Forcible Sterilization of Indigenous Women

Forcible Sterilization of Indigenous Women: One More Act of Genocide

In November 2018 it was reported that a group of Indigenous women in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan had brought a class-action suit against the Saskatoon Health Authority, the provincial and federal governments, and some medical professionals. These women complained that they had been forcibly sterilized, or tricked into giving consent for sterilization when they were under stress or heavily drugged. They claimed that doctors did this over several decades, as late as the 2000s.

Saskatoon

The UN Committee on Torture has become interested in this suit, recommending in late 2018 that the Canadian government investigate all allegations of enforced sterilization and adopt legislation criminalizing it. Indigenous activists want a new law specifically outlawing forced sterilization, but the federal government argues it’s already illegal.

Canada doesn’t have a good history with regard to forced sterilization. The provinces of Albert and British Columbia forcibly sterilized people from the 1930s to the 1970s. Authorities were responding to the eugenics movement, popular among many influential Canadians. Eugenicists wanted to keep the Canadian “race” pure by sterilizing “unfit” people, which usually meant poor people, immigrants, and people with disabilities. Indigenous peoples were at disproportionate risk of sterilization. During the last few years of forcible sterilization in Alberta, Indigenous and Metis people constituted 2.5 per cent of the population but twenty-five per cent of the people sterilized.

Forced sterilizations are an aspect of genocide. We tend to think of genocide as the mass, deliberate murder of large numbers of people. But when the United Nations formulated its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide  in 1948, it defined five ways genocide could be committed.

Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide Convention is mass murder. The others are “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group,” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”  

Forced sterilization is a means to impose measures to prevent births. The “Sixties Scoop” (in the 1960s) removing thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities, ostensibly to protect the children from abusive situations, is an example of forcibly transferring children from one group to another.

Forcible deportations are a way to deliberately inflict conditions calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction. Canada deported several indigenous groups in the far north from their homelands to various other locations, sometimes without any food or shelter, forcing them to live “off the land” in conditions so difficult as to cause many deaths from starvation, exposure and disease. (See my post of June 18, 2018: “Genocide in the Far North: Canada 1950”) Any removal of Indigenous people anywhere in the country that resulted in a significant number of deaths might be considered genocide by deportation. 

The term genocide was originally coined in 1944 by a Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin wanted to include what we now call cultural genocide in the definition. He wasn’t thinking about Indigenous peoples; he was thinking of the cultural genocide of ethnic groups such as Estonians by the Nazis. He thought destruction of works of culture that represented “the genius” of a group should be a crime called vandalism, and destruction of a religious or national collectivity should be a crime called barbarism.

Although Lemkin lobbied hard for the UN to accept his definition, in the end it didn’t. If it had, we could argue that the establishment of residential schools, with their explicit policies of depriving Indigenous children of their languages, customs and cultures--as well as removing them from their communities--was an aspect of genocide, the barbarism of destroying a collectivity. We use the term cultural genocide as a descriptive term, but it isn’t part of the UN’s legal definition.

Legally speaking, moreover, the UN definition requires proof of intent to commit genocide. So if Canadian authorities didn’t intend that Indigenous women should be sterilized: if those sterilizations were the accumulated, taken-for-granted practice of many doctors over many decades, then legally, Canada wasn’t committing genocide by preventing births. Similarly, if there was no intent to destroy a community by forcibly transferring children, then the Sixties Scoop wasn’t genocide. And if there was no intent to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about peoples’ physical destruction by deporting Indigenous peoples, then Canada wasn’t committing genocide.

But as citizens, we might want to consider our moral responsibility as well as governments’ legal responsibilities. If we add up all the ways that our governments have oppressed Indigenous peoples over the centuries, then those of us who are not Indigenous bear a weighty burden, to remedy practices that in effect, if not in intent, constituted genocide.

70 Years of International Human Rights

70 Years of International Human Rights

December 10, 2018 is the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly. Since then an enormous body of international human rights laws has been developed.

Some people think that human rights should not be universal.

Some critics believe that human rights are an example of Western cultural imperialism. They claim that non-Western countries did not participate in drafting the Universal Declaration. Yet non-Western countries have been involved since the earliest stages in drawing up human rights documents. This is so even if, like Western countries, they are quite hypocritical when it comes to applying the laws they agree to.

Other critics argue that human rights promote selfish individualism. Instead of caring for the family or community, people only care for their own rights. But in countries like Canada where human rights are by and large respected, it’s only because citizens do have a sense of community and care for each other. Housing advocates, food bank workers, and millions of volunteers help make human rights “work” on the ground.

Yet other commentators claim that as China and other non-democratic countries become more powerful, human rights will be less important internationally. It is true that such countries will work to undermine many human rights, at home and at the UN. But that makes human rights more relevant, not less. We all need protection against abusive governments.

Human rights are still relevant, and new rights are evolving. 

One recent sign of progress is in LGBT rights. This topic is difficult to discuss internationally, because some African and Middle Eastern countries are still very homophobic, as are some religious groups, in the Western world and elsewhere. We don’t yet have an international declaration on LGBT rights, but the UN is paying more attention to them.

In the last twenty years, much attention has been paid to “collective” human rights. These are rights than belong to groups of people and that one individual can’t exercise if others can’t also exercise them.

Indigenous rights are collective rights. Indigenous peoples cannot live together as collectivities if their ways of life, languages, religions, cultures, and land bases are threatened. In 2007 the UN passed UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada voted against the Declaration, but later reversed its position. By 2016 the government declared its full support for UNDRIP.

A collective right that affects everyone everywhere is the right to a clean and healthy environment. This includes the right to protection against climate changes that undermine our livelihoods and well-being.   

Another collective right is the right to peace. Viewed narrowly, this is the right not to live in a state of war. In 2018, many people still live in war-torn countries, especially in the Middle East and Africa. Others, as in Ukraine, live in fear of war. And we all live in fear of nuclear war.

Both climate change and war create huge refugee populations. By 2050, it’s thought, there will be 200 million “climate refugees” fleeing rising sea levels. Add to that the refugees who are fleeing large-scale crime, like the Central American migrant caravan currently trying to get into the US.

The UN recently agreed on a Global Compact for Migration, setting out voluntary principles meant to save lives and ensure successful migrant integration into new countries without unduly burdening social infrastructure such as health care. But the real problem is to ensure people don’t have to leave home at all.

One way to ensure more people stay at home is by developing their economies. The right to development is a collective right. Development activists usually try to reduce both poverty and inequality. There’s been an enormous reduction in world poverty over the last 25 years, even as inequality has been growing in most countries. This means it’s easier to fulfill what is known as economic human rights, such as rights to health, education, and housing. Very little of this change results from foreign aid; most is a result of the spread of market economies.

Many people in many countries have benefited from globalization, though others, such as industrial workers in Canada and the US, have lost their jobs. This is one of the reasons for the spread of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner sentiments in the Western world. Unless we can figure out a way to control these sentiments and reduce the need for people to flee their own countries because of war, crime, and climate change, we are facing an uneasy human rights future.

The End of the Cognitive Empire by Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Book Note

Note: This is a revised version of an academic book review that will be published in Human Rights Quarterly: I am including it on my blog with the permission of Bert Lockwood, HRQ’s Editor. I’ve removed footnotes, but can supply the footnoted version to readers on request; email me at hassmann@wlu.ca .

This volume is an exemplar of a new kind of academic literature that denigrates the universality of human rights, seen by the author as an imperialist concept that denies the particularity of suffering in the South. Santos is a sociologist of epistemology, the science of knowledge, who relies on a conceptual opposition of the “South” and its systems of epistemologies, to the “North” or “West” (used interchangeably). This opposition is a metaphor for two kinds of thinking; the North rational, scientific, objective, aggregative, globalizing and imperialist, committing epistemicide on the emotional, corporeal, subjective, particularist, local, and resistant epistemologies of the South. Santos’ purpose is to “de-monumentalize” the North’s bloodless and emotionless system of scientific knowledge, compared to “knowledges” from the South. An “abyssal line,” he claims, separates the two areas.

Santos does not explain what “knowledges” means; perhaps scholars familiar with the critical literature on epistemology do not need such instruction. It appears that whatever a Southern individual might think or claim to know is an epistemology or “knowledge” in itself. Thus people from the South have multiple, indeed millions, of knowledges while the North--confined as it is to reason-based thinking epitomized by well-known philosophers and (social) scientists--is confined to one ”knowledge.”

Nor does Santos explain what exactly an “abyssal line” means. It appears to apply to the Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups with whom he has worked in the actual geographical South, and whose situation one might readily agree is truly abyssal. Otherwise, the line seems to be wherever Santos puts it. The North enforces the line via the trilogy of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, although Santos concedes that some “satellite versions” of these phenomena sometimes exist in the South. Throughout, Santos refers to this trilogy in rote fashion, without analyzing whether their linkages are necessary or merely contingent.

It is difficult to argue against the empirical accuracy of Santos’ claims, because he specifically states that to him, the North and the South are not geographical regions. They appear, rather, to be mindsets. Santos’ North is rooted in Enlightenment philosophers’ stress on reason over emotion, on abstraction over concrete experience. His South is composed of people who struggle against oppression, who rely on experiences and emotions. If Santos approves of an epistemology or sociology, then it is Southern; if not, it is Northern. Nevertheless, his frequent references to Northern, Western, or Eurocentric ways of thinking or conducting research suggest that his usages of these terms are more than mere metaphors.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Santos posits a false opposition, between Northern thinkers and scientists and Southern people(s) engaged in struggle. His empirical references for evidence about Northern ways of thinking are the philosophers he cites in his footnotes. But very few real people in the geographical North actually read the philosophers that Santos claims created the modernist, Northern mindset. Most Northern individuals live their lives much as individuals in the South do, thinking with their emotions and feelings, celebrating joyously on some occasions; their reasoning is as much “warmed up” (Santos’ conception of corazonar) by experience and emotions as the reasoning of people living in the South. They live their knowledge much as Southerners do, albeit usually in much more comfortable circumstances.

Nor is it true that Northern philosophers created their ideas purely from whole cloth, unmindful of the corporeality of people’s lived experiences within their own bodies, a mindfulness that Santos claims is confined to the knowledges of the South. Philosophers of the past, like Northern human rights scholars and activists today, are well aware of the corporeality of victims of human rights abuses. That is why they oppose torture, rape, and murder, and why they promote economic human rights such as shelter, food, and health care, which protect the vulnerable body. According to Santos, though, these rights are irrelevant to people living below the abyssal line.

The North, says Santos, has neglected what he calls the “sociology of absences….” and the “sociology of emergences. This is not so: Northern sociologists have been dealing with absences for fifty years, since feminist scholars first began to note the absence of gender analysis. There has also been much attention to previous exclusions of race, indigeneity, and sexual orientation and identity from sociology and epistemology. Northern critical theorists of fifty years ago were not unaware of Fanon, Nkrumah, Freire, or many other Southern theorists/activists whose thought Santos analyses.

Santos particularly admires Gandhi, especially his synthetic approach to “knowledges” from the North and the South, a capacity for intercultural translation that Santos appears to believe is absent in the North. Yes despite his stress on the sociology of absences, Santos himself relegates to a footnote what he considers to have been Gandhi’s “complex” relations with the struggles of Dalits and the Adivasi (tribal) people.

And Santos does not mention at all Gandhi’s relations to women. Recent research (available since at least 2012) has confirmed that Gandhi slept naked with naked women, including his own grand-niece, in an attempt to show that he could resist sexual temptation. This peculiar practice was well-known during his lifetime but knowledge of it was suppressed after his death. This posthumous #MeToo information does not mean that Gandhi’s teachings are no longer relevant. But if an author purports to be concerned with patriarchy, then surely he should acknowledge his own sociological “absence” in ignoring the sexually exploitative, indeed incestuous, activities of one of his own epistemic heroes.

What does this book have to say to human rights scholars who are not concerned with the epistemology or sociology of knowledge? Not much. Santos rejects human rights and democracy for the South, claiming that such concepts were “developed by dominant social groups to reproduce domination.” They are useful concepts for “nonabyssal exclusions” in the North, he says, but they have no bearing elsewhere. It is difficult to understand why. Perhaps people engaged in struggle- especially the Indigenous and Afro-descendants communities among whom Santos himself has conducted research and for whom he has much sympathy—are so committed that they are willing to give up their lives, thus have no use for international laws or practices that might protect them from torture or arbitrary execution.

Santos also rejects Northern-based (if not all) NGOs, perhaps because they are committed to rational planning and other aspects of modernism. He views them as agents of capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal domination, including a scathing paragraph listing the many failings of which some NGOs have been accused.

Santos’ recommendations for what he calls “rearguard” as opposed to “vanguard” intellectuals might have some bearing on some types of “post-abyssal” research; that is, by  researchers who wish to cross the abyssal line. Anthropologists and some sociologists studying human rights will no doubt agree that if they can live with and among the people they study and see the world through their eyes, they will be less guilty of “extractivist” research than if they merely visit a society, ask questions, and then disappear. Santos argues for long, discursive interviewing styles in which those being interviewed can raise whatever topics they wish, tell stories, and express their emotions to the researcher, as in his own research project on Voices of the World. Such a style of interviewing has been common in sociology for decades; it is known as open-ended, unstructured interviewing.   

If one accepts Santos’ theoretical premises, moreover, then that might lead one to conduct a new kind of human rights research, based in praxis, the unity of theory and action. The only legitimate researchers, according to Santos, are those who participate directly in struggle with the people about whom they are learning. Research in these conditions is co-creation of knowledge; there are no objects of research, only subjects; the objective is “knowing-with,” not “knowing-about.” In Canada, there have been lively discussions of the ethics of conducting research among Indigenous communities without their cooperation and input, for at least twenty years, reflecting precisely these concerns about scholarly extractivism. Researchers in the geographical North are as capable of self-reflexivity as researchers in the geographical South, but Santos might argue that those capable of self-reflexivity are therefore, by definition, part of his metaphorical South.

The type of research that Santos advocates is very different from that conducted by human rights lawyers for the purpose of building legal cases. In such circumstances, lawyers may have to ask questions that might shed light on abuses that violate international law, at the expense of the larger stories that victims might wish to tell. And not all struggles are confined to the local level. Some research requires aggregation, large-scale surveys, and statistical sophistication; statistics are not merely an example of Northern modernist empiricism. The method depends in part on the objective, and researchers can assist those struggling against oppression (but not, according to Santos, for their human rights) even if they are not embedded in the day-to-day lives of people of the South.

Santos’ personal commitment to the struggling communities of both the metaphorical and the geographical South is obvious and admirable, but he has created a false opposition of regions, mindsets, and epistemologies. Within his limited dichotomies, there are some ideas that human rights scholars and activists might find worth pondering. Unfortunately, the book is characterized by verbose, obscure and almost impenetrable language, reducing its value to those who do not devote their time to debates on the sociology of knowledge.

Free Speech in an Age of Massacres

Free Speech in an Age of Massacres

A few months ago I read Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton. Rushdie is the British author of Indian Muslim background against whom Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa in 1989, calling for his death. In the Ayatollah’s view, Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, blasphemed Islam. Rushdie went into hiding, adopting the name Joseph Anton, after Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. He survived, but several of his translators and editors worldwide were assassinated or injured.

One thing that shocked me reading this memoir was that more than one radical British Muslim had appeared on television supporting the death threat, saying that Rushdie should be killed. I was shocked that these individuals were not arrested for inciting violence. It seemed to me that when one British citizen publicly called for the murder of another British citizen, he should have been held to account. Perhaps the British authorities were afraid that if these individuals were arrested, protests would then worsen among segments of the British Muslim community.

I am equally shocked that it now seems fine for American citizens to call for other American citizens to be murdered. At Trump rallies in the last few weeks, crowds have yelled “shoot her” when Trump mentioned Nancy Pelosi, soon to be Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives. They also yelled “shoot her” when Trump mentioned Maxine Waters, a long-standing Congresswoman from California. This threat is much more serious, since Waters is an African-American. She was one of the targets of bombs that a Trump supporter sent to several prominent Democrats.

Trump is normalizing murders of African-Americans. Anyone who yells, “shoot her” (murder her) in a public place should be arrested and charged. This is more than hate speech. 

The (UN) International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1969, Article 4) outlaws hate speech.  Hate speech is illegal in Canada, though the boundaries of what constitutes it are narrow. I am not a free speech absolutist: I think hate speech should be outlawed. We can’t pretend that all “bad speech” can be overcome or neutralized by “good speech.” We’re in a new world now. Lies, prejudice, and incitement to violence spread easily on the Internet, as much it seems on legitimate Internet sites as in the dark web.

This is why at the end of October 2018 there was much discussion in the Canadian press about whether the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto should have hosted a debate between David Frum, a Republican critic of Trump, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor and an advocate and organizer of right-wing populism in North America and Europe. The organizers of the debate said it was in the public interest to expose Bannon’s view directly to them. Critics argued he should not receive a platform. I was torn, though if the Munk School paid Bannon for his appearance, then I found that extremely unpalatable, as it would help him to promote his political agenda. 

Nevertheless, I worry about the likelihood that hate speech laws will be used to stymie legitimate speech. Last week (Nov. 8, 2018) I posted a blog about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apology to Canada’s Jewish community for our government’s anti-Semitic policies during WWII. In this apology, he denounced “BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions]-related intimidation” of Jewish students in Canada who, he said, were made to feel “unwelcome and uncomfortable on some of our college and university campuses.”

The Prime Minister rightly denounced anti-Semitism on campus by some BDS activists, without suggesting that the BDS movement as a whole is illegitimate. But this may not have been enough for some supporters of Israel, who think that the entire BDS movement is anti-Semitic and that its criticism of the state of Israel are forms of anti-Semitic hate speech that should be outlawed.

 And that’s the danger of hate speech laws. Incitement to violence is clear and should be stopped. Some kinds of hate speech, we also know, are calls to genocide, especially dehumanizing rhetoric that calls future victim groups vermin, as in Nazi Germany, or cockroaches, as in Rwanda in 1994. Whether incitement to genocide or to massacres of some citizens by others, as happened in Canada on January 29, 2017 against Muslims in Quebec City, and now happens with alarming frequency against African-Americans in the US, such speech should be penalized. So should speech and social media posts suggesting that Muslims should massacre non-Muslims for criticizing Islam or merely as acts of vengeance (see my blog on the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, January 9, 2015).

On the other hand, it is legitimate for Canadian citizens to criticize the policies of a foreign state, even if many Canadians are emotionally attached to that state for reasons of religion or ethnicity. Sometime one person’s hate speech is another’s free speech: therein lies the rub. I wish I could think of a suggestion as to how to solve this problem.

Trudeau apologizes to Canada's Jewish Community

Trudeau Apologizes to Canada’s Jewish Community

(please note: I published a shortened version of this blog in The Hamilton Spectator, November 10, 2018, p. A16)

Yesterday, (November 7, 2018) Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an apology in Parliament to Canada’s Jewish community for an event that occurred almost 80 years ago. 

Justin Trudeau

 In June 1939, Canada refused landing rights to the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 907 German Jewish refugees. The ship had already been turned back from Cuba and the United States. Eventually it returned to Europe, where the refugees were dispersed among Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. The latter three countries were later over-run by the Nazis, resulting in the deaths of 254 St. Louis passengers. Here’s the link to the video of the apology.

https://www.pscp.tv/w/1dRJZOBXqZdxB?fbclid=IwAR19ztgMw3sFRS_AYDLQvRJxK9z9Z2eZ3Y77SNYONL-sOtGY54QcrjebLx0

Passengers embarking on the St. Louis in Hamburg

 Trudeau’s apology was very well-crafted, presumably with input from leaders of Canada’s Jewish community. The Prime Minister set out the context of Canada’s past anti-Semitic policies very clearly. He acknowledged they had helped to facilitate the extermination of European Jews, since Hitler could see that despite their rhetorical denunciations, the future Allied countries did not want to help the Jews whom he was persecuting. 

Trudeau also explained the extent of anti-Semitism in Canada before and after WWII.  He acknowledged that by turning away the St. Louis’ passengers, as well as countless other Jews who tried and failed to find sanctuary in Canada, the country had deprived itself of much useful expertise and many productive citizens. He acknowledged the Jewish community’s contributions to Canada, including its commitment to charitable endeavors (an important statement, given anti-Semites’ belief that “Jews only help themselves.”) His delivery was sober, articulate and sincere. As someone who has studied official apologies as part of her academic career, I could not have asked for anything better.

I didn’t expect when I heard the apology that part of it would be, in effect, to me. The Prime Minister apologized for/to the “7000 Jewish prisoners of war” who, he said, were held in Canada with the very people who had persecuted them. He was referring not to POWs but to internees, Jews from enemy countries (Germany, Austria, and Hungary) who had been in Britain when the war began and were interned under the Enemy Aliens Act until they could be sorted out.  Once that had been done, many of the teenaged boys and younger men were sent to camps in Canada and Australia; some were sent on the same ships as Nazi POWs and some were held—at least initially—in the same camps as Nazi POWs. (My source for this is Eric Koch’s book, Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder, published in 1980 by Methuen).

One of those 7000 Jews (or in his case, “half’-Jew”) was my own late father, who was sent to Canada and held in a camp near Sherbrooke, Quebec, from which he must have been released by late 1941, as he married my mother in Scotland in early 1942. I don’t think he would have been pleased to have been called a prisoner of war by the Prime Minister, such a designation implying that he had fought for an enemy country.  He hadn’t: he was a refugee who after his internment joined the British army.

I wonder as well whether father would have wanted or accepted this apology, had it been offered before he died in 1998. My own opinion, as a descendant to whom the apology was also offered, is that I am grateful for the Prime Minister’s acknowledgement that anti-Semitism was rife in Canada before, during and after the war. I’m also grateful that he acknowledges the extent of anti-Semitism now and promised to intensify efforts through the  Security Infrastructure Program to protect places of worship (not only Jewish: mosques and Hindu Temples, for example, clearly need more protection after the mass shooting in a Quebec City mosque on January 29, 2017 and the torching of a Hindu Temple in my own city of Hamilton in 2001). (On the latter, see my blog entry: https://rhodahassmann.blogspot.com/2014/10/terrorism-vs-mischief-canadas-double.html )

Trudeau also referred to the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel and its apparent harassment of Jewish students on Canadian university campuses. The BDS movement is a legitimate protest against the Israeli government’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza, but it is not legitimate if it targets Jews as Jews. If Jewish students are harassed by activists in that group purely because they are Jewish, then that is anti-Semitism. I would not, for example, harass a Canadian Muslim to protest the actions of the Saudi government in Yemen and against its own citizens. Nor would I harass a Canadian Muslim of Pakistani descent to protest Pakistan’s discrimination against Christians.

The question might arise whether, eighty years after the event, Prime Minister Trudeau’s apology to the Canadian Jewish community actually matters. It does. It matters to some survivors of the St. Louis (one is still alive in Canada), and to the descendants of the St. Louis’s passengers. It may also matter to some people who were interned and their descendants.  It matters, presumably, to those members of Canada’s Jewish community who agitated for the apology. More broadly, it is an educative tool that informs all Canadians about the extent of anti-Semitism and the harm it has done and still does.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: IN DEFENSE OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

My latest book, in Defense of Universal Human Rights, is about to be released by Polity Press in the UK.  This is a short book suitable for teaching.  Some colleagues in the US and the UK have already received it.

Here is a detailed table of contents (no page numbers yet, as I have not yet received my own copy).

Introduction

Chapter 1. Universal Human Rights

Definition of Human Rights

Human Dignity

Origins of Human Rights

The International Law of Human Rights

Sovereignty versus Human Rights

 Chapter 2: Some Critical Perspectives on Human Rights

Human Rights as Western Liberalism

Abstraction versus Compassion

The Feminist Critique

Human Rights Law vs. Social Change

Critical Perspectives and Human Rights Universality

 Chapter 3: How Rights-Protective Societies Develop

Does the International Human Rights Regime Make Any Difference?

Market Economies

Civil Society and Political Action

Democracy and Political Institutions

Political Culture

Human Rights Regression

The Fragility of Human Rights

 Chapter 4: Civil and Political Rights

The Debate on Human Rights Priorities

The Strategic Value of Civil and Political Human Rights

The Intrinsic Value of Civil and Political Human Rights

The Right to Have Rights

Universal or Particular?

 Chapter 5: Culture and Community

Community and Responsibility

Community and Culture

Cultural Clashes

Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom of Religion

Social Collectivities: Indigenous Rights

The Necessity for Intra-Cultural Debates on Human Rights

 Chapter 6: Economic and Social Human Rights

Economic and Social Human Rights

Critiques of Economic and Social Human Rights

Globalization, Capitalism and Economic Human Rights

Inequality

Development Models and the Intersection of Human Rights

Cherry-Picking Human Rights

 Chapter 7: Collective Human Rights

Definition

Self-Determination

The Right to Development

Environmental Rights

The Right to Peace

Civil and Political Rights as the Basis for Collective Rights

Chapter 8: Western (Ir)responsibility for Human Rights in the Global South

International Justice

International Trade

Foreign Aid

Human Rights Non-Governmental Organizations

Human Rights in Foreign Policy

The Urgent Need for Universal Human Rights

Here is the blurb on the back cover.'

Should African and Muslim-majority countries be obliged to protect LGBT rights, even though they claim such rights violate their cultures?  Should Western-based corporations be held liable if their security guards kill union activists in Latin America?

Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann answers yes to both these questions.  She vigorously defends universal human rights, arguing that the entire range of rights is necessary for all individuals everywhere.  She especially defends civil and political rights such as the rights not to be tortured and the rights to vote, which are often so taken for granted as to be neglected. 

Howard-Hassmann grounds her defense of universality in her conception of human dignity, which she maintains must include personal autonomy, equality, respect, recognition, and material security. She argues that only social democracies can be considered fully rights-protective states. Other political systems such as communism, or minimally liberal or libertarian states, are not fully rights-protective.

Howard-Hassmann takes particular issue with scholars who argue that human rights are “Western,” quasi-imperialist impositions on states in the global South, and that the stress on individual rights undermines community and social obligation. She contends, to the contrary, that human rights support communities and can only be preserved if states and individuals observe their duties to protect human rights. Criticisms of human rights as “Western” confuse the practice of sovereignty by all states with some Western states’ hypocrisy in advocating for human rights elsewhere.

Famine in Venezuela: Update

Famine in Venezuela: Update

Note: this is an update and rewrite of my blog of May 10, 2018)

FOR A VIDEO OF THE TALK I GAVE AT TUFTS UNIVERSITY, MAY 4, 2018,. ON WHICH THIS BLOG IS BASED, SEE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgQ73lh6Kb4&t=3s 

Starvation in Venezuela

By May 2018, approximately 5,000 people per day were leaving Venezuela in search of food. (“Venezuela’s Crisis Spills Over,” New York Times International Weekly, in the Hamilton Spectator, May 5, 2018, p. 1). At this rate, 1.8 million people will have left by the end of 2018, joining 1.5 million who have already fled. This is over ten per cent of Venezuela’s population of 32 million.

The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines famine as “widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including… government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality.”  By this definition, Venezuelans may already be experiencing famine. At the very least, they are experiencing state-induced hunger.

Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela in 1999. He instituted several policies that were meant to feed poor Venezuelans, but actually made the situation worse. From 1999 to 2007 people’s living conditions improved, but food shortages started when oil prices declined. Chávez died in 2013. See my blog on Chávez’s rule, http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/03/hugo-chavez-and-right-to-food-in.html .

Chávez was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro, whose draconian policies have created massive food shortages. By 2017 malnutrition was confirmed in Venezuela, precipitating the political unrest now roiling the country. See my blogs on Maduro’s policies: http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/10/venezuela-update-food-situation-worse.html.

http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2014/03/venezuela-demonstrations-and.html http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2017/03/malnutrition-confirmed-in-venezuela.html

According to Antulio Rosales (“An Ugly New Low for the Venezuelan President,” Globe and Mail, March 12, 2018, p.A11) and Enrique Krauze (“Hell of a Fiesta,” New York Review of Books, March 8, 2018, pp. 4-7), by early 2018 more than half of all Venezuelans had lost between 19 and 24 pounds, and 90 per cent said they do not have enough money for food. The minimum monthly wage in mid-2017 bought only 12 per cent of one person’s basic food needs, even less now. Sixty per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty. Formerly dormant diseases such as malaria, diphtheria and dengue are reoccurring, while hospitals are extremely short of personnel, medicines, and the most basic equipment. Some people receive subsidized food boxes, but the contents are inconsistent and insufficient, are distributed irregularly, and are more likely to go to supporters of Maduro than others.

This shortage of food is a completely predictable consequence of the policies that both the Chávez and Maduro governments have favored over the last two decades. They destroyed the market in food by imposing control prices that resulted in underproduction when the official prices did not meet costs of production. The government expropriated farms, ranches, and even food distributors such as butchers. There’s very little if anything produced on these expropriated territories. Food is now heavily controlled by the black market and by corrupt importers (often members of the military who are also Maduro’s cronies) who sit on food at the ports to drive up the price.

At the same time political appointees, rather than competent managers, now run the state oil company. Failure to reinvest has meant that oil production has fallen drastically, so that Venezuela’s earnings of foreign exchange have diminished.

To keep all this going, the government has undermined the rule of law and the judiciary, and arrested independent trade union leaders. It has manipulated elections and is attempting to replace the legitimate elected legislature, where there are still some opposition members, with a “Constituent National Assembly” completely loyal to Maduro. Both Chávez and Maduro have ruled by decree and used arbitrary arrest, torture and even executions to maintain themselves in power. Maduro also controls the media: it is illegal now to post pictures of empty store shelves or images of desperation, supposedly because it foments hatred.

International Mechanisms to Protect Venezuelans’ Right to Food

It’s very difficult to know what to do about the situation in Venezuela. Individual citizens have hardly any recourse to outside institutions to help them in their search for food and medicine. Citizens of some states can complain about violations of their right to food to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but all that committee can do is make recommendations or “name and shame” rights-violating states. But even this doesn’t apply to Venezuela, which hasn’t ratified the necessary international treaty to permit its citizens to make individual complaints.

The US has imposed sanctions on some Venezuelan individuals, freezing their assets and banning travel to the US. It’s also prohibited financial dealings by US citizens with these sanctioned Venezuelans. Maduro replies to these measures by accusing the US of imperialism, a plausible accusation given its real history of imperialism in Central and South America.

There’s also been some regional pressure on Chávez and Maduro. The Organization of American States tried to persuade Chávez to change some of his policies, but he replied by withdrawing from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2012. Maduro has been barred from visiting some other South American countries: Peru withdrew his invitation to the 8^th Summit of the Americas for April 2018.

On Feb 8, 2018 the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which Venezuela joined in 2002, opened a preliminary investigation into alleged crimes against humanity in Venezuela, such as arbitrary detentions and torture. This followed a 2017 determination by the Organization of American States that there was evidence of such widespread crimes. The ICC Statute considers extermination via denial of food to be a crime against humanity, but the preliminary investigation did not mention this.

On May 24, 2018 the UN Security Council voted unanimously to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of war: see https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/sc13354.doc.htm .However, Venezuela is not a war-torn state, even though there is much civil conflict there now as a result of Maduro’s starvation-inducing policies.

There is no international legal mechanism to stop perfectly predictable state-induced food shortages before they happen. Nor can any legal mechanism hold entire regimes accountable, even when all or most senior government officials are complicit in the wrong-doing. All the ICC can do, if it gets that far, is try individuals, not an entire government.

Except for committing genocide or crimes against humanity, states (or the governments of those states) still have the sovereign right to violate their citizens’ human rights. They also have the sovereign right to choose whatever “development” path a state elite wants, even if that so-called development is bound to fail and result in de-development, if not outright starvation, as in Venezuela. These states’ rights are sacrosanct, and far more important to the international “community’ than the rights of starving citizens.

The Future

For the foreseeable future, Venezuelans will try to flee in their hundreds of thousands in search of food.  But they will find it increasingly difficult to do so, as both Colombia and Brazil have been cracking down on legal migration. The result is irregular migration controlled by smugglers and armed groups. Venezuelan women and girls are now trafficked across the border to satisfy the Colombian demand for sex workers. (https://www.irinnews.org/feature/2018/03/13/colombia-tightens-its-border-more-venezuelan-migrants-brave-clandestine-routes ).

Meantime, like the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burnt, Maduro continues to fiddle with the economy, arbitrarily imposing currency devaluations and insufficient wage increases, everything but permitting a free market and property rights that would encourage production and distribution of food (See “Confusion reigns as Maduro mega-devaluation roils Venezuela,” The Globe and Mail, August 20, 2019 p. B3).

On August 4, 2018 there was a drone attack on Maduro while he was giving a speech at a military parade. The question now is, whether a civil war in Venezuela will exacerbate famine even further, or whether there might be a coup by anti-Maduro factions within the military or elsewhere. If the latter, the new rulers might turn to a somewhat more rational economic policy, although they will not necessarily restore civil liberties or encourage political democracy.

(For a more detailed scholarly analysis of the situation in Venezuela and what might be done about it, see my State Food Crimes, Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Colonial Cruising

Colonial Cruising

Last week (August 4-11, 2018) my husband and I enjoyed a week-long cruise in the “inner passage’ in Alaska. This cruise focuses on the south-eastern part of Alaska, sailing between the islands off the coast and the shore. It was a long-awaited trip, my husband’s 40^th wedding anniversary present to me.

I was already aware of the pollution that cruise ships can cause in oceans and seas, thanks to a presentation I once heard by a student in the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, where I used to work.  But I was on a Dutch ship that claimed to be environmentally conscious, so I thought perhaps I was not personally doing too much damage.

an Alaskan cruise ship

As the trip progressed, though, I did wonder how “colonial,” in the current parlance, it was for us to even take the cruise. The ship was Dutch-registered, and the senior staff, including the captain, seemed to all be Dutch.  The dining room servers, cabin stewards, maintenance and repair people, and security and safety crew seemed to be all Indonesian and Philippino (also mainly, but not entirely, male). The patrons were largely of European origin, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders especially. There was also a large contingent of patrons presumably of Chinese background, reflecting the changing distribution of wealth in the latest round of economic globalization.

Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, until a war of independence in the late 1940s: the Dutch did not give up their colony without a cruel and brutal fight. I wondered how long this cruise line’s ships had been serviced by Indonesian migrants. Perhaps there had been several generations of cruise ship employees from specific locations in Indonesia.

Also, as migrant labor goes, perhaps working on a Dutch cruise ship is not as bad as a lot of other options.  Presumably, the workers’ living quarters had to adhere not only to Dutch but possibly also to Canadian and/or US standards.  The workers had the right to return home for three months every year. While we were on the ship there was an earthquake on the Indonesian island of Lambok, where one of the servers came from. While unhurt, all his family (wife, four children, siblings and parents) were reduced to living in tents: the ship gave him leave and helped him arrange his transport home.

The other aspect of colonialism that I encountered was the almost complete disregard of the Indigenous peoples and cultures in Alaska. We attended a presentation of her culture by a Tlingit woman, presented in the ship’s main entertainment hall to a fairly large audience. But beyond that, we weren’t given much information about Alaskan culture, society, politics or economics.

I went ashore at a small town called Ketchikan and discovered a professionally-curated museum featuring town artifacts and a display of late 19^th and early 20^th century photographs. An individual there told me that the museum received very few visitors from cruise ships, and those who arrived said that it was the cruise ship staff, not the ship’s publicity agents, who told them about it. The assistant at the museum was a half-Tlingit and half-Haida woman who said to me, regarding the cruise industry’s lack of interest in Indigenous culture. “Colonialism has many windows and doors: when one closes, another opens.”

Ketchikan, Alaska

The main thing that the ship promoted on shore was stores selling diamonds and tanzanite.  I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to buy diamonds or tanzanite (a stone originating in Tanzania) in Alaska; perhaps there were tax advantages.

On shore, tourist companies also promoted visits to the (presumably renovated and kitschified) brothels that existed during the late 19^th century Gold Rush in Alaska and the Yukon (a northern Canadian territory). Apparently there is a myth of merry women cavorting happily with the men seeking gold. The truth, I imagine, is that many of those women died of botched abortions, gang rapes and sexually transmitted diseases. This, of course, is not something the average tourist wishes to hear about. Nor is this precisely colonialism, jut your good old-fashioned sexism.

I am not saying people shouldn’t take Alaska cruises. If you do want to take one though, do it soon. One of the speakers we listened to told us 97% of the glaciers are receding because of climate change. If you wait a decade or two, they may no longer be there.

And if you do go, maybe try a little harder than I did—never having been on a cruise before—to forewarn yourself about local culture and conditions before you visit.