KaleidoScot The Northern end of the rainbow
The Scottish government has today launched a new campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of human rights.
Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Alex Neil, launched the Fly The Flag for Human Rights campaign this morning in Edinburgh with equal marriage campaigners Susan and Gerrie Douglas-Scott.
Fly The Flag aims to change the image of human rights and help people feel empowered to make a claim if a breach has taken place.
New research from YouGov, conducted in early November, has confirmed that one in five Scots believe that human rights are for minority groups only. The findings also revealed that 44 per cent of Scots believe human rights have no bearing on their everyday lives. The new campaign hopes to help people better understand how human rights are relevant, used on an everyday basis and help build a farier society.
Mr Neil said: “Human rights are for everyone, and they should be protected at all costs. As a modern, progressive country we have a duty to uphold the highest standards. Many of us enjoy the benefits that human rights offer without actually knowing much about the rights themselves, and without that knowledge it can be hard for us to reaffirm and protect them.
“It is vital that we build a society where human rights are fully understood…this campaign is vital to increase awareness of how human rights affect our daily lives and help us seek support when our rights are being infringed.”
Referring to the recent tragedy in Paris, Mr Neil said: “We have seen how easily freedoms we take for granted can be threatened. Creating a better understanding of our human rights is important and will help build a stronger and more cohesive society, which is fair and equal.”
Susan Douglas-Scott, who is also a humanist registrar, focused on the fact that LGBTI rights are human rights. She said: “We were the first lesbian couple to have a legal marriage ceremony in Scotland, which was an incredible experience that we’ll never forget. After 18 years together as a loving couple, our relationship had finally been given the same recognition in law and society as all other married couples.”
Fly The Flag has been designed with the support of the Scottish Human Rights Commission and a number of other bodies involved in the implementation of Scotland’s National Action Plan for Human Rights (SNAP).
Professor Alan Miller, who chairs the Scottish Human Rights Commission, welcomed the new campaign. He said: “Evidence gathered by SNAP shows that people don’t have enough awareness of their human rights, or how to claim them. The campaign can help raise awareness and understanding, which in turn can lead to more Scots claiming human rights for themselves, and encouraging public bodies and private companies to do more to respect human rights for everyone in Scotland.”
The Fly The Flag campaign includes a range of online resources and will feature marketing activity across local press and social media. it will run from 18th November until International Human Rights Day on 10th December.
For further information on the campaign can be found at www.onescotland.org
Human rights in Scotland are threatened by the police, prosecutors and courts too.
For example, my human right to associate with others on Twitter has been threatened by the courts imposing a bail condition preventing me from accessing Twitter.
So I can’t even make a tweet with Alex Neil’s #FlyTheFlag hashtag, neither can I read other’s tweets with that hashtag or with any other hashtag or no hashtag tweets – no tweets at all can I read – because of the court bail condition.
My human right to liberty and security, and my freedom of expression was threatened by the police raiding my house, arresting me and seizing my property because the police took offence at my harmless republican political tweets.
Yes of course ISIS terrorists lethal attacks killing people in Paris and elsewhere are so much worse than what the police did to me, but if I had resisted arrest the police could have killed me and I would have been just as dead as Sheku Bayoh from Kirkcaldy who died at the hands of the police.
So it is all very well Alex Neil pointing at the terrorists but he shouldn’t be allowed to paint the SNP government and the Stasi-style police state they run as “whiter than white” as regards human rights because they are far from it.
There are human rights crimes and “blood on SNP’s hands”, to speak, over their unquestioning support for Police Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service even when the police state attacks our human rights.
The SNP Government needs to get its own house in order by sacking their top cops – Stephen House is going but he is not the only bad cop as regards human rights – and also sack government law officers – Frank Mulholland and Lesley Thomson – and the Chief Executive of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Catherine Dyer – human rights abusers one and all – and the government should bring in a whole new police state management team with a genuine commitment to human rights, not just warm words with a quite different reality in practice, however much the police state try to explain away their abuses of our human rights.
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Peter Dow is a Scottish scientist and a republican socialist whose legal human rights are cruelly violated by the police and courts in Aberdeen, where he lives.
Peter Dow’s political defence blog publishes the truth about the wrongful and unjust royalist arrests, prosecutions, convictions and punishments he endures.
PETER-DOW.BLOGSPOT.COM
Google Hollie Greig , human rights is just lip service