The Colonialism of Human Rights. Colin Samson
civic stratification more widely, the concept is:
implicitly concerned with the construction of ‘moral standing’ in society and explores the relations between possession or absence of rights and access to ‘moral and material resources’. Briefly put, the argument is that a regime of rights can both shape and be shaped by the moral standing of a given group in society such that an erosion of standing can undermine the enjoyment of, or claim to rights (civic deficit or civic exclusion), while the denial of rights further erodes moral standing. The converse would also apply, in that the accrual of moral standing in society, perhaps through the intervention of civic activists, can lead to an expansion of rights, or to enhanced enjoyment of a right (civic expansion or civic gain).56
Morris argues that morality is used to construct hierarchies through which welfare rights can be claimed. Her research showed that the British Conservative government used a moral schema to justify cuts and exclusions, juxtaposing ‘hard-working taxpayers’ to morally suspect ‘dependents’. Indeed, ‘class inequality is being written more strongly into citizenship rights’.57 The way in which this occurs, at least in part, is through increasing conditionality on rights, and limiting the application of international human rights in the UK. The British government has recently conceptualized unworthy citizens and migrants within a similar analytic frame that stresses conditionality, thereby narrowing rights, ‘as the treatment of citizens comes more closely to approximate that of migrants’.58 Regimes similar to the colonial differentiation of rights have simply been imported into domestic British social policy. Civic stratification can be a general feature of government policy, as in Morris’ description, or it can be racialized, as with the denial of rights to citizens caught up in the Windrush scandal, as will be discussed in chapter 2.
The results of civic stratification were underlined by UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston’s 2018 report on the human rights implications of UK austerity policies. Alston’s report, substantiated by over 300 submissions, depicted Britain’s poor as including up to almost 50 per cent of children in the country, and, recalling nineteenth-century British middle-class attitudes towards poverty chronicled by Friedrich Engels, called Britain’s social welfare, ‘punitive, mean-spirited and often callous’.59 Public spending per head in England alone is projected to fall by about 18 per cent between 2010 and 2022, and the drastic cuts in public funding for schools, transport and housing will have disproportionately adverse effects on Britain’s burgeoning numbers of poor people.60 The social-welfare benefits and provisions that Britain offers have become more restrictive, through complex rules on eligibility and convoluted digitized access.61 All this translates into vastly different qualities of life and life expectancies, signalling that certain human rights – such as those to adequate standards of living, housing and schooling – are compromised for vast swathes of the British population. Following shortly after Alston’s report, a Human Rights Watch report on food poverty in the UK documented sharp rises in the use of food banks and other indicators of hunger, violating the basic human right to food for vast numbers of Britons.62
Alston’s parallel report on the USA completed a year earlier was even more critical of the extreme inequality in that country – the highest in the Western world. It urged the US administration to acknowledge the important link between social and economic conditions and human rights. While the report is packed with statistical indices to support its conclusions, Alston’s impressions travelling through the USA starkly illustrate the dire situation of the 40 million Americans (12.7 per cent of the population) who meet official definitions of poverty:
I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability and death.63
Alston also details projects, largely from the voluntary sector, that are attempting to address some of these problems, but the overall picture is of a massively wealthy country in which the state presides over the despair and destitution of so many of its citizens. His report was angrily dismissed as biased and ‘politically motivated’ by Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN,64 and in Britain, Theresa May’s Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, brusquely sidestepped Alston’s report saying it was of an ‘extraordinary political nature’.65
These reports and the literature on civic stratification make essential a frame of analysis that centres possession of capital and power as features of human rights. In his essay on the sociological aspects of human rights, Ted Benton summarizes the Marxian position on such rights:
The general outcome of this line of thought is to emphasise the difference between the juridical allocation and recognition of universal rights, and the very unequal de facto ability of individuals to exercise the rights they are formally allocated. Equality under the law is compromised by unequal ability to pay for legal advice and representation, and by the deep cultural gulf between specialised legal profession and many of those who might otherwise benefit from the protection of the law.66
Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission issued a report in 2018 summarizing how these inequalities operate within the criminal justice system in England and Wales: ‘defendants from ethnic minorities are more likely to not trust the legal advice they receive and are more likely to plead not guilty than White defendants, owing to a lack of trust in the system. As a result, they are more likely to lose the potential benefits of early guilty pleas in criminal proceedings.’67 According to the Commission, recent reductions in state funding for courts and legal aid have led to marked disadvantages within the law for those on lower incomes and ethnic minorities. All of this takes place in a social milieu in which hate crimes have increased and the xenophobia associated with the Brexit referendum has not abated. Similar evidence has been presented in the USA, discussed in more detail in chapter 3, indicating that African-Americans have been, and remain, disproportionately represented in the world’s largest prison system, and these disparities are attributed in many studies to a lack of information among prosecutors who fall back on racial stereotypes.68 These are ultimately related to images of black people inherited from slavery, segregation and the history of differential human rights in the USA.
These scenarios also appear in other Western democracies. In France, many people descended from its former colonies live apart in banlieues, and ‘a legal system … distinguishes between those who should and those who should not have political rights and be eligible for social services’.69 ‘Behind the universal model of the deserving citizen’, Fredette argues, lies ‘the specter of a particular kind of French citizen’.70 These differentiations, however, build on fears that human rights would interfere with colonial rule at the time of the drafting of the UDHR and Geneva Convention. Britain was also against establishing the rights of non-European migrants and asylum seekers in European countries, and European colonial powers and settler states were hostile to the broader institutionalization of human rights for colonized peoples.71 The current forms of civic stratification clearly relate to the difficulties of maintaining universalism amid systems of historically continuous racial and class discrimination.
Regarding France, discrimination in the application of rights builds on distinctions made in colonial institutions in Algeria (and later West Africa) which reinforced differences between French settlers who were citizens and indigenous Algerians who were subjects.72