by frog
I would like to congratulate Sue Bradford for being nominated for the Amnesty International Human Rights Defender Award.
It’s great that Amnesty NZ has kicked off this award. It’s nice to celebrate sporting prowess and business achievement but too often the behind the scenes battlers for human rights get missed out.
Sue has been shortlisted along with four other notable human rights defenders. Ahmed Zaoui’s lawyer Deborah Manning made the shortlist along with;
- Kathleen Dunstall the secretary for the Howard League for Penal Reform.
- Reverend John Stewart Murray. Rev Murray is a co-founder of CARE (Citizen’s for Racial Equality) and he has been involved with the NZ Race Relations Council.
and
- Shamima Ali, Executive Director of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC) in Suva, Fiji.
Published in Justice & Democracy by frog on Wed, December 2nd, 2009
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Yes, I bet he’ll loose sleep tonight trying to decide who he’d vote for!
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Nope. BB’s vote is in. He’s the kind of guy who votes from the heart and it’s a big, warm one. If he could, he’d give Sue two ticks!
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Pity Shane Bond wasn’t nominated.
So BB could vote for him for the best contribution towards our christian boys beating those nasty warmongering muslim paki apologists for jihad – at cricket!
Eh, BB?
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Amnesty International just made my list.
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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What’s a real human right?
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go Sue!
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I don’t suppose this reflects the membership of amnesty int does it?
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I remember when Amnesty was a decent, apolitical organisation which stood for human rights (real human rights that is).
It still stands for the same stuff…just more. I suppose someone thought the smacking thing was a stand against violence or something. I’m a semi-active member and am not necessarily happy with some of this extra stuff. Will be pretty pissed if she wins though.
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I don’t suppose this reflects the membership of amnesty int does it?
Whoever selects the shortlist, probably. It’s possible that we don’t have anything more dramatic because of our lovely stable liberal democracy and all that.
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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Wat,
Given that human rights are a human construction, freedom of speech is no more inherent or ‘real’ a right than education (or ponies!). What’s beyond argument, however, is that education is a right afforded to all by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as is the right to equal access to public services, equal access to medical care, and social protection of children. Sue Bradford worked tirelessly towards all of these goals, and regardless of her political persuasion Amnesty International is doing a good thing by recognising her work.
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mcol,
There is the world of difference between freedom of speech and a free pony: one is what you have while people don’t initiate violence against you, the other is what you have when you initiate violence against others. Human rights, then, are the natural freedoms you have when violence is absent: ponies and education are not among them.
What is the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”? Something handed down from Mount Olympus? No, it’s just something that a group of people (all living at the taxpayers’ expense no doubt) wrote on a piece of paper. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t valid an assertion. It’s just another statist document use to justify attacks on people’s freedoms.
If education is a “right”, then who is infringing that right of the millions of African children who currently don’t receive one? And if education is a “right”, how is it that our tax money is spent only on those in a position to vote for the politicians dispensing this patronage? That’s not rights activism, that’s a mafia state.
Sue Bradford never worked for freedom: she worked to build a state which controls more and more of our lives at the expense of our freedoms. And Amnesty used to be about freedom. Now it’s just one more NGO that wants to forcibly run other people’s lives according to its own statist lights.
It’s sad. I used to like Amnesty.
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Tell me, wat, if you will – how is it that your definition of human rights, which you keep on reasserting, is any more valid than that in the UDHR?
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mcol,
Human rights are what you are left with when you reject violence.
If, instead, “rights” are to be determined by a show of hands, then the term loses all meaning: it’s whatever the mob chooses to allow, and whatever the mob chooses to take from you.
Being a slave-owner is wrong, even if the money you aquire in that manner is spent on what we might both agree is a noble cause. Seizing someone’s earnings to redistribute as you see fit is wrong (and that’s before the process is entirely corrupted through being under the control of self-serving politicians.)
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I frequently call people on this blog ideolouges – and justly so – but wat does, by far, take the cake. James takes the date scones (Yum!), and a select few other ‘libertarians’ take the muffins.
The sultana scones go to phil and the other veganites. Careful, I like to use plenty of authentic butter-nated udder lactate!
….mmmm, date scones….
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Greenfly,
You have it there. That discusting desert suits Wat fine.
The texture, the texture! How discusting! Yuck! Pavlova? Let the aussies have it!
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I’m well aware that liberty is regarded as a dangerous “ideology” around here.
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There are no human rights other than what humans decide to grant themselves. Wat’s definition is closest to what could be regarded as the only true universal right (i.e. one that I would suppose the vast majority of humans would agree with), the right to not be subjected to violence. Beyond that, individual societies might grant themselves rights that are in accord with the values of that society at a point in time. Those rights should be subjected to regular review as society’s values, and means, change.
I think Sue worked for rights that she, herself, thought the society she belonged to should bestow on its members but I don’t recall ever being asked to vote for any of those rights (apart from one, with that vote then being ignored). Just because she passionately believed in those rights doesn’t actually make them right. Some of them, no doubt, would be utterly rejected by some societies around the world, maybe even this one. As such, it’s hard to understand her nomination.
Indeed, when I think of how she distorted the result of that referendum (claiming that the vast majority of New Zealanders voted for the status quo), it’s even harder to understand her nomination. After all, didn’t we confer on ourselves the right to a democratic voice?
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If she wins this award it will be seen as Cronyism.
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How?!
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Actually Wat’s notions of freedom are interesting, particularly the notion that tax of one earnings is theft. Earnings in the form of money is a construct of society, and if in society one presumably chooses to accept some degree of collective responsibility in order for society to continue with as little violence as possible. Is it not a social contract. But if one earns, who is the payer, and from where did the funds from to do the paying/employing. Theft by ones ancestors. Private property itself is a construct.
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