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Our decision to pursue the future of human rights, populism and politics came about because we were intrigued by current governments and political movements globally that threaten our human rights. To understand how this could have detrimental effects on our future we decided to split this project into the past, present and future. This knowledge would give us the background to formulate ideas about what the future might hold. We realised that in the past, what looked like seemingly harmless pieces of legislation over time compounded with mass misinformation and propaganda allowed a government to discriminate against a particularly vulnerable group without much opposition, the end state often leading to human rights violations. These events have happened throughout the world and are occurring today on both sides of the political spectrum. Our rapidly evolving technology is not helping us to stay away from such disasters, in fact through surveillance, AI and social media, it is significantly easier to discriminate groups and polarise populations. We encourage every single one of you to pay attention to what is happening in our country and around the world so that we don’t slowly give our human rights away.
I find the social credit system to be egregious, but it has shades of other political systems where wealthy donors are rewarded by governments for their support, whether that be through government contracts, tax cuts, peerages or otherwise. Would you say that this has a similar effect to the Republic of China’s social credit system where those who conform to the governing Party are rewarded whereas those whose interests don’t align with the Party, or who cannot afford to donate to the Party, are swept aside? Do you think this could also lead to potential human rights issues or is it perhaps not as serious?
I think I would largely agree with your statement John, and indeed we can see this just now in the UK with the controversies with the PPE contracts. A notable example in China would be the artist Ai Weiwei, who has repeatedly criticised the Chinese government and investigated corruption on their part, leading him to essentially become exiled. I would argue that those “left behind” by the social credit system in China, either through non-conformity or non-participation are already having their human rights abused as they are being denied access to better services or jobs, or even being imprisoned based purely on their political persuasion or even their personal interests, denying them their right to freedom of expression.
I think this presentation is excellent. You give great insight and evidence into past, present and future impacts of populism on human rights. Your project is fundamentally built on a brilliant idea. You make a connection between two ideas and explain the correlation between the two. Great job.