Peter Kellner: Which human rights matter most?

30 Mar 16 | News and features

Peter Kellner speaks at the Winter 2015 Index on Censorship magazine launch event at the British Library.

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:

  • The right to vote comes top in five of the eight countries (Britain, France, Sweden, Finland and Norway), and second in two (Denmark and the United States – in both cases behind free speech). Only in Germany does it come lower, behind free speech, privacy, free school education, low-cost health care and the right to a fair trial.
  • In all eight countries more than 50% select free speech as one of the most important rights. It is the only right to which this applies.
  • Views vary about the importance of habeas corpus – the right to remain free unless charged with a criminal offence and brought swiftly towards the courts. It is valued most in Denmark (by 49%) and the United States (40%). In Britain, where habeas corpus originated in the seventeenth century, the figure is just 27%.
  • Rights to free school education and low-cost health care are selected by majorities in six of the eight countries. The exceptions are France and the United States. In the US, this reflects a different history and culture of public service provision. In France, unlike the other six European countries we surveyed, financial rights (to a minimum wage and a basic pension) come higher than the rights to health and education.
  • France is out of line in three other respects. It has by some margin the lowest figure for the right to live free from discrimination – and the highest figures for the right to a job and the “right to take part with others in anti-government demonstrations”
  • Few will be surprised that far more Americans than Europeans value the right to own a gun (selected by 46% of Americans, but by no more than 6% in any European country) and “the right of an unborn child to life” (30%, compared with 13% in Germany and no more than 8% in any of the other six countries).
  • The French and Americans are also keener than anyone else on “the right to keep as much of one’s own income as possible with the lowest possible taxes”. In the case of the United States, this is consistent with limited expectations of public-sector provision of health, education and pensions. With France it’s more complex: public services do not rank as high as in the six other European countries, but jobs, pay and pensions matter a lot. In their quest for security, income AND low taxes, many French voters appear to make demands on the state that seem likely to lead to disappointment. Perhaps this, as well as the lingering memory of France’s revolutionary past, explains the enthusiasm of so many French voters on both Left and Right to mount anti-government demonstrations.
  • In Europe, property rights matter less than social rights. In Germany only 6% regard ‘the right to own property, either alone or in association with others’ as one of their most valued human rights. The figures are slightly higher for France (14%) and Britain (16%) and higher still in the four Scandinavian countries (20-29%). Only in the United States (37%) is it on a par with the rights to free school and low-cost health care.
  • There are striking differences in views to rights that are matters of more recent controversy. In most of the eight countries, significant numbers of people value “the right to communicate freely with others” (e.g. by letter, phone or email) without government agencies being able to access what is being said). Four in ten Germans and Scandinavians regard this as one of their most important rights, as do 35% of Americans. But it is valued by rather fewer French (29%) and British (21%) adults.
  • Much lower numbers choose the right of gay couples to a same-sex marriage: the numbers range from 10% (Finland) to 19% (US). This is a clear example of a reform that, separate YouGov research has found, is now popular, or at least widely accepted – but not considered by most people to be as vital a human right as the others in our list.
  • In six of the eight countries, many more people value “the right of women to have an abortion” than “the right of an unborn child to life”. The exceptions are France, where both rights score just 13%, and the United States, where as many as 30% choose the right of an unborn child to life as a key human right, compared with 21% who value a woman’s right to an abortion. The countries with the strongest support for abortion rights are Denmark and Sweden.

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.

#IndexDrawTheLine: Are voting restrictions a free speech violation?

12 Nov 14 | Draw the Line, Young Writers / Artists Programme

By Rama (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.0-fr (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

(Photo by Rama (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.0-fr], via Wikimedia Commons)

The right to vote has long been a symbol that you are seen as a valuable and worthy citizen by your government. The removal of this right is a restriction on your free expression and your ability to contribute to change in your country. But is restricting our right to vote a violation of free speech?

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

Indonesia’s democracy is no guarantee to freedom of faith

06 Feb 14 | Indonesia, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture

(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)

(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