The concept of human rights has been widely debated for some time now and spans diverse matters that impact on all of our lives. For some, the concept is academic, for others it is non-existent.  The concept fundamentally consists of rights and freedoms granted to the individual by his or her government and, in Europe, embodied in the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The most significant of those are article 2 (right to life), article 3 (prohibition against torture, inhuman or degrading treatment), article 8 (right to privacy) and article 10 (freedom of expression).

Over the last 30 years, 155 states have ratified the UN Convention Against Torture although recent Amnesty International surveys revealed that over half of its signatories are continuing this practice. And since 2009 torture and other treatments have been recorded in some 141 countries. To quote Salil Shetty, Secretary General to Amnesty International, “Governments around the world are two-faced on torture – prohibiting it in law, but facilitating it in practice”.

Many people think of this sort of conduct in countries far from home, but is our right under article 8 and our freedom under article 10 truly and freely granted to us?

There are significant debates over the value of privacy vs security. Cameras record our every move in the name of security most places we go. The advancement of technology has enabled a safer society as well as a more controlled one. Every keystroke on a mobile phone or computer is recorded – somewhere.

Ray Corrigan, Senior Lecturer on Technology at the Open University whose academic interests lie between law, society and technology, believes that such collection of data is “incompatible with the rule of law – and a healthy society” when it is in relation to “every member of the population” for later “fishing expeditions” seeking out “misbehaviour”.

An independent filmmaker is currently examining these concepts in a new film titled “Interrogating Catherine” described as “a modern day look at government sponsored intelligence, torture and interrogation methods.”

This grabbed our interest here at Translations2u, especially in light of our current expansion into making multilingual corporate films. Anyone who is interested to any extent in human rights both at home and overseas should take a look at this. You can find out more about the film and what’s happening here: http://www.interrogatingcatherine.com/index.html. And if you’d like to help raise awareness of these issues, help out by making any contribution at https://www.fundsurfer.com/project/interrogating-catherine.

References:

http://worldwithouttorture.org/tag/torture-statistics/

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12012P/TXT

http://www3.open.ac.uk/documents/7/rl1412073704271340.pdf