foreignness
Much of what is published on this site relates directly to the question of foreigness: or thinking of people as being "foreigners". Because of its pervasiveness it is important to challenge the assumption that it is OK to treat non-citizens differently - that they are somehow less entitled to human rights. Many articles explore how we unconsciously think in this way.
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Would you have me argue that all human beings are equal?
Frederick Douglass was a remarkable worker for human rights. Although he lived more than a century ago, his thoughts remain pressingly relevant. He began life as a slave, but winning his own freedom, he fought not only for abolition of slavery but also gave his support to other human rights causes, such as the emancipation of women. Born in 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, he was separated from his mother at an early age, he writes, as was typically done with slave children. His father, he believed, was his mother’s master. Even though it was against the law for slave children to be taught to read and write, Sophia Auld the…
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Do Foreigners Have the Same Human Rights as the Rest of Us?
At the core of human rights is the axiomatic truth that human beings have inherent rights: that all human beings are equal and possessed of dignity and that violation of such rights is both morally offensive and legally impermissible. An alternative ordering of human relationships is mandated by exclusive national citizenship. Implicitly and explicitly national citizenship counsels the primacy of the privileged ‘citizen’ over the ‘non-citizen’ ‘other’. Everywhere we see the manifestation of this ordering in gross, systematic and widespread human rights violations: in our laws, practices, attitudes and media. Some of ‘us’ are the privileged beneficiaries of those violations: and we violate the human rights of foreigners as if…
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Why Global Citizenship?
1. Introduction Plutarch said: … nature has given us no country as it has given us no house or field. … Socrates expressed it … when he said, he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world (just as a man calls himself a citizen of Rhodes or Corinth).[1] Plutarch urged his audience to become conscious of a wider reality and to exercise their imagination to overcome a narrow, localised conception of their identity. That is the role of my global citizenship claim too. Plutarch and Socrates did not conceive of the world as a globe,[2] as I do: I have travelled across the world;…
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Love Your Mother
Pictures of planet Earth “our home planet” capture our imagination. This one commemorates Earth Day and its message is simple: we need to love the planet we live on. It’s easy to take our ability to see the whole Earth for granted and to forget that until the ‘Space Age’ at the end of the 1960’s we had simply never seen it that way: we’d never got the whole thing in perspective. “The Blue Marble”, the photograph that appears in our logo, was taken in 1972 by Harrison Schmitt, one of the astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission. Robert Poole is his book Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth describes it as ‘A photographic manifesto for…
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Book Review: The Strange Alchemy of Law and Life by Justice Albie Sachs
The victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses whisper from the pages of this short book. They speak to us of their struggle to realize their own humanity and recognize the humanity of each other. For a judge The Strange Alchemy of Law and Life is an unusual book. But then Albie Sachs is an unusual judge. A member of the African National Congress and a legal adviser to it when it was still a revolutionary movement, Albie Sach’s life moves from barely surviving a state sponsored terrorist bombing, to which he lost an arm and an eye, to sitting on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. It is the kind of life that prompts reflection,…
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The Crisis of Human Rights: Discrimination Against Non-Citizens
The basic idea at the heart of human rights is that all human beings are equal: equal in rights – equal in human dignity. This idea is universally accepted and believed. At the same time another idea – the idea that we are separately citizens of different countries is also a feature of the modern world – and the way it is practised has led to enormous discrimination and violation of human rights. In reality people, as a matter of law, have different fundamental rights even though we believe that all human beings are equal. In a recent paper titled “Human Rights in the Age of Migration: An Empirical Analysis of Human…
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Abolish Foreignness
Eight million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes. One billion people live in abject poverty. Thousands die crossing international borders while fleeing poverty, war or persecution. Rich countries reinforce barriers, laws and measures to prevent people crossing their borders. Hundreds of thousands are held in migration prisons as if they were criminals. 67 million people live as refugees or are internally displaced as a result of persecution, war, poverty or other causes. Believing that human beings are “foreigners” makes such profound human rights violations possible.
