The Trouble with Non-Fiction
What happens when human rights discourse enters political speech? Is it robbed of its meaning?
An article recently posted on the BBC chronicles the difficulty in measuring human rights violations - even when the alleged perpetrator releases ‘official’ statistics. The unfolding conflict in the South Ossetia region of Georgia is one such example. Russia has announced that there are 1,500 casualties, with no meaningful break-down of the numbers.
“The problem here,” the local Human Rights Watch Director is recorded as stating, “is that when Russia puts out a figure like that it does two things - it distracts attention from where there are violations and from the real scale of what is happening.”
Even when investigations are non-fictional, the results can be far from clear.
View the article here.
–Deji Olukotun
