Two days ago, I drove to Grand Forks to fetch a relative of mine coming to visit us from the US. The drive was quite pleasant until the stop at the US immigration post at the border town of Pembina. The initial routine check should be simple – passport control, visa check, usual questions, “Where are you going? What will you do there? How long will you be in the US?, etc” But this normal check would trigger a higher level profile check situation. A typical African man driving all by himself to the US from Canada. That certainly does not add up. I was ushered off my rented car and into the police post, passport held all through that period, and every single item in my little carry on ransacked, including my digital camera which had pictures from the last “Festival du voyageur”, my wallet where I still had a city hoppa ticket from my last trip to Nairobi, Kenya about a month ago, and for which I had to respond to questions on what I was doing there. Thirty five minutes later, I had my passport stamped and I was led to a garage like facility where my car had been completely screened. All windows were down, car keys on the dash, my cell phone displaced, and my cd case which sat opened and next to me through the trip flipped shut. I could tell, no part of the car was left unturned as the US immigration performed their duties.
In another unrelated story, Linda (not real name) pointed out that her 6’8” tall African-Canadian son was asked several times at a shopping mall to take down his hoodies. The mall police felt he was a security threat and therefore needed a constant glare at his supposedly “threatening” face which the hoodies “sort of” concealed.
Joanne (not real name) is upset because her Aboriginal friend gets followed around the super market every time she steps into one. “All first nations are shop lifters” therefore, Joanne’s friend must be one.
Today, I started a class in Human Rights Education, where these stories are narrated – simply put, a course that seeks to empower educators and to create a sense of responsibility for human rights education – that of peers, colleagues, students and everyone they come across. One of my professors mentioned the need for us to change our mentality, educate ourselves about how and what we feel, and perhaps, that would change the way we carry ourselves.
This is one view of the class. The very liberal extreme which supports the rights of the child, of the woman, and advances the principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Human Rights Education is not just the preserve of those within the confines of the university where most students have been empowered in one form or another on their rights to education or other rights for that matter, but to the external also, where the lay person on the street needs to be informed of their rights as captured within the UDHR.
As I reflected on this socially accepted or commons approach to human rights, I came across a friends post on a social networking site. His view is that once you have stepped foot in a country that may be an “axes of evil” you should automatically be profiled, stored in a security database and your every move monitored including every purchase or phone call you make, every vehicle you drive, rent, own, and every plane ticket you purchase. My immediate response was to question the criteria for which such persons are profiled. And if only a trip to a “wrong” country is enough trigger for enlistment to a security database then this database will be full in no time with the wrong profiles and security checks at border posts will result in wrong positives. This is another extreme.
And between both extremes lie a spectrum of various thoughts ranging primarily between safety and security on the one hand and the rights of a citizens on the other; a police state versus a liberal, social commons environment. The separation of rights between the blocks of civil and political; and economic, social and cultural – the dichotomy that rips through society like knife through butter. This lifelong division comes as result of the justiciability and the resource implications of the later group.
Koch (2006) would argue otherwise, “The reluctance to accept economic, social and cultural rights as justiciable rights is closely linked to the conception of these rights as vaguely worded and resource demanding.” Yet the current situation post 911 calls for justiciability and budget resource allocations.
To my friends social networking site, I argued that enforcement could be a solution to this issue but a rethink of the socio-cultural climate may be what is needed to effectively tackle the security problems we have at our border posts.
By extension, a change in self introspection, a mental psyche of our being, and a whole speak of internal positivity might do us some good in the way we walk with a spring, talk with confidence and show that we are aware of our rights as humans but it does not in anyway change several aspects and attributes of our being that automatically places us in the negative eye of socially and environmentally influenced, media biased, and security conscious perceptions. This is but one side of the coin in the human rights equation. The external factors – context and society, plays an equally important role in what I would call the balance of human rights. Paulette Regan (2005) in quoting Taiaiake Alfred, suggested that “this can only be achieved through a decolonizing struggle on both sides. Our respective paths in this struggle are different, but the goal is the same” pointing to the fact that a meeting point at the center can only be reached when a commensurate movement takes place from the other direction. Some of this action may require a change in perception, the way one is perceived by the public, addressed by and related to one, perceptions of your race, culture, clan, community, country of origin, etc. This extreme also has to change.
An African would always be one. “A leopard cannot change its spots.” A native Canadian could become more socially and economically positive about themselves. But it does not change the way they are accosted at the airports, shopping malls and supermarkets. This is the questioning and the crux of my reflections – to what extent is the UDHR a protection of the rights of global citizens, as it claims to be?
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Ida Elisabeth Koch (2006), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Components in Civil and Political Rights: A Hermeneutic Perspective, The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol 10, No. 4, pp405-430
Paulette Regan (2005), A Transformative Framework for Decolonizing Canada: A non-Indigenous Approach
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