Tag: zero tolerance

Parliament Passes Bill To Punish Those Who Attack Healthcare Workers

The government had brought the ordinance on April 22, to amend the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, to make incidents of violence on health workers treating COVID-19 patients a non-bailable offence.

New Delhi: The Lok Sabha on Monday passed legislation that provides for up to seven years in jail for those attacking healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus or during any situation akin to the current pandemic.

The Epidemic Diseases (Amendment) Bill, 2020, will replace an ordinance issued in April by the government. The Rajya Sabha has already passed the bill on Saturday.

With the Lok Sabha giving its nod, it will soon become an act, which is going to amend 123-year-old legislation.

The government had brought the ordinance on April 22, 2020, to amend the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, to make incidents of violence on health workers treating COVID-19 patients a non-bailable offence, with provisions of a penalty and a jail term of up to seven years.

The bill intends to ensure that during any situation akin to the current pandemic, there is zero-tolerance to any form of violence against healthcare personnel and damage to property.

Under the proposed act, the commission or abetment of such violence will be punishable with imprisonment for a term of three months to five years and with a fine of Rs 50,000 to Rs 2,00,000.

In case of causing grievous hurt, the imprisonment shall be for a term of six months to seven years and with a fine of Rs One-Five lakh.

Replying to a debate on the bill in the Lower House, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said this was empowering legislation and states could make additions to the act.

Also read: Cabinet Clears Ordinance to Punish Violence Against Health Workers, IMA Withdraws Protest

The ordinance has given a very strong message to perpetrators of violence against medical professionals and health workers during the pandemic, Vardhan said.

“We have all noticed that there has been a dramatic decline in the incidents of violence against health workers all over the country,” he said.

Vardhan explained that the ordinance had to be brought as incidents of harassment and violence against health workers were rising amid a lack of awareness about coronavirus.

“Everyone was feeling sad and bad. That was the time the Government thought of taking a proactive step. When the Government reviewed, it found there were minimal laws and powers in some states. There was a need to have a central law to put in place a prohibitory mechanism to stop such activities,” Vardhan said.

With regard to certain objections raised by members from opposition parties regarding some legal flaws in the Bill, he said the bill had been drafted after taking legal opinion.

Adhir Chowdhury of the Congress said it seemed that the Government had brought the Bill in haste as certain provisions were an area of concern.

As the saying goes, “haste makes waste”, he said, adding: “I would request the Government to send the bill to the standing committee and comprehensive legislation should be brought in.”

Under the bill, there is a provision that says the offender would be presumed to be guilty of the offence unless proved otherwise by the accused defender, Chowdhury said, adding that this was an incomplete deviation from the principles of the country’s criminal law.

Bhartruhari Mahtab of the BJD and Kalyan Banerjee of the TMC also raised legal lacuna in the bill and wanted the government to consider changes.

The Health Minister said, “our government from the last 3-4 years is working on a National Public Health Act to comprehensively deal with issues related to biological emergencies”.

Subhash Bhamre of the BJP said healthcare workers should be allowed to work in an environment free of abuse. He said 68,000 healthcare workers had tested positive for coronavirus so far and 500 doctors had lost their lives due to the infection.

Bhamre said when doctors were working round the clock, donning PPEs, which makes it difficult to work, and without caring for their lives, the healthcare workers should get the respect they deserve.

T Sumathy Thangapandian of the DMK said the bill talked about violence against healthcare personnel during the pandemic, asking what would be the case after the pandemic ended.

Kalyan Banerjee said West Bengal already had legislation that provides protection to healthcare workers. He said the states should be authorised to take a decision on the punishment.

K Suresh of the Congress cited various instances when healthcare workers and doctors were attacked during the pandemic.

CERN Suspends Physicist for Sexism, Acting Sooner Than Other Institutions Have

Swift action against offenders is almost unheard of, even if an institution has evidence that someone in their employ has been making its campus an unsafe place for women.

Earlier this week, a physicist named Alessandro Strumia was suspended by CERN after he made sexist and misogynistic remarks at a presentation at the multinational European lab. The scandal, such as it is, was first reported by Buzzfeed News, which also stated that Strumia stood by his views following the suspension.

Strumia was speaking at a workshop on “gender and equal opportunities in the field” of theoretical high-energy physics and cosmology. High-energy physics concerns, among other things, the study of fundamental particles like the Higgs boson. Apart from being a visiting scientist at CERN, Strumia is a professor at the University of Pisa, Italy.

His views echoed those made by James Damore, a former junior engineer at Google who had circulated a controversial memo among his colleagues in 2017. Damore had alleged that attempts by the company to promote women’s participation in decision-making were not meritocratic and was reflecting in poorer team performance. He was fired shortly after, but not before triggering a lopsided public debate on whether women were in fact as good as men when it came to certain kinds of tasks.

In his talk, Strumia implied that there is no sexism in physics and that politics was to blame for the perception that there was. According to Buzzfeed, “Also, he claimed, there’s a wider variation in intelligence among men compared to women – which would mean that the smartest men tend to be smarter than the smartest women.”

One slide in his presentation showed that he had not been hired for a position at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics even though his papers had been cited far more than that of a woman hired for the same position.

Page 15 of Alessandro Strumia's presentation at CERN on September 28, 2018. Credit: CERN

Page 15 of Alessandro Strumia’s presentation at CERN on September 28, 2018. Credit: CERN

Several physicists from around the world as well as from CERN have since signed a strongly worded statement rejecting Strumia’s views, calling some of his claims a manifestation of “academic arrogance” and contesting all of the data he presented in his defence as being either incomplete or inapplicable.

A physicist and a biologist wrote in the New Statesman that Strumia was just banking on “bad science”: “Cherry-picking data to justify injustice is unacceptable in any venue, but to use pseudoscience to legitimise sexism at scientific meetings is an insult to the field.”

While Damore was lower down in the internal hierarchy at Google, Strumia holds important appointments and has made presentations at particle-physics conferences. Just as his words likely had a stronger effect on younger scientists in his community, his swift suspension by CERN has sent a strong message to a scientific community, and the academic world in general, already roiled by charges of gender discrimination and harassment.

Since a high-profile astronomer named Geoff Marcy was outed as a serial predator who had harassed numerous female students at the University of California, Berkeley, between 2001 and 2010, multiple allegations of harassment and bullying have surfaced in news reports and on the social media against various top researchers and intellectuals around the world.

Those accused include geneticists Inder Verma and Francisco Ayala, philosophers Thomas Pogge, John Searle and Avital Ronell, geologist David Marchant, anthropologist Brian Richmond, historians Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gopal Balakrishnan, lawyer Sujit Choudhry, astronomers Marcella Carollo and Timothy Slater, astrophysicists Lawrence Krauss and Christian Ott, and molecular biologist Jason Lieb. This is not an exhaustive list and also excludes academicians who remain unnamed in various other allegations.

Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy. Source: YouTube screengrab

Geoffrey Marcy. Source: YouTube screengrab

It is on the sidelines of this controversy that people like Damore and Strumia, and even Nobel laureates like Tim Hunt and James Watson, have been making their remarks. And it is also in the context of the unedifying response of university departments that the action taken against Strumia, at least by CERN, stands out.

CERN’s diversity policy, part of its ‘Code of Conduct’, states among other things that contributors will “promote inclusiveness in the workplace in terms of both personal characteristics and professional abilities,” “abstain from and actively discourage discrimination in all forms” and “refrain from unpleasant or disparaging remarks or actions, in particular on the basis of sex, age, religion, beliefs, nationality, culture, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, status at CERN, disability, or family situation.” This formed the basis of Strumia’s suspension.

“In the last few years, both the policies and their enforcement have changed significantly for many organisations,” Theodore Hodapp, director of project development and senior advisor to education and diversity at the American Physical Society, told The Wire. “This shift has made it clear to many individuals that if these rules are violated, there will be real consequences for individuals that have violated the rules.

Also read: What a Spat Between Two Scientists Tells Us About Sexism in Science“Consequently, the reporting of violations and subsequent enforcement of these rules have become much more aggressive.”

At the same time, many other institutions around the world – including the ones with which the people mentioned above were affiliated – have similar policies of their own, also often including a “zero tolerance” clause, but fail to enforce them.

In fact, in almost all of the other cases of sexual harassment and bullying in academic settings, institutional “due process” has often mimicked the Kübler-Ross model: going through a period of denial and bargaining before the acceptance of grief.

As an illustrative example, when Fernanda Lopez Aguilar first complained against Pogge for sexual harassment at Yale University, she said to Buzzfeed that the institution’s response was to attempt to buy her silence for $2,000 (~Rs 1.4 lakh).

A general view of the LHC experiment as seen at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Credit: Reuters/Pierre Albouy

A general view of the LHC experiment as seen at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Credit: Reuters/Pierre Albouy/File Photo

Swift action against offenders is almost unheard of, even if an institution has evidence that someone in their employ has been making its campus an unsafe place for women. As a result, victims have less and less faith that the institution of ‘due process’ itself will be fair to them, leave alone punish the offenders. It doesn’t help that the judicial process does not always treat victims kindly, forcing them to relive traumatic incidents even as media trials proceed unchecked.

Such reluctance to submit to due process is viewed by many as a sign that the accusers are not confident enough about their allegations or in fact may not be speaking the truth at all. This further diminishes the support available to them and prevents them from coming forward.

As Vox wrote about the world of academia based on a report published earlier this year: “It’s male-dominated, it’s hierarchical, and it’s filled with relationships of dependence between faculty and trainees. Plus, many fields of science feature isolating environments like labs and hospitals, where researchers and students spend long hours cooped up together.”

Further compounding this ‘fertile ground’ and the “culture of sexism” it breeds is the fact that when those accused of harassment are also the source of investments, grants and other funds for the institution, the latter becomes reluctant to acknowledge the problem and responds sluggishly. One can only hope that the CERN call could be signalling that this might be changing.

“If an individual who brings in a lot of money is guilty of violating these rules, there has been a tendency to ask for exceptions for such individuals,” Hodapp added. “However, the backlash that many places are experiencing for not following existing rules can easily extend beyond the loss of grant funding brought into the university by the individual,” for example through “loss of reputation”.

The Holes in Trump’s Immigration Policy and His Warped Conception of Borders

At a time when images of children separated from their parents in cages are shocking the world, Trump’s recent juxtaposition of the US with migrant camps is all the more problematic because it evokes a powerful imagery that panders to fear and xenophobia.

The Donald Trump administration’s abhorrent anti-immigration policy that is causing thousands of children to be separated and detained away from their parents is garnering global outrage. A total of 1,995 children have been separated from their parents who are facing criminal prosecution for unlawfully crossing the border. The United Nations and even First Lady Melania Trump have spoken out against this practice. 

American citizens are demanding answers from their senators. They are also donating thousands of dollars to support organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Hollywood celebrities are vocalising their demand for a more humane approach.

There is no doubt that President Trump’s zero-tolerance approach to immigration, which has come down hard on illegal border crossings, is cold-blooded, a gross violation of human rights, and unbecoming of a global leader like the US.

People hold signs at a protest against plans to deport Central American asylum seekers in Los Angeles on May 17, 2016. Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

However, we need to move beyond outrage and humanitarianism to understand the deeper issues that are laced in the narrative that frames recent debates on borders, politics and immigration in the US. Narratives, especially those of political leadership, are not benign but powerful. They are not disconnected from society, but play an instrumental role in shaping perspectives of the way society views itself and others. Narratives are perpetuated and repeated, thereby feeding into the realm of the everyday and informing world views, perspectives, biases and opinions.

As a result, political discourse is an important site to understand the current contours of society. Moreover, it highlights the growing need to not only question but to also critically examine the substance of narratives that are reproduced by political leaders.

Let us take Trump’s recent press conference on Monday where he addressed the current border and immigration crisis. Trump, defiant of the current situation, shifted the attention to the larger issue of immigration policies and responded by calling them these “horrible laws” and blaming Democrats.

To be clear, there is no law that says children must be taken from their parents if they cross the border unlawfully. Instead, a “zero tolerance” policy created by the president in April and put into effect last month by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, allows no such exceptions. More so, in defending his position, President Trump went on to make three claims that are worth unpacking.

First, Trump stated: “The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, it won’t be… you look at what is happening in Europe you look at what is happening in other places, we cannot allow that to happen to the United States, not on my watch…”

What is specifically problematic with this claim is the juxtaposition of the US with migrant camps because it evokes a powerful imagery that panders to fear and xenophobia. Here, ‘migrant camp’ and ‘refugee holding facility’ are used as derogatory terms implying to some extent that the current numbers of those crossing the US-Mexico border is out of control. To emphasise this, Trump invoked Europe and the refugee crisis. While the issues of migration at the US-Mexico border and those of Europe are characteristically different, what Trump managed to suggest was a notion of a comparable crisis and chaos which may not be the case.

This leads to the second claim that Trump made, where he stated, “We need borders, we need security, we need safety, we have to take care of our people. You look at the death and destruction that’s been caused by people coming into this country without the process.”

There are two issues with this statement. Firstly, the correlation between the borders, security and safety and the supposed death and destruction caused by people entering the country. Trump made a similar association with migration and crime, drawing on the example of Germany where in a tweet he claimed, “crime in Germany is way up”.

Not only did this claim face flak from Berlin but more importantly was factually proven to be incorrect. Elmar Brok, a German MEP who is a close ally of Merkel, said: “First of all, Mr Trump is wrong. He has a greater problem with migration than Germany and the EU. There has been a 95% drop in numbers coming to the EU since October 2015. The leader of the free world should be bringing the world together not trying to divide it.”

The construction of the migrant as criminal, dangerous and murderous effectively upholds the stranger-danger syndrome as a necessary for divisive politics in any society. Trump, even during his election campaign, had routinely viewed migrants suspiciously and used terms such as ‘barbaric murders’ and ‘rapists’. Securing borders does not necessarily correlate to the crimes but only make it easier to the shift the suspicion to the outsider/foreigner. A study found that only 3% of migrants without a college degree are in jail, compared to 11% of the native population. The odds of being killed in a terrorist attack by an immigrant as low as 1 in 723 million, as per a study by the Cato Institute.

Historically speaking, the creation of the alien, foreigner or undesirable and the racialised ‘other’ traces its roots to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This was the first act in US immigration history that was used to target a specific ethnic group. It is considered the cornerstone of a racialised and hierarchical immigration policy that institutionalised the gate-keeping ideology of US immigration laws.

Thereafter, the Immigration Act of 1924 was used to create quotas to protect a racially-defined notion of who could enter the US. Even though the US is considered a melting pot of cultures and a land of immigrants and opportunities; different groups of immigrants have faced varying effects of racialised immigration policies over time.

A view of inside the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facility shows children at Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Centre in Rio Grande City, Texas, on June 17, 2018. Credit: CBP/Handout via Reuters

Furthermore, the apprehension of illegal border crossers and undocumented migrants at the US border is not new. Under former president Barack Obama, for instance, illegal border crossers also faced prosecution. However, under Deferred Arrests for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), exemptions were made for those travelling with children. But what is particularly telling of current times is the touch of Trump, whereby it is not the numbers of those crossing that is causing a crisis but the ways in which these borders crossers are treated.

Finally, Trump affirmed, “Just remember a country without borders is not a country at all.”

What is interesting to note in this statement is Trump’s conception of borders. While the relationship between sovereignty and territorial borders is the foundational premise for the nation-state owing to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1664, what is necessary to highlight is the false assumption that immigration is a threat to the borders. Borders are a foundational aspect of defining a nation-state, however, borders are not hermetic, nor are they territorial air-tight containers that are fixed. Borders are inherently porous, it is in their nature to be crossed, transgressed, and even subverted. Hence the notion of being sealed or having the ability to be is sealed suggests a conception of border that is disconnected from the geographical and contextual nature of borders on the ground.

In other words, the crossing of borders, both legally and illegally, does not necessarily threaten the existence of any nation but is a mere function of being a nation. All nation-states across the world deal with the issue of illegal border crossings. However, the extent of the criminalisation of illegal border crossings, their treatment of asylum-seekers, and the violence perpetuated by nation-states in their neighbourhoods that cause this migration varies and need to also be considered. Finally, is important to also reiterate that migrations are often forced, a 2011 Gallop Survey found that found that if the world’s borders were open, only a meagre 14% of the population would move.

Prithvi Hirani was recently awarded a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Her thesis is titled ‘The Border, City, Diaspora: The Physical and Imagined Borders of South Asia’.