future tense: security and human rights
Increasingly, geo-political movements against terrorism, the protection of national security and defense of ‘universal’ human rights are defining this post-9/11 era. The spotlight of the international media is shining brightly on instances of the protection, or more often the abuse, of basic rights and freedoms for peoples around the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, with a plan ‘to secure a better future for all the peoples of the world’.1 However all is not going according to plan. As Christine Chinkin notes, ‘The universality of human rights standards is challenged as abuses are committed in the name of religion, custom and tradition…in the post 11 September 2001 environment…’.2
The current media-glare often results in darkness-to-light narratives of abuse and punishment, the characters in the story represent victims and villains, justice and injustice, compassion and cruelty. The binary axis of human rights reportage, upon which the world’s media seems to turn, is suspiciously familiar, pointing to colonial ancestry. It is remarkable how the world’s media is creating a ‘them and us’ scenario around terrorism and human rights, so like that of colonial rhetoric. Then, the colonised were ‘them’; the colonisers were ‘us’. In an unfortunate linear progression, coloniser and colonised are now pronounced as terrorisor and terrorised in the world’s media where the recognisable terrorist advances in a monolithic vanguard across international human relations.
In the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Future Tense: Security and Human Rights’, Caroline Turner points out that rarely in human relations can we see a simple case of right and wrong.3 What Turner, and co-curators of Future Tense Simon Wright and Pat Hoffie, identify as