{"id":274,"date":"2003-12-05T06:56:16","date_gmt":"2003-12-05T06:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:25","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:25","slug":"i_have_just_got_to_stop_reading_the_guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=274","title":{"rendered":"I Have Just Got To Stop Reading the Guardian."},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen steps off the cliff<\/a> into Idiotarianland.<\/p>\n

The spiraling human rights crisis in suspended member Zimbabwe will grab most of the attention of Commonwealth leaders at the heads of government meeting in Nigeria this weekend. This is to be expected when there were more than a thousand reports of torture at the hands of the police and security services last year. President Mugabe must be sent a clear message that arbitrary detention, torture and systematic repression are at odds with the Commonwealth’s vision of democracy, the rule of law and good governance. <\/p>\n

However, leaders must also look at how other members have trampled on basic freedoms in their rush to join the so-called “war on terror”, have attacked the right to seek asylum, and still permit cruel punishments and executions. Is it any wonder that Mugabe has got the message that human rights violations will not be challenged? <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/b><\/p>\n

Our own government made the UK the only country in Europe to derogate from the European convention on human rights in order to rush through the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act. It has used it to imprison 14 foreign nationals for up to two years without charging them or bringing them to trial. They face the prospect of remaining in detention indefinitely on the basis of secret evidence that they have not been allowed to see and therefore cannot challenge. These “security measures” are undermining the credibility and viability of basic legal safeguards. <\/p>\n

The clampdown on the right to asylum has seen the Australian government’s “Pacific solution” set of policies enable it to hold for months scores of people, who have been recognised as refugees, in detention centres – a policy branded by a UN delegation as “offensive to human dignity”. Similarly, the new asylum bill in the UK threatens to criminalise those seeking asylum.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See, it appears to be like this. Unless we are perfect, anyone else has every right to do exactly what they will – and we of course can’t be critical. This is a consequence of that particular blindness that we seem to have nowadays in which everything bad becomes equivalently bad; it’s a kind of binary morality.<\/p>\n

Sadly, I live in an analog world, as do the rest of the real people I know.<\/p>\n

Ms. Allen, may I introduce you to your US counterpart, William Schulz<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Certainly I have argued within Amnesty that in the face of genocide, such as in Rwanda, the organization is utterly remiss not to take a position in favor of military intervention.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At some point we can spend our energy worrying about relabelling audio jacks labelled ‘master\/slave’, or about liberals who criticize team names using racial epithets – or we can look at countries that are being looted by kleptocrats, and where the people are starving as a result.<\/p>\n

It seems like an easy decision to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen steps off the cliff into Idiotarianland. The spiraling human rights crisis in suspended member Zimbabwe will grab most of the attention of Commonwealth leaders at the heads of government meeting in Nigeria this weekend. This is to be expected when there were more than a thousand reports of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}