Ask Gary (Unknown)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist (Unpublished)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/06

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re back with another ‘Ask Gary’. We’re at the cusp of the election, so that should be borne in mind when this is published as a retro retrospective perspective. So, we got some big exciting news come from Humanist International. One; we had elections, we had the AGM, and we have the freedom of thought report basically out or coming out. 

Gary McLelland: Coming out on the 10th of December which is International Human Rights Day.

Jacobsen: 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

McLelland: That’s right which I’m sure everybody has magnetically attached to their fridge. The general assembly or the AGM I think was actually a big success. We were very worried about it and in effect we organized four general assemblies that year. We organized a conference which was supposed to take place in Miami; of course, Corona virus stopped us doing that. Then we organized a second general assembly which was supposed to be a general assembly which would take place by proxy. So, the idea was that the member representatives would send their nomination papers or their voting papers to five or so representatives who could attend the meeting in person spaced out and that they could transact the business but there were a few objections to that which were quite fair. So, the staff was tasked with trying to find a way to do it electronically.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I’m very skeptical. In fact, I’m not even skeptical, I’m against online elections because I think they are just very problematic in a number of ways. You can’t verify who’s voting and so on. I mean in the context of the US election obviously, well okay maybe not in the context of the US election because it’s not my business to poke around in the US democracy but in an abstract sense, I think electronic voting for States for elected officials is just really wrong. One of the good things about in person voting is that in order to do fraud at scale, it’s almost possible. You could probably impersonate your neighbour if you know their address and their details or whatever but the idea that you could replicate that across a statistically significant part of the vote to therefore make a difference is just impossible but with electronic voting anything becomes possible. You can use hashes or blockchains or something to create unique user identifications but as soon as that’s stored on a storage device or uploaded via an insecure network link or whatever then the entire security of the ballot is broken.

Basically, I’m very skeptical of online voting. However, it’s probably true to say that voting for our…doesn’t pose such existential question for the world. Therefore, the risks of it being tampered with are quite low. So anyway, we managed to find a system which does all those things I mentioned about; it uses hashes and it generates secure links using check summon tokens and these other methods and it’s also completely anonymous or pseudonymous, we know who voted but we don’t know which individual, etc. So anyway, we found all the software to do that. Our members responded very well. We actually had the highest attendance at a general assembly that we’ve ever had, so there’s about just under 100 people attended voting delegates that is from our 120 member organizations. It was a great success and we have a more diverse board than ever.

Anya Overmann was elected the president of Young Humanist International as well as Dr Leo Igwe and Debbie Goddard who were elected to our board and Anne-France who was re-elected as our vice president. So, it’s really an impressive number of candidates. The one thing is I think because we tried to organize the general assembly, the overriding priority was that it was done efficiently and safely and looking back it could have been more participatory let’s say and there wasn’t that much opportunity for discussion and debate and things. It is difficult to replicate those things online. Obviously, you can’t have a 100 people having conversations with each other on a platform like this because it wouldn’t work like it would do in person. Nonetheless, we managed to conduct the business. The election results were like 98% turnout and stuff like that. So, I think it’s been done safely, securely, and obviously with the trust and ascent of our members which is what we need.

Next year’s general assembly is scheduled to take place in Kathmandu towards the end of the year. We’re going to review in February whether that’s actually feasible. It looks certainly for those of us in the northern hemisphere, as we head into our winters that the Corona virus is going to probably spread quite a lot more, seems to be what most of the data shows and of course if we’re thinking about having a meeting this time next year in the northern hemisphere. That raises a big concern about whether it will be feasible. So, I guess we need to see if the authorities can develop and then roll out to build citizens of the world a suitable vaccine and I’m skeptical as to whether we have the logistics to do that. If we’re not able to meet in Kathmandu we will probably have another online general assembly and we’ll try and devise a way of making that more exciting, participatory, and more like an actual general assembly rather than just the bare minimum legal that we’re required to do. So, that’s that. I forgot what else you asked about.

Jacobsen: The freedom of thought report. What is Uttam’s analysis of it happening in Kathmandu?

McLelland:  Well, at the moment Uttam is quite hopeful that the event can go ahead. He says that the virus doesn’t seem to be presenting as much of a problem in Nepal as at least it seems to be here. I can only really speak in detail about the situation in the UK because it’s the one I’m experiencing but, in the UK, today is Friday the 6th of November, we just entered yesterday another national lockdown and the UK treasury has taken on the task of paying the wages of any employees who are affected by this situation until the end of March which is really quite an astonishing thing. I mean there was estimates that this was going to cost 5 billion pounds per week and we’re talking about a situation that’s going to last for 5 months at 5 billion pounds a week. I mean the money that’s being generated is just kind of phenomenal. So anyway, that’s just to say that at least my perspective here in the UK is that the situation is grave. We’re also preparing for our national health, at least the warnings are the National Health System here could be overwhelmed by Corona virus meaning that people who need anything else from the Health Service will not be able to be seen which is kind of scary; the first time this has ever happened since the health service was created in the 50s.

So, at least that’s my perspective looking at things and I can’t really say much more in the detail about it other than that Uttam feels quite confident can go ahead. I’m very skeptical. We’ve agreed to review the situation in February and in February we’ll either make a firm decision that it will go ahead or to cancel it because one of the other things like every other organization we’re trying to prepare for is the loss of opportunity costs. So, reviewing like 20120 as a whole, I think our staff team responded very well to the situation that happened. However, we did burn a lot of resources by constantly planning and replanning things that had be in the end cancelled. I said we organized four general assemblies because we kept on changing the plans as the situation developed and of course that burns up resources because you spend time on something which doesn’t happen. So, we’re trying to be quite firm that, we might make a decision to cancel in February and then the situation improves drastically but at least we won’t have wasted time planning an event that doesn’t happen. So, we’re trying to kind of take that mentality across all the work that we do. 

Also, I think it’s only fair that we give people clarity on what they can expect. I know for example a number of people had planned to visit Miami this year including me and also to take a holiday or a vacation at the same time to take advantage of being a different part of the world and then those all of those events have to be cancelled.  So, I think we’re just mindful that we want to be a little bit careful about committing to something that we can deliver. So, that’s Corona virus. So, we’ll wait and see what happens in Nepal. It’s very difficult to make a prediction at this stage but by February we will at least we’ll make a decision either way. 

On the freedom of report; yes, we are now ready to launch the 2020 freedom of thought report. The launch event will take place on the 10th of November. You can see details on either our website or our Facebook page. The launch event is going to be a recorded event which will be premiered live on the 10th of November which will basically be a short presentation by the new editor of the report which is Emma Wadsworth-Jones, who’s the humanist risk coordinator. She replaced Bob Churchill who left the organization last year. He was the inaugural editor of the freedom of thought report who really brought it into being back in 2012. So, Emma’s taken over as editor. She’ll make a short presentation about the main findings in the report and then Andrew Copson, our president will share a discussion about the findings of the report with Debbie Goddard who’s the vice president of American Atheists along with Fred Davy who is one of the commissioners of the United States Commission on freedom of religion or belief which is a new, I think it’s called a non-executive agency of the US government but basically it’s an arm’s length body established by the US government to advocate for freedom of religion or belief.

Jacobsen: Is it bipartisan or nonpartisan?

McLelland: It’s nonpartisan although it does because it’s kind of non-executive, they rely on annual funding from the state department. So, the commissioners are appointed by the presidential administration. So, like a lot of things in US politics, you can probably see those appointees as being nominated by certain political parties but the work they do is nonpartisan and the commission itself does not take a political stance other than that their commissioners may be in their personal lives political if that makes sense. We’ve worked quite closely with the commission on the cases like Mubarak Bala and others and the US for all that would be critical of it in terms of foreign policy on freedom of religion and belief. This commission does seem to be doing a lot of good work. They’re willing to take on cases like Mubarak and advocate for them and they can take the influence and the standing of the United States and they can say things that the government can’t because they’re a non-executive body, they have more freedom to be outspoken. For example, they’ve released press releases tweets and statements. So basically, they can take the…of the United States but it’d be more outspoken than the government is all the point I was trying to make. So, Fred, Debbie, chaired by Andrew. We’ll also have Ahmed Shaheed, who’s the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion and belief, the longest job title in the world.

Jacobsen: [Laughs] It’s not.

McLelland: It’s not? 

Jacobsen: The Special Rapporteur on occupied Palestinian territories is the longest.

Mclelland: Yeah. 

Jacobsen: He’s a Canadian. The longest one I have heard of is Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. 

McLelland: That’s quite specific.

Jacobsen: That’s a sentence, that’s not a title. 

McLelland: Yeah, that’s a long one to be sure. So, the panel like I said, will consist of Debbie, Fred, Andrew, and then we’re also going to have Emma of course. We’ll also have a very special guest… who’s a guy called Mohamed Cheikh Ould M’khaitir, which you may remember he was actually featured in the 2014 issue of the freedom of thought report. He was detained in 2014 in Mauritania. He is a humanist and an anti-slavery advocate and he was held for many years in solitary confinement on death row and we were the first organization and largely the only organization to take up his case and advocate on his behalf. So, when he was released by the authorities and transferred to Europe last year, we sent a member of staff to go meet him which was an amazing thing. So, he’s going to join the launch event and speak in Arabic, so we’re going to have him translated and talk about his experiences of being a humanist at risk and what it’s like to receive support from Humanist International and all the rest. So, that that’s going to be a good event.

I should say the theme for the report this year, we always give it a sort of theme, to try and pick out some of the relevant moments; is covid-19. No surprise there, it’s the present theme of everything at the moment but really what we want to try and pick out is the increased effect that covid-19 has had on humanistic risk. We report examples of people who are unable to leave their homes or their communities. We’ve had examples of forced praying within homes and communities, we’ve had examples of people who are fleeing from harm being stuck and being denied consular assistance, been denied access to asylum services and we’ve also seen a really worrying rise or increase in cases of domestic violence. Also, we’ve seen for example in the case of Mubarak Bala and others states using the restrictions placed on them by covid-19 as an excuse not to follow the rule of law. We’ve seen it sort of weaponized in a way to try and undermine access to legal services and legal defences and things like that. 

Jacobsen: Gary, thank you so much for your time.

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