By Ajay Shah, on April 5th, 2010
Shekhar Gupta’s column in the Indian Express today is about the incipient threats faced by freedom of speech in India.
Authoritarianism vs. the Internet by Daniel Calingaert goes into the ways in which the Net increases freedom, and the way governments are fighting back. I got nervous when I read this description about some of the things that repressive regimes do:
Users are required to register with an ISP when they purchase internet access at home or at work, so that they cannot operate online anonymously. Customers at cybercafes have to present identification, and cybercafes install software to monitor and filter customers? web browsing. In Vietnam, cybercafe owners are required to keep a record for 30 days of all the websites their customers visit.
Do we do similar things in India?
The article by Calingaert led me on to this measurement of the freedom on the Internet in 15 countries by Freedom House. Their score shows:
| Rank |
Country |
Measure of repression |
| 1 |
Estonia |
10 |
| 2 |
UK |
20 |
| 3 |
South Africa |
21 |
| 4 |
Brazil |
26 |
| 5 |
Kenya |
31 |
| 6 |
India |
34 |
| 7 |
Georgia |
40 |
| 8 |
Malaysia |
40 |
| 9 |
Turkey |
40 |
| 10 |
Egypt |
45 |
| 11 |
Russia |
51 |
| 12 |
Iran |
74 |
| 13 |
China |
78 |
| 14 |
Tunisia |
78 |
| 15 |
Cuba |
90 |
I’ve seen the following pattern again and again: In measures of governance quality, India looks good when compared with China and Russia. So two of the BRIC countries really have a system of governance which is not comparable with that found in India. Far more interesting are the BSST countries — Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and Taiwan — which are democracies much like India, and have a lot of things done right in governance which India should learn from.
Finally, see Donald Morrison on the Dreyfus Affair in the Financial Times. I often wonder whether India has the depth of commitment to human rights and liberal values to be able to achieve a similar outcome. At present, I’m not convinced.
By Dan McLaughlin, on September 1st, 2009
The existence of unalienable rights of individuals is an honored tradition in America, rooted in the philosophy of the classical liberal thinkers. The rights to life, liberty and property mean that nobody has the authority to take the life, liberty or property of anyone else. They apply to any person in any social arrangement.
This is opposed to modern liberal thinking, which is the negation of liberty of the individual and imposition of the will of society. Socialist mentality has introduced a whole host of additional positive rights which assume that society owes everyone a minimum standard of living and access to a full slate of services. Those additional rights deserve a closer look to see if they are truly universal and unalienable.
If two people exist on a desert island, both have rights, just as they do in an advanced industrial society. Neither has the right to injure or kill the other person, to enslave him or her or to take property that he or she acquired legitimately through his or her own efforts. These are the basic rules for all human cooperation and for societies based on true justice. It is legitimate to engage in voluntary trade that benefits both parties, but it is not legitimate to use force or coercion to get a benefit at the expense of the other person.
Does either person have a right to food, water or shelter? They do have a right to use their resources, their skills and strength to provide for their own needs, but neither has the right to have the other provide for them. Can person A legitimately force person B to give him medical care? Even if B was a doctor, the only way that A can enforce a right to any level of health care is to violate the rights of B. Thus, that positive right to health care is a spurious and illegitimate claim.
In any society, however, whether made up of two people or billions of people, all parties are better off if they cooperate. B can provide medical services, but A can provide other valuable services, and they will both benefit if they give each other value for value they get. They can each concentrate on the things they do best and depend on the other to provide for other things.
In the event that A becomes disabled and cannot provide any value to the relationship, does A now have a right to the services of B? The answer is unequivocally no. There is no right to violate the rights of others just because one cannot provide for oneself. That does not mean that that B should let A perish just because A has no right to B’s help. Charity and compassion are also important parts of the human condition, religion, tradition and ethics, and it is considered good for B to help A in time of need. The Good Samaritan is a famous and useful analogy that illustrates true charity. It highlights voluntary aid to others, using one’s own resources. It has nothing to do with A having a right to B’s property or service, but only demonstrates the good will of one person for another.
In a larger society, the rights of the individuals hold the same significance. The fact that advanced medical services are available on a wide scale does not mean that any individual has a right to any level of health care. Medicine is merely a valuable service that people provide. Voluntary cooperation is the essential characteristic of any free society, but no medical person owes anyone else medical service. It is based on mutual agreement about value given and value provided.
There are many charitable organizations and millions of charitable people who are willing to give of their time and their resources for the benefit of others. It is fitting and proper that they do that. It is not fitting and proper for organizations or individuals to use the force of the state to coerce others to do charity. Using the government to take money from others for enforced charity is still aggression against the rights of others. It is counterproductive and displaces true charity with violence.
There is no right to health care. The path to a prosperous society where the poor and disadvantaged are most likely to have their needs met is paved with respect for the basic unalienable rights of each individual, being bound only by the equivalent rights of others.
By Dan McLaughlin, on December 8th, 2008
December 10th, 2008 will mark the 60th birthday of the United Nations Declaration Of Human Rights (DHR) and kick off a year long propaganda campaign pressing its agenda. The document has 30 articles which purport to catalog the rights that every human has. Most of those rights are what can be called positive rights, things that a person can demand someone provide for them. By contrast, negative rights are the ones that we, as Americans, are most familiar with. They include the rights to life, liberty and property. They say that nobody has a right to take the life, the liberty or the property of any individual without his consent.
The DHR is riddled with inconsistencies and inner conflicts. It begins by saying that all of the listed rights are inalienable. The normal view of “inalienable” means “cannot be alienated” by anyone, including government. The DHR ends with articles describing the circumstances where the stated inalienable rights can be alienated by the United Nations or member governments. Rights are given and rights are taken away. The term “inalienable” in the introduction is an outright fraud.
Many positive rights are granted under the DHR, such as the right to food, water, shelter, education and so forth. Negative rights, such as the right to own property without confiscation, are also granted. Whenever you grant positive and negative rights together, there is an insoluble problem. In order to provide anything to anybody, it must first be taken from someone else. In order to take it from someone else, their property rights must necessarily be violated. The donor has no rights in the confiscated property. Inalienable property rights are a fraud under the DHR.
Compulsory education under the Declaration is to be directed at socializing our children, making good subjects of international government and furthering the activities of the United Nations. The silly notion of educating our children to help them to be more productive and prosperous never occurs to the writers of the DHR. Education under DHR is a fraud.
Article 29 (1) says that “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” This manifests itself in calls for compulsory community service for all citizens. There is discussion of that very thing in America today. If a person is compelled to do service against his or her will by anyone, including politicians and bureaucrats, that is a form of slavery or involuntary servitude. It is in direct conflict with article 4 of the DHR: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude…” Freedom doesn’t exist under DHR.
Article 30 ends the list. It says that “Nothing in the Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.” The net effect of that statement is that, if anyone tries to roll back government interference, to limit welfare, unemployment, social security or any other government program, they are guilty of humanitarian crimes under the Declaration. Their rights are not protected. They have no rights, under the DHR, to speak or write about the abolition of those programs, belong to organizations that promote their abolition or take part in rallies or hold seminars that speak out against them.
The bottom line is that the Declaration Of Human Rights is not a statement of inalienable rights, in any sense of the word. It is, rather, a comprehensive manifesto, aimed at promoting world socialism under the United Nations. The U.N. was founded on the idea that national sovereignty is an outdated notion and that an international government is needed to enforce peace and to provide for equitable distribution of the world’s wealth.
Article 22. “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international cooperation, and in accordance with the organization and resources of each state, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.” As Karl Marx, the father of communism, said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The DHR is the socialist manifesto. This December 10th and for the whole year, people interested in maintaining free societies need to counter the United Nations propaganda with information on the reality of the document and the world socialist agenda of the United Nations.
By Mary Nichols, on November 13th, 2008
Around the world, millions of children are engaged in child labor. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that up to 1 in 5 children globally are working, with the proportion even higher in some regions of Africa and Asia. Recent estimates of the overall numbers involved range from 158 to 246 million, although the true scale is unknown. Studies have revealed that the majority of child workers, around 70% according to recent World Bank research, are employed in agriculture, followed by services and then manufacturing.
The involvement of children in employment per se is not necessarily a problem. As an ILO report observes, many children combine part-time jobs with their education and gain valuable skills or make a useful contribution to family income in the process. For many others, however, child labor means being exploited by unscrupulous employers, exposed to harmful or dangerous conditions or, at the very least, missing out on an adequate education. The ILO has estimated that in 2000, 171 million workers aged between 5 and 17 were involved in work that was “hazardous to their safety, physical or mental health, and moral development,” and that 8.4 million were employed in the most serious forms of child labor, for example as prostitutes, child soldiers and bonded labor.
The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child requires governments to protect those aged under 18 from economic exploitation, from performing any hazardous work or any work likely to interfere with a child’s education. However, child labor is an intractable problem that is difficult to eradicate due to its perceived economic benefits at the family and household level. In low-income countries or communities, children are often sent out to work when the expected economic benefits to their family are higher than the perceived economic rewards of education, or when schooling their children is unaffordable for the parents.
Child Labor and Poverty
The links between child labor and poverty have been clearly demonstrated in many studies; there is evidence of a consistent negative association between the extent of child labor in a country and its GDP. The problem of child labor is not confined to the developing world, however. Although the vast majority of working children can be found in Africa and Asia, followed by Latin America, developed countries such as the U.S. also have significant numbers of child laborers, particularly among immigrant communities engaged in agriculture, where extra hands mean extra income. Moreover, countries with similar levels of GDP have differing levels of child labor, suggesting that other factors such as cultural traditions or attitudes and the availability of affordable education also play a role in determining the relative importance of child labor within their economies.
Child labor has an adverse affect on the development of human capital through education and skills development and is therefore likely to hamper economic development in the countries or communities concerned, as well as severely damaging the future prospects of the child workers for escaping poverty. There is a strong positive relationship between the proportion of children working in a country and the proportion not attending school, while not surprisingly, children who do attend school but also work long hours outside the home tend to perform poorly in academic examinations, according to World Bank research.
There is little consensus about the most effective policy options for reducing the prevalence of child labor. It is sometimes suggested that trade sanctions should be applied against countries with particularly high numbers of children working, but UNICEF argue this would make little difference since the majority of child laborers are employed in agriculture and relatively few in export sectors.
The preferred option of the ILO is for the introduction by national governments of “income transfer programs,” like those already in use in India, Mexico and Brazil, which offer financial benefits to low-income families whose children leave paid employment in order to attend school. At the same time, there is a need for adequate investment in the educational sector with the aim of making affordable, high quality education available to all. According to ILO research published in 2004, the long-term benefits of such policies for the countries concerned are likely to be significant; it was estimated that although the overall cost of eliminating child labor would be in the region of US$760 billion, the resultant benefits resulting from improved health and education, concentrated in the developing world, would be around US$ 5.1 trillion.
References
Duran, M.P. (2004). Investing in every child: An economic study of the costs and benefits of eliminating child labor. ILO: Geneva.
Fares, J. & Raju, D. (2007). Child labor across the developing world: Patterns and correlations. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4119, February 2007. Available from http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALPROTECTION/EXTCL/0,,contentMDK:20254527~menuPK:965612~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:390553,00.html.
International Labour Organization (1998). Child Labor: Targeting the Intolerable. ILO: Geneva.
International Labour Organization (2002). Every child counts: new global estimates on child labour. ILO: Geneva. Available from http://www.ilo.org/public//english/standards/ipec/simpoc/others/globalest.pdf.
UNICEF (1997). The State of the World’s Children 1997 – Child labour. Available from http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/.
US Department of Labor (1998). By The Sweat and Toil of Children, Vol. VI: An Economic Consideration of Child Labor.
By Mary Nichols, on August 8th, 2008
Overcrowding of prisons is putting pressure on criminal justice systems to use alternatives to custodial sentences. Electronic tagging is one method which can be used either instead of, or to reduce the length of, a prison sentence or as part of a non-custodial sentence. This is in effect a form of house arrest or curfew, in which offenders are required to stay at or close to their homes for a specified number of hours per day. An electronic tag worn on their person, usually on the ankle, alerts a control center if they violate these conditions.
Although tagging has been used in the United States since the mid-1980s, it has only recently been more widely adopted around the world in countries including Canada, Australia, Singapore, Sweden and the Netherlands. Within Europe, the UK was the first country to introduce electronic tagging, initially on a trial basis in 1989 as a condition of bail, with electronic monitoring as a specific curfew order sentence later introduced under the 1991 Criminal Justice Act.
The main potential benefits of electronic tagging are cost savings to the criminal justice system and the more optimal use of prison space. However, tagging hasn’t yet been adopted as standard practice in many countries, and where it is in use, relatively little systematic research has been conducted into its costs and benefits. Much of the research which has been conducted has been in the UK, where a great deal of controversy surrounds the practice of electronic tagging.
Human Rights Issues
Although there have been no successful legal challenges to the use of tagging on grounds of human rights, it has sometimes been argued that electronic tagging violates either Convention Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” or Article 8, which provides the right to “private and family life.” In a UK study, tagged offenders complained of being stigmatized and treated like animals; cases were also identified in which tagged individuals were attacked by others who suspected them of being sex offenders. On the other hand, there is evidence that some prisoners prefer tagging to prison sentences, leading to charges on the part of opponents of tagging that it is a soft option and one which does not deter individuals from re-offending.
The case for tagging hasn’t been helped by some high-profile bad publicity, such as the case of a female suspected burglar in England, who escaped for a two-week vacation without detection while tagged, and other media stories about individuals slipping off their tags to go on a crime spree. These types of incidents generally result from inadequacies in the monitoring system used rather than a problem with electronic tagging more generally, but their sensationalist aspects tend to overshadow more serious debate about the potential role of tagging in fighting crime. Moreover, the whole issue of tagging offenders has been mixed up with proposals and counter-arguments on both sides of the Atlantic about its use for other groups, such as juvenile truants and asylum seekers, which have brought the human rights aspects of tagging to the fore.
In the absence of successful legal challenges to tagging on grounds of human rights, any future expansion of its use is likely to be driven by cost considerations as well as more robust evidence of its effectiveness in reducing re-offending. Yet the limited research in both these areas has produced findings which are inconclusive and contradictory.
Costs and Benefits
Some studies have generated estimates of significant cost savings from the use of electronic tagging, mostly extrapolated from evaluations of small-scale trials or fairly simplistic number-crunching exercises. An early evaluation of trials in the UK claimed that several million pounds a year would be saved if curfew orders with tagging were rolled out nationally, with at least two-thirds of these orders replacing custodial sentences; an online BBC report recently claimed that tagging an offender for a year costs less than 10% of the cost of imprisonment for the same period. However, electronic tagging can only generate cost savings if used to replace custodial rather than other community-based sentences, with the latter perhaps being less costly to implement and monitor. A Canadian study by the John Howard Society of Alberta observed that tagging may even add costs to the correctional system by increasing levels of control to an extent which is unnecessary for some lower-risk offenders.
Similarly, there is conflicting research evidence on the impact of tagging on re-convictions. For example, a 1999 Canadian evaluation reported that electronic monitoring had no identifiable impact on future criminal behavior, yet a 2006 Florida-based study of 75,661 tagged offenders found evidence of significant reductions in the likelihood of conviction for a technical violation or new offense. However, a 2004 Florida study provided evidence that a high proportion of the tagged individuals in that state were low-risk offenders who would probably have received non-custodial sentences anyway, so the cost-savings of electronic tagging may have been minimal.
According to 1999 research with magistrates in the UK, tagging is a useful way of disrupting patterned criminal behavior such as night-time burglaries, shoplifting and late-night public order offenses and is also effective for long-term monitoring of sex offenders and other ex-offenders who continue to present a public safety risk. However, the magistrates interviewed argued that tagging is not an appropriate way of dealing with all types of convicted criminals, especially those who might present a risk to their own family members if confined to their homes. More systematic research is needed into the use of tagging for different categories of offenders to identify how the practice can generate the greatest cost savings to the penal system as well as helping to reduce overall crime rates. Criminal justice researchers will also need to examine the potential use of new forms of surveillance technology, such GPS satellites, which may open up opportunities for more effective monitoring of offenders in the community but will also certainly bring human rights issues into the center of the debate.
References
BBC News (2005, March 20). Electronic tagging investigated. Retrieved from BBC News.
Bonta, J., Wallace-Capretta, S., & Rooney, J. (1999). Electronic Monitoring in Canada. Ottawa: Solicitor General Canada.
Bottoms, A.E., Gelsthorpe, L. & Rex, S. (2001). Community Penalties: Policy, Practice and Future Directions. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
John Howard Society of Alberta (2000). Electronic Monitoring. Retrieved from The John Howard Society of Alberta.
Mortimer, E., Pereira, E., & Walter, I. (1999). Making the tag fit: further analysis from the first two years of the trials of curfew orders. Home Office Research findings (105).
Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (2005). Electronic Monitoring should be Better Targeted to the Most Dangerous Offenders. Report No. 05-19. Retrieved from The Florida Monitor.
Padgett, K., Bales, B. & Blomberg, T. (2006). The Long-Term Effects of the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in the Community. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA, Nov 01, 2006.
Stacey, T. (2006). Electronic tagging of offenders: a global view. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 20, 1-2.
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