neutrality

“It's one thing to keep an eye on the human rights situation in North Korea, China, or Uzbekistan. But monitoring human rights in Britain or Germany would be laughable.”

Ludmilla Alexeyeva, doyenne of the Russian human rights movement

Amnesty International has a principle known as WOOC, which stands for Work On Own Country. The principle says (roughly) that members of Amnesty International are not permitted, as members, to do campaigning work on cases in their own country². The lobbying and campaigning that members do has to be directed (primarily) at governments other than one's own. Thus, if you are a member of the UK Section of Amnesty, you are likely to be fighting for the rights of individuals living in Sudan, in Burma, in France or Bulgaria, rather than for victims of the British government located in the UK.

A lesson on human rights in a school in Woolwich

"Do [Amnesty International's] lesson plans give equal weight to both sides of the issue? Certainly in the lesson at Woolwich, more time (25 minutes) was spent watching an emotive film on the unfairness of denying Guantanamo Bay detainees their right to a fair trial and the hardship of the detainees' families than was given to the other side of the argument (15 minutes).

And the other side of the argument was presented in a less engaging form: a short, written press release from the White House, setting out the US government's justifications for holding suspected terrorists in Guantanamo without trial."

Oh dear. And I wonder what a really balanced look at Guantanamo might be like. An interview with the inmates, telling us that the propaganda about the conditions in the secret camp is just that - propaganda? Maybe we would learn that they actually have televisions in their rooms, 5 items of fresh fruit a day, and the opportunity to study a foreign language.

But no: the authorities at Guantanamo strangely won't allow interviews with inmates. I wonder what they are afraid we might learn, if all is really hunky-dory there.

I wonder too, what a balanced look at the unbalanced idea of the right to fair trial might look like: some interviews with retired Colonels from the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail, telling us how they cannot sleep at night because they are afraid of terrorist attacks on their country homes in Gloucestershire? A film about how good life was for good citizens before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came along (or the Bill of Rights)? A look at some of the evidence which the US authorities have accumulated against those terrorists sitting in Guantanamo Bay? Perhaps that might stop our 15-year olds feeling sympathy with their families or their plight.

But no: the US authorities won't allow us (or the detainees) to look at the evidence. As of today, not one of the Guantánamo detainees - and there have been 775 since January 2002 - has been convicted of a criminal offence by the USA. 10 of them (only), it is true, have been charged for trial by military commissions, but these trials were then ruled unlawful by the US Supreme Court. The Red Cross, which is about as cautious, as secretive (and as 'balanced'?) an organisation as I would have thought it possible to find, made it publicly known that "The main concern for us is the U.S. authorities ... have effectively placed them beyond the law... After more than 18 months of captivity, the internees have no idea about their fate, no means of recourse through any legal mechanism. They have been placed in a legal vacuum, a legal black hole. This, for the ICRC, is unacceptable."

So how about a balanced view of the inhumane and degrading treatment - the torture - which has been identified as standard practice in Guantanamo by all independent observers? How about presenting the positive side of that treatment in a 'more engaging form' for our 15-year olds?

The balanced Red Cross investigators, according to a leaked report, found a system devised to break the will of prisoners through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." They went on to say that "The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,"

I suppose that Jessica Shepherd would regard it as very unbalanced of me to quote these extracts, without giving the Bush-Cheney administration the chance to put the 'other' side. But quite apart from the fact that the Bush-Cheney administration are determined to keep everything about Guantanamo Bay a secret, so it is extremely difficult to get their gloss on torture, the end of the presumption of innocence, and the end of the right to fair trial; quite apart from the fact that organisations like the Red Cross and even Amnesty International are extremely careful (some might say too careful) to check both sides of the story, to hear from Bush and Cheney and anyone else who might balance the information they receive on the ground - quite apart from all of that, I cannot for the life of me imagine what that 'other side' might be. I cannot imagine anything that might make what is happening there now anything other than wholly unacceptable - either legally or morally, either from the point of view of international law, or from the point of view of basic human values. More importantly: I am very far from sure that even if we could provide an 'acceptable' viewpoint on Guantanamo Bay, that is what we should be giving our 15-year olds.

Does Jessica Shepherd perhaps think that the time has come to rewrite the international declarations of human rights which the world put together after the horrors of the Nazi holocaust? Because if she doesn't, she needs to explain what a 'balanced lesson' on the issue of people being held without charge, for years on end, and under inhumane conditions might look like. And why on earth we need it.

I suspect that if it was the Burmese monks who were being held in secret camps, the balance might be thought to be unnecessary - just as it was with the Soviet Union. I suspect that on the issue of Burma, our 15-year olds will not be required to consider the military rulers' side of the story in a 'more engaging form'.

Have a look at these nuggets to get a really unbalanced view

POSTSCRIPT
I wrote to Jessica Shepherd twice, to see if she could explain the question of balance. But she did not respond, nor did anyone else at the Guardian.

Worth quoting at length, since he is such an acknowledged guru - and yet his thoughts are so very distant from the practice we are mostly told to adhere to in what passes for 'progressive' education today:

- - -

'... there is no such thing. There neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time - neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas. To try to get people to believe that there is such a thing as this, and to convince or try to convince the incautious that this is the truth, is indisputably a political practice...

Another principle which the so-called human rights educator is supposed to abide by is that of being 'unemotional'. A very strange and inappropriate quality to aim for, it seems to me, and I have always found it hard to accept, let alone to observe it. Why might it be thought to be desirable for a human rights educator, of all people, to be detached from his or her emotions (at least while in the process of educating)?

I suspect that the reasons are the following:

1. We should be 'professionals': we are facilitators, above all, and that requires adopting a neutral position
2. Emotions get in the way
3. We are not supposed to 'push' a line, 'impose' our opinion; we are supposed to allow participants to find their own answers

I think there are two key objections to this position, apart from the particular responses to those points. The first is that I am genuinely not sure how you should detach yourself from your emotions, particularly if you care about human rights (and therefore about humans): is it possible, for example, to discuss the death penalty, torture in Iraq, the holocaust unemotionally?

The second objection is that I wonder how useful 'unemotional' education is going to be in promoting the goals of HRE. I see one of the main problems we are trying to resolve as being a lack of emotional response to the horrors that surround us. Most people care about their own child, their own immediate family or circle of friends; and the human rights violations that occur in the world are mostly (I think - but with the obvious and resounding counter-example of domestic violence) against those outside this circle. If there was a similar emotional response to children in Rwanda and in the UK, the British government would not have gone out of its way to prevent UN peacekeepers from going in to stop the genocide. Should an educator be unemotional about such facts?

So now for the specific objections to reasons 1 - 3 above:

1. There is no such thing as neutrality. A lack of response sends just as important a message as a condemnation or positive approval. There are certain issues where this is obvious - for example, responses to torture or sexual exploitation of children - but in fact it applies to every issue. An attitude of 'not caring' (even if you really don't) is still an attitude. See hammer action for more on this.

2. Yes, sometimes emotions get in the way. If only the victims of torture would feel nothing the world would be a cleaner, calmer place. But it seems bizarre to ask of an educator in human rights that he or she should tone down an emotional response to injustice, cruelty, violence, dishonesty, apathy - particularly when empathy is supposed to be one of the qualities we try to encourage in those we educate. Perhaps: in those we educate, but not ourselves?

3. We 'push a line' just as strongly by refusing to comment, as we do by offering our opinion (think of hammer action). To assume that stating our opinion (emotionally) is giving those we educate no possibility to formulate their own responses is to adopt a very poor opinion of those we educate. Do we hit them on the head until they agree with us? And anyway: if we care about the responses they do formulate, and we care that these responses are thought through, chosen because they are appealing, sympathetic and sensible - then is it not partly our role to help them find the best arguments (both rational and emotional)? We still can - and should - provide them with the best arguments for the other side as well

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Strangely, that guru of the HRE community, Paolo Freire, was pretty clear about the need for an educator to argue for her own position, for her own dreams:

What kind of educator would I be if I did not feel moved by a powerful impulse to seek, without lying, convincing arguments in defense of the dreams for which I struggle, in defence of the 'why' of the hope with which I act as an educator?

(from Pedagogy of Hope)