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Word of the Week: w/c 01/02/16 - Genocide

31/1/2016

 

The act of systematically trying to wipe out an entire race or people

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The term Genocide was first used in in 1933 by the Lawyer Raphael Lemkin in a paper presented to the League of Nations (the body that later became the UN) to describe the atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians between 1915 and 1918.

The act of systematically trying to wipe out an entire race or people was formally made illegal under international law in 1946. The UN defines the act as being “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. There of course have been many terrible historical examples of such acts ranging from The Holocaust (see last year’s WOTW; Shoah), the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the slaughtering of Muslims in the Bosnian War and the Civil War in Rwanda.

But how do such terrible events come about? They certainly don’t just occur overnight and indeed build up over years or decades. We would all like to believe that such an event could never happen in our own time and nation, but one can easily envision that this was also said by ordinary Germans in the 1930s or by Bosnians in the 90s. www.genocidewatch.org suggests that there is a process that tends to occur, based on the work of Gregory H Stanton:
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One might argue that to ensure that we never reach stage 7, Extermination, it would be very sensible that we ensure we never even get to stage 1. But can you think of any groups in our society that may already be classified as different? Travellers (Gypsies) and significant populations of immigrants in the UK both strike me as groups that certainly run the risk of being classified as different - programmes such as “My big fat Gypsie Wedding” seem to fan the flames of such classifications. Whilst the actions of one particular landlord in Middlesbrough reported last week in The Times also serves as another example of behaviour that could contribute to the later stages of Stanton’s model.

This week our Year 11 IGCSE pupils will take part in a visit to Northwood Synagogue where they will hear directly from a survivor of the Holocaust. This is only one part of the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to make young people more aware of the events of the past so they can ensure that it never happens again. To use the slogan of HMD 2016 #Dontstandby
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Word of The Week: 26/01/15 - Rights

25/1/2015

 


The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are considered to be entitled, often held to include the rights to life, liberty, equality, and fair trial, freedom from slavery and torture and freedom of thought and expression.
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The history of Human Rights could be argued to go back as far as Cyrus the Great when he freed all the slaves in Persia and declared that people had the right to practice whatever religion they chose. One can track their history and development in documents asserting individual rights such as the Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, the US Constitution, The French Declaration on the Rights of Man, The US Bill of Rights, the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the European equivalent.

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The founding principle of these documents seems to be that humanity has intrinsic value – either due to a religious reason such the existence of a soul or for logical reasons such as the fact that we all have the same DNA and are all members of the species Homo Sapiens.  

On Thursday 22nd January, Martin Chamberlain QC came to address our Philosophy Society on the need to continue to have human rights enshrined in law. He first set out the arguments used by those who would remove human rights in the belief that civilised societies automatically protect the rights and liberties of their citizens. This was summed up in the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves”. Mr Chamberlain suggested that although on the surface this sounds honorable in reality this is “tyranny by the majority”.


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Mr Chamberlain then went on to outline why this was the case based on the thinking of scholars such as John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill; that in a democracy, if an individual is wronged, who can he appeal to other than the majority? If the individual is not supported by the majority they risk being victimized or subjected to violations of their rights. This is why there must be an independent judiciary and intrinsic human rights to protect citizens.


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Now the discussion moved onto a number of cases where there has been an appeal to the Convention on Human Rights to ensure that justice is done – some of these were cases where Mr Chamberlain was the acting barrister. These included prisoners arguing for the vote, the death of Baha Mousa, the deportation Abu Quatda and the issue of Free Speech. The talk concluded with a discussion of the Charlie Hebdo case and how selective governments can be about the right to free-speech – the Human Rights Convention is needed to ensure that justice remains blind and that all are treated with equality and impartiality.

The talk was extremely well received by our pupils and this was demonstrated in high quality of questions that they asked in response. These included whether there are any situations when human rights can be legitimately be ignored, if the British government should develop an independent Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and whether verbal abuse should be treated in the same way by the Law as physical abuse.

For Berkhamsted students, a video of the talk will be available on the learning platform.

Do you think we don't need to have a Convention on Human Rights? Or are they essential for justice to be done?


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