Rwanda is a permanent state of exception... Wait what?!

I saw Romeo Dallaire speak last month in Halifax but have studied the Rwandan genocide before. This is truly something that speaks to the cowardice and ineffectivness of the UN system in some cases, but more importantly speaks to the nature of human rights.

Declaring all humans equal means that there is a duty beyond state borders, and beyond measures of citizenship, and beyond ethnicity or culture to ensure that those rights are upheld.

I'm not saying human beings are not inherently equal. If anything, I believe that we are all capable of equally different and important things. From my own experience I know that given the opportunity, different people can succeed.

What I am saying is that if we truly buy into the theory of human rights, and all the facile rhetoric of the UN on human rights, then it requires a large shift away from our current modes of government. Human rights leap across boundaries of the state, and so must the ways we can enforce them.

As it stands, only citizens are guaranteed rights in a country; provided that said country has any constitutional or charter rights in the first place. But if human rights are guaranteed to folks because they are human, then what is the difference between a citizen and a human? Citizens have human rights, but non-citizens don't even though they are obviously still human.

You can say this is because the state's power and jurisdiction only matters over a certain area of land, making their laws only affect so many people; but with human rights a claim is made further than law can grasp, and you can see just how ineffective 'law' and the 'state' is. All that is needed to 'legally' torture someone is to make them not a citizen, soldier, or anything, so that you can lock them up in Guantanamo bay indefinitely (for example).

So there is a disconnect here between what is human and what is a citizen, and this is what a very smart man named Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception; where it becomes normal to have juxtapositions like this in our everyday lives. In this way, Rwanda forced us to look at the permanent state of exception that we all live in here in Canada (or any other developed nation), we guarantee human rights within our country, but refuse them to non-citizens, and as members of the UN we guarantee human rights to all on earth, but then refuse to enforce them.

Next time you defend human rights, make sure you know what they entail. Next time you think about Rwanda, think about the plaque outside Dachau that reads "never again" in various different languages. Think about what it will involve to truly never let things like this happen again. You might notice there is a common theme here that is required to avoid genocide, deal with hatred, and talk about human rights.

You have to think about it.