You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Human Rights’ tag.
The most revealing thing about modern slavery is not only that it exists. It is that so many people who invoke slavery as a moral category seem oddly uninterested in it when it is happening now.
In contemporary activist politics, slavery is often treated as a permanent indictment of the West. It is invoked to explain present inequality, assign inherited guilt, rewrite institutional language, justify symbolic rituals, and discipline dissent. Some of that history matters. The transatlantic slave trade was real, brutal, and morally indefensible. A serious civilization should be able to tell the truth about its crimes.
But truth has a tense. If slavery matters morally, then slavery matters now.
According to the latest Global Estimates from the International Labour Organization, Walk Free, and the International Organization for Migration, roughly 50 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021: 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. Walk Free estimates that about 7 million people in Africa were living in modern slavery.
If slavery is invoked as a living moral category when it indicts the West, then slavery should also matter when people are being coerced, trafficked, forced into marriage, or trapped in labour today.
These are not metaphors. Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced marriage, trafficking, sexual exploitation, debt bondage, and other forms of coercion that people cannot freely refuse or leave.
Many human-rights groups do serious work on these abuses. That should be acknowledged. But the cultural volume is not the same. Western institutions pour energy into land acknowledgements, reparations debates, decolonization seminars, symbolic renamings, privilege workshops, and inherited-guilt rituals. Meanwhile, present-tense slavery struggles to command anything like the same moral attention.
Mauritania, for example, formally abolished slavery, yet descent-based slavery and slavery-like practices remain serious concerns. That should disturb anyone who claims to care about domination and human dignity. It should not be a niche humanitarian footnote.
The strongest activist reply is not ridiculous. Historical slavery did not vanish without consequence. The transatlantic slave trade, colonial rule, segregation, and legal exclusion shaped wealth, institutions, geography, and inherited disadvantage. A society does not become innocent simply because the worst laws are repealed.
That is a serious point. But it does not answer the problem of moral selectivity. If slavery is invoked as a living moral category when it indicts the West, then slavery should also matter when people are being coerced, trafficked, forced into marriage, or trapped in labour today.
This is where much contemporary anti-racism becomes revealing. In theory, it opposes domination and exploitation. In practice, it often functions as a selective solvent. It dissolves confidence in Western institutions, Western history, Western moral achievement, and Western civic inheritance, while offering little concrete help to people being dominated right now.
The predictable reply is that this is whataboutism. It is not. Whataboutism says, “Ignore this evil because that evil also exists.” The argument here is the opposite: if slavery is evil, then concern should become more urgent when slavery is happening now. Historical truth matters, but it cannot become a substitute for present-tense moral attention.
Nor is this answered by saying critics do not understand critical theory properly. If a theory constantly produces institutional rituals of guilt, suspicion, deconstruction, and accusation, ordinary citizens are allowed to judge it by its public effects. A politics that requires specialist initiation before anyone may notice its consequences has already left democratic argument behind.
The issue is not whether the West has sins in its history. It does. The issue is whether anti-racism is actually against domination, exploitation, and slavery as human evils, or whether those evils are useful mainly when they can be arranged into an indictment of Western society.
If slavery matters only when it can be used to shame the West, then slavery is not the real object of concern. The West is.
References
International Labour Organization, Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration. Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage.
https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/global-estimates-modern-slavery-forced-labour-and-forced-marriage
Walk Free. Global Slavery Index 2023 — Global Findings.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/global-findings/
Walk Free. Global Slavery Index 2023 — Modern Slavery in Africa.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/regional-findings/africa/
Anti-Slavery International. What is Descent-Based Slavery?
https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/descent-based-slavery/
Anti-Slavery International. Mauritania: Descent-Based Slavery.
https://www.antislavery.org/what-we-do/mauritania/
Arab Reform Initiative. Racialized Hereditary Slavery in Mauritania: Interview with Activist Abidine Maettalla.
https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/racialized-hereditary-slavery-in-mauritania-interview-with-activist-abidine-maettalla/
There are debates where reasonable people can disagree but China’s human rights record is not one of them.
Over the past decade, a substantial body of reporting—by journalists, satellite analysis, leaked documents, and international organizations—has converged on a set of findings that are no longer seriously contested outside official denials.
Start with Xinjiang.
Evidence indicates that over a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been detained in a network of facilities described by the Chinese government as “vocational training centres.” Satellite imagery, survivor testimony, and leaked directives point to something else: mass internment, political indoctrination, and coercive control over religious and cultural life.
Accounts from former detainees describe:
- forced renunciation of religious beliefs
- constant surveillance
- psychological pressure and, in some cases, physical abuse
Separate investigations have also documented:
- forced labour programs linked to global supply chains
- coercive birth control measures, including sterilization and IUD placement
These are not isolated allegations. They appear across multiple independent sources.
Move to Hong Kong.
Following the 2020 National Security Law, political dissent has been sharply curtailed:
- pro-democracy figures arrested
- independent media outlets shuttered
- public protest effectively eliminated
The framework of “one country, two systems” remains in name, but its substance has been significantly reduced.
Then there is the broader system.
China operates one of the most sophisticated internal surveillance states in the world:
- extensive camera networks
- digital monitoring of speech and association
- censorship regimes that restrict information flow
Criticism of the government can carry professional, legal, and personal consequences that extend beyond the individual.
None of this requires speculation. It requires attention.
What complicates the situation is not uncertainty about the facts, but the global context in which they exist. China is economically central, diplomatically influential, and deeply integrated into international systems. That creates incentives to soften language, delay responses, or treat clear abuses as matters of interpretation.
They are not.
There is room to debate how to respond—sanctions, engagement, decoupling, or something in between. There is less room to debate what is happening.
The record is already there and the question is whether we are willing to look at it directly.
Reference List
Xinjiang / Uyghur Detention & Abuses
- Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Assessment of human rights concerns in Xinjiang (2022)
https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous - The New York Times. ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose Mass Detentions (2019)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html - Associated Press. China cuts Uyghur births with IUDs, sterilization (2020)
https://apnews.com/article/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
Hong Kong Crackdown
- Amnesty International. Hong Kong National Security Law analysis
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/hong-kong-national-security-law/
Surveillance / System-Level Control
- Freedom House. Freedom in the World – China
https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-world
Inspired by a recent conversation with a antediluvian blogger.
A good piece, by John Tasioulas but I’m left wanting more.
“But is it enough to rely on the supposed fact that human rights are embedded in a liberal democratic culture? Or do we need to be able to step back from that culture and offer an objective justification for the principles embedded in it, as the philosophers have long supposed? The problem is that social expectations and cultural assumptions not only vary significantly across societies, but that they are fragile: various forces ranging from globalisation to propaganda can cause them to change dramatically or even wither away. Would rights against gender or racial discrimination disappear if sexist or racist attitudes come to predominate?
The question is not fanciful. Once apparently settled beliefs about the impermissibility of torture or the rights of refugees have recently suffered a backlash. There can be backsliding as well as progress, with no guarantees either way. Social expectations and deep cultural assumptions are no more a sufficient basis for human rights than the law is. There is a fatal contradiction in defending human rights against the rising authoritarianism of a ‘post-truth’ era while simultaneously abandoning the belief that our commitment to those rights is itself grounded in the truth, and being prepared to defend it on that basis.
My own view is that human rights are rooted in the universal interests of human beings, each and every one of whom possesses an equal moral status arising from their common humanity. In other words, in defending human rights, we will need to appeal to the inherent value of being a member of the human species and, in addition, the interests shared by all human beings in things like friendship, knowledge, achievement, play, and so on. And we will need to ask whether these considerations generate duties that are owed to each and every human being. This proposal is hardly uncontroversial. The appeal to the inherent value of humanity will be contested by some as a brute prejudice – a ‘speciesism’ on a par with racism. Similarly, the appeal to universal interests will be contested by those who think that human rights are ultimately about respecting individual freedom regardless of whether it advances the right-holder’s well-being.
Whether I’m right or not, I am convinced that we cannot sustain our commitment to human rights on the cheap, by invoking only the law or the assumptions of our liberal democratic culture. Only a deeper justification can explain why we are right to embody them in the law, or maintain a liberal democratic culture, in the first place. This has precisely been the aim of philosophical defences of human rights from the 12th century up until very recent times. To keep our human rights culture in good order, we cannot avoid engaging with the question of justification.”
Tasioulas has some lofty notions about the universal interests of human beings, I would in argue that the societies in our culture/world systematically devalue the intrinsic worth of individual human beings, whether it be in the pursuit of racist or monetary ends, it leads to the same grim conclusion – your humanity is dependent on what social class you inhabit and the colour of your skin and what sex you are.
Given how the world works, I find it hard to believe that Canada is taking a principled stand on human rights in Saudi Arabia. Western democracies certainly try to own the rhetoric when it comes to democracy, peace, and freedom – but their realpolitik is quite similar to the nations they routinely criticize for being autocratic dictatorships that are terrible to their people.
My skepticism aside, this is the tweet that started the diplomatic furor between Saudi Arabia and Canada:
Well, the powers that be in Saudi Arabia didn’t like that one bit:
“We consider the Canadian ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia persona non grata and order him to leave within the next 24 hours,” Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry said on Twitter.
“Any other attempt to interfere with our internal affairs from Canada, means that we are allowed to interfere in Canada’s internal affairs,” it said.
“Saudi state television later reported that the Education Ministry was coming up with an “urgent plan” to move thousands of Saudi scholarship students out of Canadian schools to take classes in other countries.”
“Saudi Arabia said it is also freezing all new trade and investment transactions with Canada and “reserves its right to take further action.” Saudi Arabia is one of Canada’s largest export markets in the region, and some 10 per cent of Canadian crude oil imports come from Saudi Arabia.”
“Of course the major worry for Canada will now be the fate of a $15-billion contract for almost 1,000 light armoured vehicles between the Saudi government and London, Ont.’s General Dynamics. The controversial deal, struck in 2014 and approved in 2016, called for the vehicles to be delivered starting in 2017, but it’s not clear how many have already been sent as Ottawa refuses to release the “commercially confidential” information.”
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is reportedly selling off its assets in Canada and will stop buying Canadian wheat and barley, in the latest escalation in the sudden diplomatic dispute between the two countries.”
“The national Saudi Arabian airline, Saudia, said this week that it would suspend all flights between the country and Canada, starting next week.”
I think I speak for many Canadian when I say. “WTF just happened here?”. The Saudi record on human rights isn’t a particularly deep dark secret and to call for a what seems to be a bit of leniency in one specific case doesn’t seem as beyond the pale as the Saudi’s seem to think it is.
Would Canada recall its ambassadors and impose sanctions if Norway made light of our decidedly horrible treatment of our First Nations people? I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t. Most likely some diplomatic hand-waves and some impassioned statements about how we’re working hard (we’re not) to improve the lives of all Canadians and then the issues would pass.
What is more intriguing is that despite the Saudi backlash, Canada’s government isn’t backing down:
“Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada isn’t backing down from its position that led to diplomatic sanction from Saudi Arabia.
Freeland made the comments Monday afternoon in Vancouver a day after Saudi Arabia announced it would cease new trade deals with Canada and expel the Canadian ambassador.
“I will say Canada is very comfortable with our position. We are always going to speak up for human rights; we’re always going to speak up for women’s rights; and that is not going to change,” she told a news conference.
“Canadians expect our foreign policy to be driven by and to embody Canadian values, and that is how we intend to continue our foreign policy.”
On Friday, Global Affairs Canada had tweeted, “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.”
This is post is just full of WTF’s. Freeland seems to be articulating a values based position on a foreign policy issue. It makes little sense has Saudi Arabia is clearly demonstrating their willingness to go full-trump and punish Canada economically for having the ‘bombast’ to ask them to release a blogger they have detained and are torturing (sorry folks, flogging is torture any way you want to slice it.)
It’s sad that I’m feeling so cynical about this particular story, and continue to look for the angle that the Canadian government is not sharing with the press. Like, since when do nations actually take ethical stands on any issue these days? It just isn’t good for business.
I’m going to continue to follow this story folks, because something just isn’t adding up.
Dan Savage on why SSM is a decent, humane institution.
Shutdown this, markets crashing that. Hey, if the Americans want to self-destruct their country maybe they should start with Guantanamo Bay.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…