Noisy Sex

(source)

Via Reason.com:

The bizarre and terrifying situation where a woman has been arrested for having sex too loudly. In modern-day Britain, even the decibels of our sexual moaning can become the subject of a police investigation.

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the northeast of England [not in the photo], was remanded in custody for having “excessively noisy sex”. The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her “shouting and groaning” and her “bed banging against the wall of her home”. Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: “I can’t stop making noise during sex”, she told The Daily Mail. “It’s unnatural to not make any noises, and I don’t think that I am particularly loud”…

Cartwright had previously been served with an anti-social behavior order (ASBO) — a civil order used to control the minutiae of British people’s behavior—that forbade her from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in England.

That’s right. Going even further than Orwell’s imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright’s noisy shenanigans… It was because she breached the conditions of her ASBO, the civil ruling about how much noise she can make while making love in England, that Cartwright was arrested.

Anyone can apply for an ASBO to stop anyone else from doing something they find irritating, “alarming”, or “threatening”.

Local magistrates’ courts issue the orders, sometimes on the basis of hearsay evidence (which is permissible in ASBO cases). In short, the applicant for an ASBO does not have to go through the normal rigors of the criminal justice system to get a civil ruling preventing someone he doesn’t like from doing something he finds “alarming” or “dangerous”. Once you have been branded with an ASBO, if you break its conditions—by having noisy sex in your own home, for example—you are potentially guilty of a crime and can be imprisoned.

I don’t want to imply that there can be no anti-social behavior, or that the exercise of one’s rights can never infringe upon other people’s rights, but this is just absurd. More absurd human rights violations here.

Human Rights Facts (48): Numbers of Abortions Going Down

You can see from the graph below that the numbers of abortions, compared to 15 years ago, are down: from 35 abortions per 1,000 women to 29. This reduction took place all over the world, albeit not in equal measure everywhere. Unintended pregnancies have also fallen, from 69 per 1,000 women in 1995 to 55 per 1,000 in 2008, as contraception use has increased.

(source, source)

The graph also shows that most abortions in Africa and Latin America, and half of abortions worldwide, are unsafe (carried out by an unskilled practitioner in unhygienic conditions) and therefore a possible violation of the right to health of women.

Something which isn’t evident from this graph: almost half of the world’s women live in countries where abortion is severely restricted by law (a number that has hardly changed over time). These laws do not prevent abortion, which you can see from the numbers for Latin America, where abortion is practically outlawed. The numbers there are as high as anywhere else, if not higher. Moreover, as abortion is illegal there, most abortions are unsafe.

More on abortion.

The Causes of Poverty (25): The Matthew Effect

The Evangelist Matthew Inspired by an Angel, by Rembrandt

(source)

The Matthew Effect – a concept invented by sociologist Robert K. Merton - is based on the following extract of the Gospel of Matthew:

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

This statement is intuitively convincing. Those who already have economic resources can use these to acquire even more of them, often if not by definition at the expense of those who don’t have them. It’s easy to see how wealthy people have better information to use their wealth in such a way that they can increase it. How they know the right people, how they can use the education system to their advantage (and to the advantage of their offspring), how they can use the political system to their advantage etc. Conversely, poor people are often stuck in a poverty trap: their poverty makes them sick, and their sickness even more poor; their poverty makes it hard to access education, and their lack of education makes them more poor etc.

You can see at once how this is relevant to the issue of human rights. While income or wealth inequality as such isn’t a human rights violation, it does have implications for human rights. And poverty is a human rights violation. But the Matthew Effect can be observed in other human rights as well. Take for instance the wiretapping that is used in the war on terror. Initially, wiretapping is targeted towards individuals who are suspected of plotting an attack. However, it seems inevitable that those who are authorized to use wiretapping expand the field of their authority. Instead of targeted wiretapping, they go on fishing expeditions: throwing out the nets as wide as possible and see which fishes end up in it. They start to use data-mining, for instance, checking private information of entire populations in order to filter out suspect individuals.

Another example of the Matthew Effect in human rights can be found in hate speech laws. The laws may initially impose limits on the freedom of speech that crack down on cases of hate speech that may cause violence and riots. However, once certain exceptions on the freedom of speech are legal and legitimate, the boundaries may move towards more restrictions. Maybe speech that doesn’t pose an imminent threat of violence but perhaps a longterm threat to the stability of a multicultural society – such as derogatory speech, or blasphemous speech – should also be prohibited. And then you may find yourself on a slippery slope.

I can also mention what I called “searchlight human rights violations” (see this previous post): for example, a certain level of sexual violence against women in a particular society, can teach young men a certain culture, mentality and value system that automatically leads to a wider use of violence.

However, I don’t believe things are as simple as this. While the Matthew Effect is certainly a force that is driving human rights violations, I don’t think there is anything inevitable or mechanical about it. There are other forces at play as well, and some of them go in the other direction. If that wouldn’t be the case, then the Matthew Effect would have landed us in a place where respect for human rights is non-existent, and would have done so a long time ago.

Regarding the particular case of wealth inequality, a simple application of the Matthew Effect would require a vision of the world with limited resources. And although some – important – resources are indeed limited, others – equally important ones – are not. It’s not because one person receives a good education, that another one must receive less education. And when one person accumulates riches, this can benefit others (his or her employees for example).

Limiting Free Speech (35): Publishing Lists of Pedophiles on the Internet, Ctd.

example of a sex offender registry

(source)

A follow-up from this previous post on the same subject. We should of course do our utmost to protect people, and especially children, from sexual predators. In the U.S., and to a lesser degree elsewhere, “utmost” means publishing so-called “registries” of sex offenders on the internet. These registries contain the names, addresses and offenses of people convicted for sex crimes. The purpose of the registries is to inform people about the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders and allow them to take measures to protect their children. (A few examples of registries are here, here and here; some of those are government sites, others are not).

By definition, since the purpose is protection, these registries should contain only information on people who are likely to offend again, and to offend in a way that is dangerous to children (and possibly adults). People who have been convicted in the past but are not deemed to be possible repeat offenders, or people convicted for sex crimes that are not dangerous (flashers for example) shouldn’t be included, but regularly are.

These registries are an exercise of free speech. The question here is: should they be allowed, or are they doing more harm than good? In other words: should this case of freedom of speech be restricted in order to protect other rights? (we’ve seen before how human rights can be limited when they come into conflict with other human rights). Which other rights could possibly be harmed by this exercise of free speech? One could say the right to privacy of the offenders (it’s not because you’re a convicted criminal that you automatically lose your right t privacy). But that’s not obvious. Someone’s address and criminal record aren’t private information. So registries of sex offenders aren’t, by definition, violations of the right to privacy. Hence, the right to free speech of publishers of such registries can’t be limited because of the right to privacy of the offenders.

But there are other reasons why the rights of those publishers can be limited. Registries can (and did) lead to

• harassment of offenders, violent attacks and even murder
• ostracism, including their family members and children (some registries even have button to print a mugshot that can be posted on the offenders’ doors)
• violations of their right to freely choose a residence: they are either chased away, or legally prohibited from living near certain places (schools, playgrounds…); sometimes these prohibitions are so restrictive that people are forced to be homeless (in Miami, exclusion zones have created a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge)
• violations of the right to work: people whose names are in registries are often fired from their jobs or have difficulties finding a job.

These are obviously rights violations that are serious enough to at least make us consider whether the right to free speech of the publishers of registries should be maintained.

And even the right to privacy can become a problem. As noted, addresses and criminal records aren’t private. However, many registries contain a lot of “noise” – people who do not pose any threat (some U.S. states requires registration of people who have visited prostitutes, who have had consensual sex as teenagers etc.). Not only does this label harmless people as “predators”, with often devastating consequences for them. Another result of this noise is that the registries become useless. As a consequence, those who defend the registries ask for more information to be included so that they can judge which “predator” is a real one:

I agree that a man who exposes himself to a woman may not pose the same danger as a convicted child-molester or rapist. All represent a threat, however, so the solution is thus not less information but more detailed information. Give me the facts about the offence and let me decide the level of risk to me and my family. As the parent of two young children I would like to know who my neighbour is going to be before I buy that new home. Adrian Kendall

Taken to its logical extreme, such a view will defend putting everything “bad” about everyone in a super-register. 1984 all over again. Perhaps registries could be used on a need-to-know basis only.

PS: there’s apparently also an iPhone app for this:

More posts in this series.

Types of Human Rights Violations (2): Self-Inflicted Human Rights Violations

(source)

We usually think of human rights violations as a harm inflicted by one person on another, by the state on some of its citizens, by companies on citizens etc. And that’s indeed the natural way to think of them. But there is also something we can call self-inflicted human rights violations (although I didn’t find anything about it on the internet; using Google before I posted this, I got a “No results found for ‘self-inflicted human rights violations’” message).

Self-inflicted human rights violations can be classified into different subgroups: involuntary self-inflicted human rights violations, voluntary ones, mixed cases or unclear cases, cases similar to risk taking, cases involving individual and their rights, and cases involving groups and the rights of their members.

Involuntary self-inflicted human rights violations

Some people make mistakes, or act in a self-destructive way or in a way that causes involuntary harm to themselves. For example, while poverty has many causes, some people are poor because of their own actions or omissions. Hence they violate their own right to a certain living standard (art. 25 of the Universal Declaration). Other people act in such a way that they make it very hard on themselves to find a job, violating their own right to work.

Voluntary self-inflicted human rights violations

Some people just decide to give up some of their rights voluntarily. They may decide that these rights are not important, or less important than something else, e.g. their religion or culture. Some examples: the participants in certain reality TV shows such as Big Brother, forfeiting their right to privacy; people choosing euthanasia or (assisted) suicide; people choosing to be unemployed etc. As long as these people don’t cause harm to anyone else, it’s difficult to see how one can disapprove of them. After all, it’s their life and their rights, so they alone can decide what to do with them.

Between voluntary and involuntary

It starts to become difficult when the involuntary masquerades as the voluntary. And there are indeed many cases that are mixed or where it’s not clear if we’re dealing with voluntary or involuntary self-inflicted rights violations. Take the school drop-out for example. At first sight, one can say that someone who decides not to finish school takes a voluntary decision to do so, and that we can’t label this an involuntary self-inflicted violation of the right to education. However, is such a choice really voluntary? Remember we’re often dealing with children in these cases. Voluntary means that there is a choice. And a choice implies knowledge of alternatives, as well as knowledge of the different consequences of different choices. Without these two types of knowledge, we can hardly say that there is a choice. This knowledge assumes that there has been education, and hence that we are dealing with an educated grown-up, not a teenage drop-out.

Another example: Muslim girls or women who voluntarily accept the restrictions imposed on their gender by their religion, hence violating their own right to equal treatment and non-discrimination. Again, no problem if it’s really voluntary. But is it? Didn’t their education and social environment condition them in believing that a certain interpretation of their religion is more important than their human rights? Possibly so.

Risk

I talked about risk and human rights before, albeit in another context. Risk is relevant here because it can lead to self-inflicted human rights violations. People who do not voluntarily violate their own rights, or who don’t make mistakes that cause violations of their own rights, may nevertheless act in such a way that they take a conscious risk that their actions will lead to violations of their own rights. Take the criminal for instance. He takes the risk that his actions will cause him to end up in prison, in which case he has violated his own right to free movement, and possibly other rights as well.

Such a risk is also on the borderline between voluntary and involuntary. If you take a risk, it has to do with risking certain consequences you want to avoid. You don’t want these consequences, so if they occur the situation can be said to be involuntary. On the other hand, the fact that you take the risk of these consequences occurring, indicates some level of acceptance of these consequences, but not full acceptance (otherwise it would be silly to speak about a “risk”). And acceptance equals voluntary. To take the same example: the convicted criminal did not enter prison voluntarily, but the fact that he took the risk of ending up in prison indicates that his predicament is to some extent voluntary. He could also not have taken the risk.

The rights of group members rather than individuals

There’s a difference between individuals giving up or violating their own rights, and groups doing the same for their members. Take the example of the Roma minorities in parts of Europe. Many of the Roma parents don’t register their children at birth. Without a birth certificate, it’s hard to receive benefits or access to schools. When girls reach the age of 14 or 15, they are taken out of school and they enter into arranged marriages. Such actions cause serious harm to children’s education, and are a major cause of the continuing poverty of many Roma communities.

Crime and Human Rights (4): California’s Prison Disgrace

In this undated photo released by the California Department of Corrections, inmates sit in crowded conditions at California State Prison, Los Angeles (AP Photo/California Department of Corrections)

(source)

California’s archipelago of 33 prisons houses more than 170,000 inmates, nearly twice the number it was designed to safely hold. Almost all of its facilities are bursting at the seams: More than 16,000 prisoners sleep on what are known as “ugly beds” — extra bunks stuffed into cells, gyms, dayrooms, and hallways. [Governor Arnold] Schwarzenegger has referred to the system as a “powder keg.”

Even as Schwarzenegger has promised reform, the corrections budget has exploded during his term, from $4.7 billion in fiscal 2004 to nearly $10 billion in fiscal 2007, or about $49,000 for each adult inmate.

For more than three decades, California has been trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle where putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has become the answer to every new crime to capture the public’s attention — from drug dealing and gangbanging to tragic child abductions. Spurred on by a powerful prison guards’ union and politicians afraid of looking soft on crime, corrections has become a bottomless pit, where countless lives and dollars disappear year after year. And now that it has metastasized to the point where even a tough-guy governor and the guards agree that the prisons must be downsized or else (see “When Prison Guards Go Soft”), every attempt at change seems stymied by inertia. The sheer size of the system has become the biggest obstacle to finding alternatives to warehousing criminals without preparing them for anything more than another cycle of incarceration. James Sterngold (source)

And California may be the worst U.S. state in terms of prison-overcrowding, but not in terms of incarceration rates:

per capita incarceration rates by US state

(source)

The U.S. as a whole is an outlier in international comparisons, for reasons explained here.

(source)

More on prison conditions and populations in the U.S. is here.

Political Artist (31): Luba Lukova

(source)

More on privacy.

Satellite Evidence of Human Rights Violations (5): Why Do We Need It?

USHMM, crisis in Darfur interactive map of satellite images

(source, you can access this map here)

If the previous posts in this series weren’t convincing enough, here’s a short overview of some of the reasons why we need satellite evidence of human rights violations:

• Sometimes there’s no other way to gather information about human rights violations. Traditional means of reporting violations – such as field work, interviews, journalistic reporting etc. – may be unavailable, for example because there’s a war going on, or because the government doesn’t let anyone in.
• Satellite images can help to corroborate otherwise doubtful or contested information common from other sources. All sources put together create a compelling narrative.
• Images speak louder than words. Especially satellite images, which go beyond the small scale and can show the often widespread impact of rights violations. Such images can provoke activism.
• Traditional images can always be discredited by governments. It’s easy to claim that these images highlight isolated cases and that the situation isn’t as bad as some make it out to be. Satellite images can uncover the systematic nature of many rights violations.
• Satellite images can also prevent rights violations. For example, during the genocide in Rwanda, people were herded together before they were massacred. (One can assume that this type of behavior isn’t limited to the Rwandan genocide). When satellite images detect this herding, troops which are already in the country can react and intervene. Or, it can be a signal for outside troops to come into the country. (Unfortunately, in Rwanda, satellite images were not used).
• Very high-tech satellites, for example sub-0.5 meter spatial resolution, would allow identification of people, victims and perpetrators, and estimation of the sizes of populations (e.g. refugees). This, however, raises the possibility of abuse and invasion of privacy.

Unfortunately, many of this is still theory. Governments, which normally operate the satellite systems and own the images, aren’t always willing to use their tools and information for the protection of human rights.

Religion and Human Rights (18): Euthanasia

(source, cartoon by John Trever)

People own their own body. Their body is part of their private property. It is something that is theirs; it is the thing par excellence that is their own. It is not common to several people and it cannot be given away. It cannot even be shared or communicated. It is the most private thing there is. Owning your body means that you are the master of it. Other people have no say in the use of your body; they should not use it, hurt it or force you to use it in a certain way. This underpins the security rights such as the right to life, the right to bodily integrity, and the prohibition of torture and slavery. It also implies the right to self-determination and therefore the right to die.

More on euthanasia here and here.

Migration and Human Rights (19): The U.S. Wages War on Illegal Immigration, and Kills the Fourth Amendment

(forgot where I got this from; sorry)

OK, maybe not kill, but it felt good writing it. In the U.S., about 100 seven-member Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams conduct regular raids across the country in search of illegal immigrants. Normally, they are supposed to look for fugitive illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, but it’s not unusual that they go about and round up undocumented workers who haven’t committed a crime. Illegal immigration isn’t a violation of criminal law; it’s a violation of civil law.

These teams make house calls before dawn. They have guns although they are supposed to “knock and talk” their way into a home. In reality, they often force their way in. And instead of search warrants issued by a judge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have administrative warrants issued by their superiors.

All this flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment which protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and demands that police have warrants issued by independent courts and based on “probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” (see here). The Fourth Amendment applies to illegal immigrants as it does to U.S. citizens.

The Gates affair may have captured the public’s imagination, but it’s small beer (sorry for the pun) compared to what illegal immigrants – or those mistaken for one – have to put up with.

More on privacy, arbitrary arrest and illegal immigration.

Human Rights Cartoon (56): Abortion

(source)

As the topic of abortion is back in the news, with the horrible killing of – indeed, terrorist attack on – Dr. Tiller*, maybe it’s useful to link back to one of my older posts on abortion (where I also explain why I believe this is a human rights issue). My position is basically anti-abortion, but I do regret the disdain of many pro-lifers for the rights of the mother. They don’t seem to understand that the rights of the mother should sometimes take precedence (for example when the health or the life of the mother are at risk) and that a tragic choice between mother and fetus should sometimes be decided in favor of the mother. They prefer the simplicity of moral idealism and ignore the tragic nature of a lot of morality in real life.

And neither do they seem to care about the consequences of criminalization of abortion. This quote says it well, I think:

When imagining a future abortion black market and the inherent dangers such a market would introduce to mothers and fetuses alike, I find myself worrying. I worry that it might make matters worse. The life of the mother is sacred, too, and in a black market the most desperate mothers – and especially the poor and the young mothers – would be at a much higher risk then they are now. This hardly seems just. E.D. Kain

We can see what this means in countries where abortion is illegal:

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus…

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. (source)

The rights of the mother that have to show up in the equation aren’t necessarily limited to health and survival. The right to self-determination of the mother, or her right to decide without government interference what to do with her own body, is perhaps, in some cases, also important enough to override the right to life of the unborn child.

More on abortion and maternal mortality.

* I know I’m late with this, although I did post some timely pieces about this incident here and here.

Political T-Shirt (8): CCTV

(source, where you can actually buy this T)

More on CCTV.

Terrorism and Human Rights (19): The War on Terror and the Right to Privacy

war on terror and privacy Ian Waldie Getty Images

(source)

Just a few more thoughts as a follow-up from this post, this one, and this one. During an apparently never-ending war on terror (what could be the end of such a war?), people are quick to believe their “liberal” governments when they tell them that a bit less privacy is a cheap price to pay for more physical security.

However, many of those governments, because they claim to be “liberal” and “democratic”, feel uneasy about this. After all, if rights are tradeable like this, if they depend on the circumstance and should be surrendered when the circumstances become more difficult, what is left of them? They become a luxury for good times, rather than a safeguard in bad times. (Another sign of this is the way in which the war on terror is eating away at other rights as well, e.g. the right not to be tortured; but let’s stick to the right to privacy here).

Because of this unease, governments claim that the right to privacy isn’t really being sacrificed. ”If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about”. It’s only the terrorists whose right to privacy is being limited. But in the meantime

• DNA databases are being established for almost entire populations
• CCTV is omnipresent
• “data mining” is used extensively (after all, how can you determine if someone is a terrorist if you haven’t first violated his or her right to privacy?)
• etc.

I don’t mean to imply that rights such as the right to privacy are absolute or that there can never be a good reason to limit one right for the sake of another. On the contrary. But limiting rights can only be done when there is a “clear and present danger” for other rights or for the rights of others. A vague and everlasting “war on terror” provokes limits on rights when there’s no such danger. Limiting rights becomes the normal MO of governments keen to prevent such a danger from ever occurring. And that’s unacceptable. Obviously, terrorism is a danger, but governments can only limit rights in order to prevent it when the danger is clear and present, and imminent. A general and vague fear of terrorism will not do.

More on the war on terror. More on privacy.

Political Graffiti (51): Looting

(source)

More on private property. More on looting.

Political T-Shirt (7): CCTV

(source, where you can actually buy this t-shirt)

More on CCTV.