Human Rights in Ireland

Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of private education and the implicit commodification of learning. However, this emergent trans-continental rights-demand is not simply another traditional usage of rights. Very often, when we hear ‘human rights’ we think about them in the most legalistic of senses. They are fetishized as that which the state may guarantee for the subject. As noted by all sorts of critical theorists, such an identification leads to a thorough limitation of political agency. The political subject is figured simply as the individual in need of the state’s protection. I have recently argued, in Human Rights and Constituent Power, that we must begin to think about a different human rights,  a differential human rights. This idea of rights would have, as its condition of existence, a fundamentally split nature. On one side is the closure implicit in the juridical form, but on the other is the radical political demand to reshape the world. I have suggested that we might term this second limb ‘right-ing’ – in that it is a potent and creative process rather than something which is always already given. Let me develop the idea a little more in the context of the radical demand for a right to education instantiated in Chile and Colombia.

The ‘Chilean Winter’ has seen massive student demonstrations against one of the most privatized educational systems in the world. Joined by trade unions and other left organizations, the students have mobilized and manifested themselves in public space. They have fought for the re-establishment of public institutions which would be run on a not-for-profit basis. They have argued against the private universities and secondary schools that  render education as a commodity. Read Full Post »

Few are willing to make comparisons between this past year’s radical political activity in the UK – from the student protests to the major TUC demonstration – and the Tottenham riots. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: there is no unifying political goal of these ‘looters’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘thugs’. Theirs instead appears to be a ‘consumerism of the excluded’ – as someone quipped recently. But there is a common denominator – that is the role of the police in patrolling the fringes of ordered liberal society.

The response to every and any hint that the police might have behaved badly is remarkably similar in so many instances. Firstly, denial: ‘he shot first’, ‘he moved towards me’, ‘he was being restrained for his own safety’. Then, if the pressure is great enough and the evidence obvious enough: acceptance and repentance. This comes with promises that any bad apples will be sought out, plucked from the tree and binned. Then finally, when the fury has dissipated, charges and complaints are dropped, or one person takes the hit – rarely anything beyond a slap on the wrist. As Alex Wheatle says, for instance, no police officer has ever been convicted for the death of a black person in custody. This should not surprise us. The police will close ranks in an attempt to protect their own. The political and legal establishment will tolerate this to a certain extent. They recognise ‘the difficult job that officers do’. Yet, this type of reasoning misses the everyday and ordinary violence of the police, and by extension that of the state (and the law). A different way of looking at this emerges when we refuse to accept, for a moment, that police violence is automatically or necessarily legitimate. Read Full Post »

Sanex, a toiletries corporation, have a new advert. They tell us that ‘Your underarm skin has three fundamental rights: A right to effective twenty-four hour protection, to moisturization and to a natural Ph balance’. In this post I would like to briefly explore these rights, before talking a little more seriously about two newer rights that have a little more political effect. Let me pose two questions that this advert suggests: firstly, who/what is the subject of the rights and secondly, what are its effects, in base political terms. Obviously, Sanex are suggesting that across the world, human skin is being oppressed by those dastardly humans who wear(?) it…. The subject of these three fundamental rights appears to be one’s skin, and its protection occurs through Sanex’s ‘dermo-active-three complex’. The effect of this right, is clearly that other toiletry companies do not respect the fundamental rights of your skin. There is a fissure between the person and their skin and it is the skin that holds these rights. One can only imagine what rights other parts of your body might have, and how they might be ‘respected’. The conflict of my constitutive parts is going to have the courts busy for years I suspect – the skin on my face has the right to air and sunlight, but the hair that grows there is surely violating these right. My beard has the right to exist, but shaving clearly violates it… In fact the problem of excretion in general is going to be a minefield for rights-talk.

There is an important point here: rights are deeply linked to desire. Rights are (at least in one sense) a manner of authorising or (pro)claiming the authority of your desire. There is a complex interplay between recognition of the legitimacy of one’s (political) desires and identity.Sanex are thus tapping into this authorisation inherent in rights, and combining it with the pseudo-scientific jargon that has long been a hallmark of cosmetics campaigns. They are withdrawing the sense of rights and in the hollow shell of the term laying crass commercial interests. But what of rights in all this: We have long known that rights were infinitely reversible, that there is no pure liberatory or progressive essence at their heart. In fact, individual rights stem precisely from such a reversibility – human rights stem from the sovereign’s natural right to rule which morphs into the natural rights of the individual before and during the enlightenment. Rights themselves are reversible and have no necessary political position

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In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet presences (belonging to both states and corporations). They have continued to post a variety of curious videos to YouTube that threaten corporations and regimes alike (see for general information here and here, on Operation Payback see here, on Algeria; here, and on Egypt; here). In general, these messages seem to coalesce around the demand to stop attacks on free speech particularly through the internet. This ‘movement’ is strange to the ears of those associated with human rights as it seems to mix postmodern cosmopolitan demands for human rights with a radical political philosophy of the multitude. This is an uncomfortable mix on the face of it because the radical politics of Hardt and Negri or Agamben (for instance) are inimical to traditional human rights. I want to argue that this is not such a fundamental contradiction. What Anonymous seem to see is the radical democratic potential of human rights – this would be a potential quite distinct from the conventional renderings.

The first point to note is that while Anonymous make statements and undertake actions they are not a unity. Read Full Post »

This is the full contents of a memorandum published on the 3oth of November by wikileaks.  It concerns the actions of the ‘Shannon Five’, and the responsiveness of major world powers to democratic mobilization in Ireland. All spelling errors were in the original.

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DUBLIN 001020

SUBJECT: EMERGING CONSTRAINTS ON U.S. MILITARY TRANSITS AT SHANNON

Classified By: Ambassador James C. Kenny; Reasons 1.4 (B) and (D).

¶1. (C) This is an action request. Please see para 10.

¶2. (C) Summary: Although supportive of continued U.S. military transits at Shannon Airport, the Irish Government has informally begun to place constraints on U.S. operations at the facility, mainly in response to public sensitivities over U.S. actions in the Middle East. Shannon remains a key transit point for U.S. troops and materiel bound for theaters in the global war on terror, while yielding diplomatic benefits for the Irish Government and significant revenues for the airport and regional economy. Segments of the Irish public, however, see the airport as a symbol of Irish complicity in perceived U.S. wrongdoing in the Gulf/Middle East and in regard to extraordinary renditions, a view that underpinned a recent jury decision to acquit the “Shannon Five” protesters who damaged a U.S. naval aircraft. The Irish Government has repeatedly defended U.S. interests in the face of public criticism, but has recently introduced more cumbersome notification requirements for equipment-related transits in the wake of the Lebanon conflict. These requirements, which entail a more expansive interpretation of munitions of war, are designed to give the Irish Government mor latitude to decide on allowable transits, accoring to a senior Department of Foreign Affairs oficial. We suspect that the Government aims with tese new constraints to dampen public criticism ahead of the 2007 general elections, and we would apreciate Department gudance on a USG response, including on any next steps regarding the Shannon Five. End summary. Read Full Post »

DuVall summarises the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s thought: ‘if submission were replaced by civil resistance, the people could pierce the shroud of oppression, shifting power in a way that few in the world would have comprehended.’ The starting point for civil disobedience is injustice. However, the question always placed at the feet of those who resist by breaking the law, is whether such acts can ever be right. Civil disobedience became a major question for political theory in the US in the sixties and seventies. I want to suggest that two of the issues raised in that debate can usefully be drawn out here. Firstly, there is the question of whether civil disobedience is non-violent by definition. And secondly, there is the question of whether civil disobedience requires a sort of existential choice between security and order. (For further discussion of these points and more, see ‘The Defense of Conscience – A Limited Right to Resist’, which this piece draws upon).

Let me begin with the definitional debate. Bedau states ‘Anyone commits an act of civil disobedience if and only if he acts illegally, publicly, non-violently, and conscientiously with the intent to frustrate (one of) the laws, policies, or decisions of his government.’ Read Full Post »

The images of the Gardai’s horse charge or their over-zealous use of the baton (knocking a young woman out cold and bloodying the faces of others), being used on peaceful student demonstrations has a chilling effect. We are unaccustomed to seeing our Gardai in the same light as (the very often violent) Italian or French police forces. We are unaccustomed to Garda cavalry charges past the Shelbourne. To me, it brings back the memories of the 2009 Financial Fools march in London and some of the ensuing police violence, which lead among other things to the death of the bystander Ian Tomlinson. After that day, myself and a colleague penned this piece for Critical Legal Thinking. I was asked to republish it here which I think is appropriate.

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In this podcast recorded earlier in September, Illan rua Wall conducts a wide-ranging interview with Wendy Brown; the Heller Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkley.

Interview with Wendy Brown

Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to rights. She refuses to reject rights, but instead seeks to question the premises upon which they stand and the power relations in which they emerge. Rights are not democratizing power, but about protecting against power. Read Full Post »

The question of populism and radical change has re-emerged in American politics, first with Obama and now with the tea party movement. However, it was another story that recently caught my eye. The New York Times carried a story about Republican ‘agents’ (or ‘operatives’) encouraging homeless people to stand unopposed in the Green Party primaries. Because the green party do not have sufficient coverage to stand centrally selected candidates for all ballots, homeless people have gained the nomination to stand for local government. Beyond the curiosity of the story, I want to argue that it is more significant and revealing than it might initially seem. Read Full Post »

At last weeks first birthday workshop on human rights in Ireland, Fergus Ryan from DIT, suggested that the crucial problem for human rights activists in Ireland was that decisions at the ECHR or Supreme Court were seen as the end of the story, ignoring what he called the ‘cultural change’ necessary for successful human rights action. He argued that you cannot adduce this or that ECHR decision in a political argument and expect that to be the end of the matter. Rather, it is necessary for people to culturally buy-in to human rights. To this point, Mark Kelly of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties asked; how long do we have to wait for cultural change. I want to suggest that Read Full Post »