Bungled dealing with of Covid-19 pandemic exposes Britain shamefully using roughshod over human rights, says Amnesty Worldwide

The UK likes to lecture different nations on methods to behave, nevertheless it doesn’t fare effectively within the Amnesty Worldwide annual report on human rights, with its rising disregard for particular person freedoms inflicting severe concern.

There’s a sense of aid upon reaching Web page 378 of the Amnesty Worldwide Annual Report for 2020/21, as you learn the organisation’s findings about the UK’s document on human rights. That aid quickly vanishes.

Earlier than that time, you’d have encountered the evil the same old world basket instances have demonstrated over the previous yr. These traditional human rights infringements are there by the bucketload: the extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture, egregious shows of discrimination in opposition to ladies, kids, ethnic minorities, and lesbian, homosexual and transexual populations, denial of meals, water, sanitation, training, and freedom of expression.

In some nations, residents simply vanish off the face of the Earth and are by no means seen once more. Like magic, however tragic. Not simply in these ‘we-do-what-we-want’ elements of the world like China, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkmenistan, and Nigeria. Persons are disappearing in locations the place many carefree Western vacationers select to take their holidays, like Argentina, Mexico, Egypt, Kenya, Brazil, and Thailand. Pad Thai, anybody?

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Away from the eyes of sunburnt Brits having fun with the golden sands, infinity swimming pools, cocktails and unique dishes, home safety forces hunt their prey with impunity, unbound by the constraints of human rights or interfering Amnesty Worldwide investigators.

And whereas to ‘tut-tut’ and shake our heads in disapproval is sort of an instinctive reflex to the tales of horror, violence and inhumanity discovered within the 408-page report, earlier than stroking your chin and bemoaning how uncivilised civilization is elsewhere, know one factor: Britain doesn’t come out smelling of roses.

The extra you learn of the annual report, the extra you start to really feel that, whereas state-sponsored torture, the mistreatment of total populations, and cruelty to fellow human beings are clear breaches of common human rights, there are extra delicate and insidious contraventions which can be simply as efficient.

In these cases, ruling authorities are encroaching upon freedoms not with weapons and black hoods over the pinnacle, however with undemocratic selections, unchallenged laws, delays to inquiries, and a gradual tightening of legal guidelines associated to social freedoms – all with the compliance of the individuals they govern. 

Just like the UK, for instance, the place Amnesty Worldwide considers the incompetence that reigned in coping with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic – which has seen the nation expertise one of many highest dying charges in Europe – tantamount to a breach of the correct to well being for aged residents in care houses, together with black and Asian well being staff. Many died, in disproportionate numbers to the remainder of the inhabitants.

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Not solely that, however the inquiry which greater than 70 organisations demanded from the federal government into the dealing with of the pandemic has been fobbed off, till some as-yet-to-be-determined date sooner or later.

It’s laborious to grasp why there’s not a large outcry over this. Have we Brits really develop into that docile?

The report additionally expresses issues over how the UK addresses discrimination, about freedom of meeting and the way police cope with demonstrations, about the correct to housing and the best way we deal with ladies, refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants, and the rights of lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender individuals. Just about everybody.

There are worries about permitting counter-terrorism forces and British troopers serving overseas impunity for his or her actions. The identical type of impunity loved by these police and in-the-shadows sorts whose job it’s to ‘disappear’ troublemakers in far-off locations, wherein we’re glad we don’t stay for that very cause.

And but, the place’s the media outcry? 

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Elsewhere, we’re signing arms offers value billions with authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and promoting rubber bullets to American police which they’ll hearth at Black Lives Matter protesters. However that’s simply enterprise.

One thing appears skewed on our ethical compass, which is unusual as a result of our leaders typically discover themselves lecturing to the world about a greater method, about compromise and equity, when in reality, they’re endorsing aberrant behaviour.

As Amnesty Worldwide’s UK director Kate Allen warned 5 years in the past, “There’s little question that the downgrading of human rights by this authorities is a present to dictators the world over and fatally undermines our capacity to name on different nations to uphold rights and legal guidelines.”

She was proper, and issues haven’t improved within the 5 years since then. So after we huff and puff about extrajudicial killings within the Democratic Republic of Congo, or upbraid Kyrgyzstan when police select to disperse a peaceable march on Worldwide Girls’s Day, and even insist that Serbia comes clear about who ordered the removing of the our bodies of 900 Kosovo-Albanians from Kosovo to Serbia in a 1999 cover-up of slaughter, we shouldn’t be shocked once they ignore us.

The issue is that while you play free and simple with human rights, the ethical excessive floor is not yours, and that information travels quick. The Amnesty Worldwide annual report will be sure that of that.

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