The Scottish Government has abandoned its Human Rights Bill, but as the causes of migration multiply the struggle for cultural rights continues, writes Robert Rae.
Once upon a time, the Scottish Government displayed an admirable independence of thought in the international arena. It was telling, then, that at a time when Israel was stretching the credibility of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to breaking point, the Government announced that its much-heralded incorporation of Human Rights into Scottish law was to be postponed. To be fair, the Cabinet Secretary responsible, Shirley-Anne Somerville, did come to Scotland’s inaugural annual Human Rights Conference to explain to the assembled and disgruntled rights movement exactly why they had been marched to the top of the hill and then unceremoniously stood down. The rationale she offered was that more time was needed to work out the new legislation’s tricky relationship to devolution. The suspicion in the room however was that there would have been plenty of time within the incorporation process to do that, and that the decision had more to do with the outcome of the recent general election. After losing two First Ministers in quick succession, both with a declared commitment to Human Rights, had there been a lessening of commitment at the top of the ruling party? Time will tell, but the comment by one of the leading university academics felt about right: if she had had her fiddle with her (she happens to be a talented player) the moment would have warranted a sad slow air.
The Scottish social movement that has developed over the last few years around Human Rights is led by a passionate group of law professors, which gives a clue as to how complex it can get. That a theatre and film maker like me has got wrapped up in it all indicates its breadth. I’m not an academic or a politician and spend much of my professional life creating and shaping frames in which stories can be communicated on stage or screen. This is a personal take on a developing story and its meaning.
By way of a simplified political analysis: as the Tories set about building a far-right identity around a willingness to denigrate and ignore human rights legislation whenever it got in the way, the Scottish Government set about cementing our difference by incorporating those rights and more into Scottish law. Bravo! The academics started to work out how to do it, the third sector responded enthusiastically to the potential difference it could make to the lives of the people they represented, and others with feet in both camps began to work out how to ‘make rights real’, both in terms of the responsibilities of those who would have a duty to uphold the new law, and the routes available to those who needed ways of ensuring their rights were upheld. Years of thought and planning and energy, encouraged and supported by the Government via Task Forces and Departments, was to have culminated in the Scottish Human Rights Bill, which, with cross party support, was to become the law of the land this year. Hence the widespread disappointment when it was unexpectedly dropped from the legislative programme. That disappointment now shows signs of turning into genuine anger, with murmurings of betrayal. Another defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
The Rights We’re Denied
The Bill was set to incorporate major UN Treaties, as well as conventions against all forms of discrimination against women and racial discrimination, and provisions on the rights of persons with disabilities. It was to incorporate a new right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The Bill to ensure that children enjoy their rights, as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), came into force in July this year. It was when this was moving through the required legal processes south of the border that tricky issues around devolved competencies emerged and provided a rationale for the proposed delay in legislation. From the breadth of the different intersectional concerns expressed in the various treaties and conventions, you can begin to appreciate the breadth of interests represented within the rights movement. With so many acronyms things get complicated, so along with over a hundred other organisations, we became members of the Human Rights Consortium Scotland. Check out their website for more details.
Who are we? We are an organisation called Art27 Scotland set up to explore cultural rights in practice (and theory). Our name comes from Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” ICESCR, which was incorporated into the Bill, recognises in Article 15 the right to “take part in cultural life”. As artists often working in a community-based context, like colleagues in other sectors, we glimpsed an opportunity to create a fundamental shift in policy. We soon discovered an international dimension and joined a global movement. Cities such as Barcelona have adopted Cultural Rights as the basis for developing and implementing a new radical cultural policy (Fem Cultura) which led to a shift in distribution and focus of resources along the lines that socialists and radicals had long been advocating.
What Are Cultural Rights?
Culture includes our ways of life, the identities we choose, the meaning we give our lives, our language, traditions, rituals – the list goes on to touch upon most of the things that define our humanity – as well as how we express these in music, dance, theatre, literature, visual art, design, architecture, and film. This broad definition of culture may make it difficult to monitor and easy to sideline, but when a person’s Cultural Rights are being denied, so are their rights to be valued as human and to be protected.
I’ve been working recently on a project with victims, survivors, and combatants in The Conflict along the border in the North of Ireland. In the play a British soldier describes how he was systematically taught to reduce the humanity of his enemy – which in this case was the Nationalist community – to the point where he regarded them as less than human and so was able to intimidate and ultimately kill them. It was only when a series of events led him to experience them as full human beings that he began to realise what he had become. Diagnosed with PTSD, he recalls that the most significant part of his journey was when he’d been assigned to accompany a group of disabled young people from Newry on their annual outing to watch Celtic play. His experience of their unguarded welcome and their joy and excitement in the expression of their cultural identity shifted something inside him that couldn’t be reversed.
I’m lucky enough to have visited Gaza before its destruction to meet the many artists working in the community. I’d regularly use one of the six door taxis that ferried people along the strip from city to city, stopping whenever there was room to let people in carrying shopping and even livestock. They were full of laughter and respectful curiosity. Memorable visits included a progressive deaf school run by a Swiss head teacher. The girls were immaculately turned out in their gingham summer dresses and shiny white socks. I talked into the night with actors struggling with the practical difficulties they faced in staging an Athol Fugard play. I met disabled activists working on a charter to enshrine Disabled Rights into a Palestinian constitution and joined workshops with music teachers struggling with children who hid under their desks whenever a car backfired. Despite all, people were warm, hospitable, and proud of their world-famous cuisine, just as anyone encountering the Palestinians in Scotland today will testify. It is sad and shocking then to have to report on the recent experience of Gazan children here in Scotland, where despite having lost immediate family members, they report a common experience in schools of having to remove any expression of their culture in case it “upsets other pupils”. One boy was removed from class when he began to explain that a song he had shared was from Palestine, some have been asked to remove Keffiyehs, one girl was stopped from collecting for Medical Aid for Palestine despite the fact that weeks before she had been fundraising for Ukrainian children, and another was stopped from decorating their pencil case with a map of Palestine, disturbingly reminiscent of the experiences of school children in the Occupied West Bank.
A Lesson from Little Ireland
Our ongoing collaboration with the Palestinian community is part of Art27’s programme of work in Edinburgh’s Southside where, by working with artists who share first languages, we engage through Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Polish and English. Thanks to the mosque and the university, it is the most diverse area of what is officially Scotland’s most diverse city, a place where, like in cities across the world, people connected digitally live simultaneously in two or more places. When researching for our intervention, locals told us that despite the diversity there was no place in which to share and experience each other’s culture, and they wanted one. That became our mission, to create community by developing a space that was accessible to all, a place where they could express and share their culture. Opposition came from those determined to protect the community spaces on behalf of traditional users and, when pushed, the idea of traditional users coalesced around a notion of working class. The people we engaged with were more than likely in the precarious gig economy, working as drivers or in hospitality, on the lower end of the wage scale and living in the kind of accommodation they could afford, so why were they not regarded as working class? The communities themselves identified racism as being the source of their exclusion.
Not so long ago there was an area of the Southside known as Little Ireland. It sat in the arches under the bridges that connect the Southside to Princes Street, many of its dwellings had no light and minimal sanitation, however they provided Irish migrants with cheap accommodation as well as the comfort and security of being amongst one’s own. When Gaelic speakers left home to find work in the cities, they gravitated to the poorer working-class areas that offered affordability as well as the company and guidance of people who shared their culture and spoke the same language. It is no different today. Diverse cultures have always been a part of working-class place-making. And as the causes of migration multiply, with climate change and war, the need for human beings to migrate to survive will not lessen. More and more of the world’s population will live in cities and consequently those cities will become home for many different cultures. It comes as no surprise then that cities across the world are turning to the mutual respect expressed in cultural rights as a basis for stability founded in human dignity, and as an alternative to the rising tide of fascistic solutions, rhetorical or real. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that whatever barriers states erect, the ingenuity of those seeking safety will find a way through. Is the ‘solution’ then to allow one cultural group to annihilate another using murderous force to create what the powerful culture perceives as a safe homogenous state? History has shown us where that ends. Or is the alternative the mutual respect generated by knowledge and understanding of each other’s culture? Surely recognising the right of all human beings to a cultural life offers a happier way forward.
Robert Rae is a theatre and filmmaker, currently Co-Director and artist in residence with Art27 Scotland.