Basic human rights are at risk in the clamour to get tough
NOW they’re all lining up to show us how tough they are. Alan Kelly wants gardaí to patrol the border with Northern Ireland to stop all non-essential travel, coupled with mandatory quarantining for all visitors arriving into Ireland by boat or plane – all part of his ‘national aggressive suppression strategy’ to tackle the coronavirus.
Róisín Shortall thinks the Government’s mandatory quarantine proposals are unenforceable, and dismisses them merely as a continuation of the Cabinet’s ‘lax approach to travel from the beginning’.
Mary Lou McDonald was equally scathing, branding the Government’s suggestions ‘a half plan’. The Sinn Féin boss claimed a lack of political leadership and plain common sense in Taoiseach Martin’s latest plans to suppress the virus.
She wanted what she termed ‘universal quarantine’ for those engaging in unnecessary international travel.
Three leading politicians, all of them determined to impose what would, in effect, be a form of preventive detention on people, most of whom pose no threat whatsoever to others, since most travellers are not infected with the virus.
This rush to curtail civil liberties, to further violate our fundamental right to come and go as we please, is a stark reminder of how populism can lead to bad law.
And bad law is always accompanied by injustice and human misery.
The Government has been the target of entirely wrong-headed criticism this week by those, including leading politicians, who accuse them of sloth-like inaction and delay in introducing measures into law that would help suppress Covid-19.
THE shrill, clarion call for the detention (mandatory quarantining in hotels and at home) of all travellers into Ireland is a dangerous failure to respect the liberal and democratic character of our political set-up. It’s a pandering to the mood of the moment, an appeal to the mob.
Politicians – and the rest of us – may all come to regret what they wished for.
China has been hugely successful in driving down cases of the virus – all on the back of mass surveillance of its entire population through deep-State and openly displayed technologies, the kind that big-brother dictatorships love and keep.
Fundamental principles such as the right to liberty and bodily integrity are mere democratic baubles that the Chinese leadersaid: for-life Xi Jinping and his communist comrades don’t have to concern themselves with. That’s why they could lock down 11 million people in the city of Shijiazhuang two weeks ago, after just 39 cases of the coronavirus were confirmed.
Overlaying all this in China has been a so-called ‘QR code’ which – through ordinary mobile phones – monitors and controls the movements of each and every person in the country. So enthusiastic is Xi Jinping about the success of the QR code that he suggested its adoption globally during the online meeting of the G20 leaders at the end of last year, despite the obvious threat to civil liberties everywhere.
Unsurprisingly, Xi has found a receptive ear in such places as Iran and Russia, countries not exactly noted of late for observing even the most basic human rights.
HUMAN rights advocates are stunned by the dangers Chinesestyle control and technologies pose worldwide. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch said Xi’s proposal for global surveillance in order to defeat coronavirus ‘could easily become a Trojan Horse for broader political monitoring and exclusion’.
And Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends digital privacy and free speech, reminds us of the obvious – when governments get new powers to cope with a particular crisis, they never give them up again when the crisis passes.
He told the BBC how in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 the United States introduced vast surveillance powers. Mr Schwartz
‘Nineteen years later, those powers are still very much in the hands of the US government.’
The Irish Council of Civil Liberties has, quite rightly, expressed concern about a recent law giving gardaí the right to issue on-the-spot fines of up to €500 for those found in breach of the current Covid restrictions which amount, in effect, to house arrest. Liam Herrick says fines, on the evidence, will not be effective and are likely to cause divisiveness and have an uneven application.
In truth, he didn’t get much of a hearing from most people going through what, in reality, is bereavement-style shock and trauma arising from the dreadful effects of the pandemic which have not yet been processed fully, or at all.
The Government’s instinct to hasten very slowly indeed on further legal assaults and curtailments on our rights is to their credit. They should be praised for their liberal democratic credentials, and not harassed by the practitioners of a politics laced with cynicism, easy answers and self-advancement.
Alarm bells are ringing as politicians clamber to curtail our freedoms still further. We all know the risks when governments get a taste for that kind of thing.