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Peter Kellner speaks at the Winter 2015 Index on Censorship magazine launch event at the British Library in February 2015. The panel discussion coincided with the publication of Drafting freedom to last: The Magna Carta’s past and present influences to mark the 800th anniversary of the document’s drafting.
Peter Kellner is president of YouGov and a contributor to Index on Censorship magazine. Kellner discusses the results of a YouGov survey about rights across seven European democracies and the United States. Full results are available here.
As far as I know, North Korea is the only significant country whose citizens have never been polled. Everywhere else, it is possible to discover what people think on at least some issues; and in the world’s democracies we can ask about the most sensitive social and political topics and obtain candid answers. In less than a century, and in many countries less than half a century, opinion polls have given people a voice of a kind they never had before.
It is against this backdrop that I chose the topic for my final blog for YouGov, before stepping down as president. The rise of polling in different countries has accompanied the spreading of democracy and human rights. We can do something that our grandparents never could: find out which human rights matter most to people – and to do it, simultaneously, in a number of countries. In this case we have surveyed attitudes in seven European democracies and the United States.
This is what we did. We identified thirty rights that appear in United Nations and European Council declarations, in the British and American Bills of Rights and, in some cases, are the subject of more recent debate in one or more countries. To prevent the list being even longer, we have been selective. For example, we have omitted “the right of subjects to petition the king”, and the right of people not to be punished prior to conviction, which were promised by Britain’s Bill of Rights. Matters requiring urgent attention in one era are taken for granted in another.
Even so, thirty is a large number. So we divided the list into two, and asked people to look at each list in turn, selecting up to five of the 15 rights from each list that “you think are the most important”. This means that respondents could select, in all, up to ten rights from the thirty. This does not mean that people necessarily oppose the remaining rights, simply that they consider them less important than the ones they do select.
This is what we found:
Those are the main facts. Each of them deserves a blog, even a book, to themselves. It’s not just the similarities and differences between countries that are significant, but the variations between different demographic groups within each country. (For example, British men value free speech more than women, while women place a higher priority on the rights to free schooling and low-cost health care. Discuss…)
Nor does this analysis tell us about direct trade-offs. How far are people willing to defend free speech in the face of social media trolls – and habeas corpus when the police and security services seek greater powers to fight terrorism? (Past YouGov surveys have generally found that, when push comes to shove, most people give security a higher priority than human rights.)
The results reported here, then, do not provide a complete map of how human rights are regarded in the eight countries we surveyed. But they do give us a baseline. They tell us what matters most when people are invited to consider a wide range of rights that have been promoted over recent decades and, in some cases, centuries. It is, I believe, the first survey of its kind that has been conducted.
It won’t be the last. Understanding public attitudes to human rights, like promoting and defending those rights, is a never-ending task. It is also a vital one, just like giving voters, customers, workers, patients, passengers, parents – indeed all of us in our different guises – a voice in the institutions that affect our lives. Which has been the purpose of YouGov for the past fifteen years and will continue to be so.
See the full results of the survey.
This article was originally posted at yougov.co.uk and is posted here with permission.
(Photo by Rama (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.0-fr], via Wikimedia Commons)
In the recent United States midterm elections there was controversy over the Republican’s use of voting restrictions to prevent groups — who they assumed would vote Democrat — from access to the polling station. The voter ID “fraud” laws have been accused by liberals as a shady measure to attempt to reduce voting by racial and ethnic minorities. It would also affect young people who lacked the supposedly necessary identification.
Voting age is another example of an ongoing debate surrounding this issue. Sixteen-year-olds were allowed to vote in the Scottish referendum earlier this year. Since then, people have questioned whether the voting age should be reduced to 16 for the upcoming UK general election, and whether sixteen year olds are capable of making a well informed decision. And if voting is an act of free speech, does this mean prisoners should have the opportunity to vote? If voting is truly a human right should we all have the right to vote?
This article was posted on 12 November at indexoncensorship.org
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
Listening to Indonesian politicians campaigning for this year’s elections you could be forgiven for thinking that freedom of religion is not a problem in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population and that all is well when it comes to interfaith relations.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
Just because freedom of religion rarely makes an election theme doesn’t mean that everything is all right. And don’t take the word of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono either, who in May received an award from the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation for promoting “religious tolerance”.
Speak instead with the followers of Ahmadiyah, the Muslim Shias, various Christian denominations and other minority religious communities. They will tell you, mostly in private, of their fears along with stories of persecution and harassment, sometimes involving violence by hard-line Islamic groups, and often with the tacit approval of the government.
To religious minorities, the fact that no politician has bothered to take up the issue and that the majority of Sunni Muslims are keeping silent, Indonesia is anything but tolerant. The problem is growing due to this official and public denial in Indonesia that it even exists.
The religious minorities also know they are missing out on the opportunity to make their case before the nation during this election year because most politicians would consciously avoid talking about religious freedom in their campaigns.
Indonesians will be voting twice this year, first for their representatives in April and second for their president in July. A new government will be installed October.
This will be the nation’s fourth democratic elections since it deposed strongman Suharto in 1998. Indonesia has since won accolades as one of the few successful countries to make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
Its leaders often boast that Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy after India and the United States, and the largest democracy among Muslim-majority countries. Religious tolerance has even been touted as one of the recipes for the country’s success.
Indonesian diplomats have been involved in establishing and promoting interfaith dialogues at bilateral, regional and international levels. In August, Indonesia will be sure to showcase its democracy and religious tolerance when it hosts the annual meeting of the UN Alliance of Civilizations.
Indonesia’s democracy, however, has one big flaw: It is quickly turning into a simple majority rule, and this means that when it comes to religious issues, the voices of religious minorities are drowned out by the voice, or even the silence, of the Muslim majority.
While religious moderation still prevails, religious minorities feel that often the Muslim majority stretches their tolerance too far to include tolerating religious intolerance. Their silence in the face of reported religious persecution is disturbing.
Muslims, predominantly Sunnis, make up about 86% of Indonesia’s population of 250 million.
Religious minorities coming under persecution have learned that sometimes it is better to keep silent and not draw too much public attention to themselves. In some instances, those who have spoken out against their ill-treatment have earned the wrath of more Muslims and the government.
Typically the victims were blamed and came off worse. Some Ahmadiyah, Shiah and Christian leaders have gone to jail on various pretexts. Charges have ranged from blasphemy for preaching their beliefs to building permit violations in connection to places of worship. Worst of all, some religious minorities have been targeted for disturbing the peace by their mere existence.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of Ahmadis have been lingering in makeshift shelters for years in East Java and West Java because their homes, schools and mosques have been vandalized or even razed to the ground by radical Islamic groups.
Dozens of Shia followers in East Java are living in shelters after they were hounded out of their village in 2012. The provincial government has told them that they would be able to return on condition of renouncing their Shia beliefs and “return to the right path”.
A Shia leader last year saw his jail term doubled to four years by the High Court and later upheld by the Supreme Court for spreading his teachings, something that the court considered blasphemous to the “real Islam”. Two men who led the mob to vandalize his house and attack his followers in Sampang received eight months imprisonment.
This is a repetition of the 2011 controversial court verdicts that sentenced an Ahmadiyah follower, whose house in the Cikeusik village in West Java was raided in a fatal attack, to six months imprisonment, the same or higher than what the assailants got.
Last year also saw Palti Panjaitan, a priest with the HKBP Filadelfia Christian church in Bekasi, just outside Jakarta, tried in a court for “assailing” a Muslim leader who had joined a mob to taunt and harass him and the Church followers outside his church.
This has resulted in the congregations of HKBP Filadelfia, and that of GK Yasmin Christian church in Bogor, another township adjacent to Jakarta, conducting their Sunday prayers outside the Presidential Palace in Jakarta every week in protest of the government’s failure to protect and uphold their rights to conduct services.
President Yudhoyono has obviously not heard their prayers yet.
In both cases, the local government has refused to reopen their churches in defiance of Supreme Court rulings that supported the presence of the church and the right of the people to conduct prayers there.
Religious minorities in Indonesia may have given up hope on President Yudhoyono helping their case. But at least they have some comfort knowing that, come October, a new president will be in power: Yudhoyono cannot return for a third term.
Freedom of religion may not be an election issue, but no doubt the new president will be reminded that their oath of office includes a pledge to uphold the constitution, which clearly stipulates an obligation to guarantee and protect freedom of religion.
Democracy still gives some hope.
This article was originally published on 6 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
The EU might be able to help Belarus democratise, but it can’t solve its problems for them. Andrei Yahorau and Alena Zuikova examine a nuanced relationship