Tag Archives: Human Rights

When Calm Is Not Enough

Douglas Adams fans will know that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has the words “Don’t Panic” inscribed on the front cover in large friendly letters. Useful advice in challenging times, because panic implies thoughtless and impulsive action.

In contrast, in a recent substack essay, Sandro Galea offers a thoughtful and philosophically grounded argument for equanimity in times of political and institutional upheaval. His call is for calm, intellectual humility, and measured action—especially in the face of uncertainty, polarisation, and erosion of trust. And his argument is rooted in moral seriousness and philosophical tradition. His invocation of stoicism, pragmatism, and the idea that passion should be channeled, not indulged, is both admirable and deeply needed in many contexts.

There are certainly lessons in the essay for me, because I am not beyond the cathartic tweet and angry rant.

Nonetheless, even while I appreciate his concern about performative outrage, alarm fatigue, and the risks of losing strategic focus, I worry more that equanimity will not fully meet the gravity of the current moment.

Calm is positioned as a centrepiece of a rational response, but in the face of authoritarian drift, this may not be true. Galea rightly warns against seeing every disagreement as existential. But in some cases, that is exactly what they are. And here I must be careful. By “existential” I do not mean that human life will cease to exist. I do mean, however, that political traditions that hold the rights of the individual as core, are at existential risk. The current political landscape—marked by widespread disinformation, open contempt for liberal norms, and attempts to consolidate executive power through legal, rhetorical, and administrative means—is not a policy disagreement. It is a strategic project to transform liberal democracy into a performative, illiberal system.

In such a context, remaining calm (which is different from not panicking) is quite possibly the least rational response. It risks underestimating the nature of the threat—a threat that deliberately weaponises chaos, disorientation, and norm erosion to exhaust democratic opposition. When “everything, everywhere, all at once” (EEAAO) is the strategy for destroying a liberal democracy, false calm doesn’t preserve clarity—it masks danger. We become the poached goldfish cooking in the ever warming water.

Equanimity can blur the line between a policy disagreement and an ethical breech. Galea urges restraint in response to funding cuts, institutional restructuring, and ideological pressure. But what if these are not just isolated matters of administrative efficiency or political difference? What if they are tools in a broader campaign of harming the very system of government best designed to preserve the interests of the people? And that is exactly what the EEAAO strategy would suggest they are—autocracy trumped up as a policy disagreement.

When thousands are dismissed from public health agencies, when HHS disseminates misinformation about vaccines, when the infrastructure for climate science is actively dismantled, when court orders are ignored, when immigration laws a weaponised to silence dissent—this is not a policy disagreement. These are tactics with critical consequences, and they demand a response that acknowledges their moral stakes. Calm analysis may aid clarity, but when calm becomes habitual, it risks normalising that which should provoke action.

Equanimity is not ideologically neutral unless both sides approach an argument with the same calm. And this is one of the structural challenges in Galea’s framing. Equanimity is easier for those with institutional protection, social capital, and professional standing. It can become a posture of the “polite center-left”—technocrats, academics, and professionals committed to liberal norms—even while those norms are being strategically exploited or dismantled by authoritarian actors.

The political right in the U.S. has repeatedly shown a greater willingness to break norms, delegitimise elections, and mobilise extra-institutional power—sometimes violently. The political left, especially its center, remains norm-bound and institutionally deferential. This asymmetry means that equanimity, when over-applied, can function less as a virtue and more as a strategic vulnerability.

The threat of violence is asymmetrical. Before the 2020 election, journalists and political scientists openly worried about the possibility of civil war in the U.S.—largely premised on a Democratic victory being treated as illegitimate by the right. Those fears proved partially correct: Trump lost, and an attempted insurrection followed. In contrast, after Trump’s 2024 victory, those concerns vanished—not because the threat disappeared, but because the side most prone to violent refusal of democratic outcomes had won.

This reveals a deeper point: a center-left government is far more likely to provoke armed reaction than an authoritarian right-wing government is to provoke institutional noncompliance. Equanimity in such a context does not meet the moment. It plays into the imbalance and helps normalise a tilted playing field.

Triage under fire requires more than calm—it requires strategic urgency. “Don’t panic” is the better guide. In a war zone, triage doesn’t require serenity—it requires adrenaline management, urgency, and the ability to act decisively under pressure. Calm may feel virtuous, but if it becomes a default stance, it can dull the moral reflexes at precisely the moment they must be sharpest.

Not every act of protest needs to be loud. The language does not have to be obnoxious. But when the fundamental institutions of public health, science, and democracy are being deliberately undermined, a more direct, even disruptive, form of resistance may not only be justified—it may be morally required.

Sandro Galea is right that equanimity is not the same as inaction. And he is right that outrage alone does not build durable progress. But like any virtue, equanimity must be applied with discernment. When the rules are being rewritten, when the democratic compact is under open threat, and when harm is immediate and lasting, too much calm may serve not wisdom but delay—and delay is its own kind of complicity.

I admire Galea’s clarity of tone and seriousness of thought. My disagreement is with how best to meet a moment shaped not by healthy debate, but by coordinated disruption. In such times, clear-eyed, unpanicked urgency may better serve the cause of justice than calm.

The Hanging Garden of Human Rights

Human rights haven’t failed because they’re irrelevant. They’ve failed because they’re a hanging garden—detached from moral roots, stretched by competing claims, and hollowed out by politics. It’s time to reclaim the foundation.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, health and human rights was emerging. But the field carried intellectual divisions. On one side were the public health practitioners—many without legal training—who used the language of “rights” as a cry for decency. Rights, for them, became a sharper way of saying “ought” or “should”—signalling fairness and ethical urgency.

To the lawyers, this was infuriating. When they spoke of rights, they weren’t talking about moral gestures. They were talking about the law—about using legal instruments to empower action. What do treaties require of duty bearers? How do we hold them to account? General Comment 14 wasn’t a metaphor. It was a legal tool—an authoritative interpretation of the right to health under international law.

While the lawyers stayed with “human rights,” others drifted towards a more explicit discussion of equity, fairness, and (natural) justice. The split revealed a foundational problem. Human rights—the narrower legal and procedural endeavour—had become crucially detached from the ethical instincts that once animated the field.

The narrowing of human rights to law provided rigour, but lost moral reach. And as states learned to ignore legal obligations with impunity, what remained was often hollow. Public health had a moral language without teeth. Law had a legal language with contradictions and a weak ethical foundation.

Today, the international human rights framework is fraying—and in danger of complete collapse. It’s not a failure of aspiration. It’s a failure of structure.

We appeal to fairness, but we disagree on what fairness means. We invoke rights, but the legal instruments offer an incoherent and contradictory account of what grounds them. And when rights collide—speech versus protection, work versus life—we have no principled way to resolve the conflict.

Too often, the international human rights framework is treated as if it’s free-floating. The rights are asserted without grounding, and negotiated without foundation. We’ve built a symbolic garden of human dignity, but it hangs untethered—detached from root and soil.

What we need, I contend, is a moral structure beneath the legal scaffolding. Something that explains not just what rights exist, but why they matter—even when they’re inconvenient, unpopular, or costly.

A Different Kind of Foundation

The traditional approach to grounding human rights is to seek a foundation in reason, drawing on various traditions of moral philosophy. Yet each of these traditions—necessarily, though often implicitly—relies on a set of foundational assumptions that themselves demand justification. For example, John Rawls, working within the liberal contractarian tradition, assumes that morality can be derived from radical impartiality (the “veil of ignorance”). John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, as utilitarians, treat utility—happiness—as the basis of moral judgment. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic theologian rooted in natural law, posits God not merely as a theological claim but as a rational necessity. Immanuel Kant, the deontologist and perhaps the most rigorously reason-driven of all, grounds morality in the capacity for rational self-governance—the idea that to be moral is to act only on principles one could will as universal law.

Unfortunately, reasoning our way to good behaviour does not seem to have worked.

An Axiomatic Approach

An alternative approach is to work backwards. Rather than deducing rights from reason, we ask: what must be true for rights to make sense at all?

Three axioms emerge:

Inherent Dignity

Every human being possesses inherent dignity. It’s not something to be earned, granted, or achieved—it’s a moral condition intrinsic to personhood. Dignity doesn’t fluctuate with ability, social contribution, or behaviour. It’s not comparative. It doesn’t admit degrees. It is equal and inviolable.

Individual Welfare

Dignity, while inviolable, is not self-executing. The social and legal order must promote the material, psychological, and social welfare of individuals—so they can live, develop, and participate meaningfully. Without these conditions, dignity is betrayed in practice, even if affirmed in theory.

Constraint on Expendability

No one is expendable. Lives cannot be sacrificed for the convenience or benefit of others—except under conditions of compelling and justified moral necessity, subject to strict and transparent constraint. Where institutions permit suffering for efficiency, or render individuals invisible in pursuit of “greater goods,” moral collapse has already occurred.

These aren’t ideals. They are constraints. They don’t define utopia. They define a moral floor beneath which no system can fall and still claim legitimacy.

Axioms to Rights and Duties

From these axioms, rights and duties follow:

From dignity comes the right to recognition, and the duty to respect others as full moral equals.
From welfare comes the right to the conditions for flourishing, and a duty to assist when the need is real and the cost is bearable.
From non-expendability comes the right not to be sacrificed, and a duty of restraint—to avoid complicity in systems that treat people as disposable.

These are not grounded in legal agreement. They are grounded in the foundational, moral necessity.

Once one begins to play with this axiomatic approach, what fast becomes clear is that the state, as a moral agent, has been miscast in international law. The state is not a de facto rights-holder, nor is it a source for the rights of others. The state is a duty bearer—nothing more.

The state exists to protect dignity, promote welfare, and prevent expendability. When it fails to do this—systematically, persistently—its legitimacy erodes. Its existence is not self-justifying; i.e., the purpose fo the state is not to perpetuate its own existence. Its existence is contingent.

This flows from the axioms, and reframes the conversation: human beings do not have moral standing because the state recognises them. The state has standing only to the extent that it honours the people within its reach. This is not anti-state. But it is deeply sceptical of the idea that the state’s authority is morally primary. It isn’t. People are.

When Systems Fail

The axiomatic approach is pluralistic, but it is not permissive. Some systems are structurally incompatible with these axioms. For example, autocracies treat rights as contingent on loyalty or usefulness. Dissent is punished not because it is wrong, but because it defies power. Theocracies, in contrast, base human worth on belief and compliance to doctine. The person becomes secondary to divine law—as interpreted, of course, by the state. In both autocratic and theocratic systems, rights are conditional. Recognition is revocable. Worth is earned.

The axioms say otherwise. Dignity is inherent. Welfare is required. No one may be discarded.

It would be wrong to claim that the axioms are an expression of “Western values.” The expression of these kinds of ideas can be found across tradition in Asia, Africa, and the pre-colonial America. They are put forth as minimum moral thresholds. The test isn’t, thus, one of cultural conformity to some putative “Western” ideal. The test is whether the system respects the moral worth of the people within it.

Against Relativism. And Democracy.

Some people will simply not agree with the axioms. They will argue that certain groups—racial, ethnic, religious—are less than, sub-human. That outsiders are un-deserving. That dissenters are worthless. Life is to be instrumentalised for some other end.

Relativism, when pushed far enough, accommodates this. It permits anything, so long as it is “culturally accepted.”

The axioms say: no. Some practices are beyond justification.

Nor do the axioms necessarily support democracy. Majority rule is not a moral guarantee. A vote to discard a minority is still a failure. Democratic decisions must be constrained by moral principles.

Power alone is not a justification, whether the source of that power is autocratic, theocratic, or democratic. Justification is determined by what power does. Too often, might is blight.

Holding the Line

The axioms emerged from a simple realisation. Many communities, political parties, and even nations now openly argue that the value of other people’s lives lies only in how useful they are to the ambitions of those with power. The human rights framework is under siege—not just from external enemies, but from those who claim to defend it. You can see this everyday in the statements and actions of leaders (and wanna-be leaders) around the world. Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central, South and East Asia, Oceania and the Americas—everywhere leaders seek to treat some group as “other”. “Those people”—outsiders, the un-deserving—are no longer means to allowed to be the means to their own ends, they are the means to ours.

States invoke rights while violating them. Institutions look stable but are morally hollow.

The axioms of dignity, welfare, and non-expendability do not resolve every conflict. But they clarify the ground. They give us a framework to test law, policy, ideology—and to know when a system has failed, even if it looks orderly.

You can read the full account, with examples and theoretical detail, in the preprint on SocArXiv:

But the core is simple:

People matter. Their lives must be livable. And they cannot be discarded.

I am shocked these ideas are up for debate.

This blog was first published on 24 May 2025 and further edited on 7 June 2025

Parasitising Human Rights

A snail glides slowly from the shelter of the underbrush into the sunlight. One of its eye stalks (ommataphore) pulses with an unnatural rhythm, swollen, brightly coloured and weirdly attractive. A thrush spots the movement and swoops down, drawn to the flickering lure, pecks off the stalks and flies away.

The thrush was fooled. What it mistook for a juicy caterpillar was a parasite seeking a new host. The parasite, Leucochloridium paradoxum, is a trematode that infects a snail and turns it into a self-destructive zombie. The life cycle is simple: bird eats parasitised snail, parasite reproduces in bird’s gut, bird defecates, snail eats infected droppings. Once the parasite has been eaten by the snail, it hijacks the snail’s behaviour. It migrates to the snail’s eye stalks and drives it out of the safety of the underbrush and into the sunlight, where it will lure a bird to eat it. Rinse and repeat.

It was only very recently that I realised that the Christian far-right groups had adopted an analogous strategy to attack the international human rights framework and women’s rights in particular.

The Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD) and its companion, the Women’s Optimal Health Framework (WOHF), function with unnerving similarity to the apparently tasty snail. They are each packaged in the shiny and appealing language of “optimal health”, “human dignity”, and “family”. They infiltrate the human rights system—not to strengthen it, but to hijack it, disguising regressive aims as a legitimate rights discourse. Once absorbed by a State-host, the State is zombified to re-present the regressive framework in shiny, deceptively appealing language waiting to parasitise the next State.

The GCD was first presented to the United Nations as a letter under Donald Trump’s 45^th Presidency of the United States. It was an initiative of the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a fundamentalist Christian. Borrowing the name of the City of Geneva, made famous by its association with refugees, human rights and the Geneva Conventions, the GCD is neither supported nor endorsed by Switzerland nor the the Republic and Canton of Geneva, nor is it adopted by the UN.

The GCD document opens with lofty and appealing commitments to universal human rights and gender equality—pulling deceptively and disingenuously on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It declares that “all are equal before the law” and that the “human rights of women are an inalienable, integral, and indivisible part of all human rights and fundamental freedoms”.

Once consumed, there is a parasitic turn. The GCD reverts to a framework that reduces women to vessels and vassals in service to cells and states. The foetus is elevated. It is endowed with rights that eclipse those of the woman herself. She becomes a fleshy bag—nutrients in, baby out—stripped of the autonomy to define her own purpose or direction. The role of the State shifts. It is no longer the guarantor of individual freedom but the authority that dictates what a woman may or may not be allowed to do. “The family”—a surprisingly labile cultural concept—is suddenly reified, declared “the fundamental group unit of society,” as if its meaning were fixed and universal. The document commits fully to a vision of a society where the population serves the State, and women serve the population—with the least autonomy.

Health is a human right as is the right to healthcare. The GCD and the WOHF want to parse this, playing a game of reductio ad absurdum. You might have a right to healthcare, they argue, but you do not have a right to an abortion. As if it makes sense to say you have a right to healthcare, but not if you have scabies, rabies, HIV, or malaria. Pregnancy is not a disease, but it does require healthcare and that care may include the termination of the pregnancy. A woman’s purpose is not reproduction—servitude to a foetus.

Men, too, are caught in the parasitic zombification. They should not mistake their apparent elevation in these structures for freedom. They lose something fundamental. Choice. Authoritarian gender orders assign roles to everyone. Power is not granted—it is rationed and always conditional. The State grants status for obedience and identity in exchange for submission. Those assigned dominance are especially bound by its terms. This constraint brooks no dissent. In a society of freedom, you can find your own place. In a society of roles, your place determines you.

These zombified States do not act alone. The US-backed Institute for Women’s Health promotes the destruction of women’s rights, replacing evidence with sleek visuals and rhetorically based policy tools. The materials are presented as neutral frameworks but embed deeply conservative ideologies—valorising motherhood, framing women’s worth through familial roles, and avoiding any substantive discussion of sexual rights.

States that adopt these frameworks serve as megaphones, amplifying anti-abortion and anti-diversity policies in UN negotiations and global fora. This is not a grassroots movement for gender justice. It is a top-down project of moral, political, and social control, disguised as health policy.

The GCD and WOHF are not neutral initiatives. They are a parasitic ideological vehicle that masquerades as progressive while advancing regressive policies. Their true function is to infiltrate human rights systems, hijack the language of empowerment, and turn States into agents of restriction.

We must name this strategy for what it is: a parasitic ideology—designed to deceive, manipulate, and replicate. Human rights advocates must remain alert, resist co-option, and expose these frameworks not just for their content, but for the insidious strategies they deploy.

The only antidote to such parasitism is clarity, resistance, and the refusal to surrender universal human rights to the State.

Scaffolding Human Rights

I walked through the Place des Nations in Geneva today where the iconic Broken Chair sculpture was completely covered in scaffolding. I couldn’t help but wonder: are we witnessing routine maintenance, or an unintended commentary on the state of global human rights?

Broken Chair covered by scaffolding

The Broken Chair has stood in the square since 1997. It was originally commissioned by Handicap International (now Humanity & Inclusion) to raise awareness about landmines and cluster munitions. At 12 meters tall, it’s a prominent feature of the landscape, and dwarfs passers-by.

Its location is significant. The sculpture faces the United Nations’ Palace of Nations and is surrounded by the headquarters of key UN agencies: the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). This area serves as a global center for human rights advocacy and international diplomacy.

Over time, the Broken Chair’s symbolism has expanded. While it still represents the impact of explosive remnants of war, it has come to embody the broader struggle for human rights and dignity. Its three-legged design, with the shattered fourth leg, is a metaphor for the delicate balance required to maintain peace and protect human rights. Civil society groups advocating for the end to a war, freedom from torture, the right to bodily autonomy, or some other right often use the Chair as a backdrop to their rallies.

Seeing the Broken Chair encased in scaffolding today made me reflect on the current state of human rights. We are in a world where rights are being progressively eroded by political appeals to national sovereignty and cultural superiority, or by military force—the global right of might. Challenges range from ongoing conflicts and displacement to the st

rategic disregard of international norms and values. The need for strong support systems for human rights has become increasingly evident.

As the Chair needs scaffolding, so too do human rights. While we wait for the Chair to emerge renewed, let’s not forget that human rights do not exist in a vacuum. They require nurturing and renewal, and when they are under threat, they need defending.