No room for debate
The entire point of these debates is to disarm us of our outrage so we don’t use it constructively.
As I sit here, writing this article, it is a Wednesday and I—alongside thousands of people across the world—am watching the Global Sumoud Flotilla be illegally detained for bringing life saving supplies to Gaza. By the time this article is published, the news will have confirmed Israel’s illegal seizing of these humanitarian aid vessels.
The situation in Gaza has been officially recognised as a genocide by multiple institutes including the UN, yet people still ask: what about Hamas? Across the ocean, the Sudanese face their own genocide in Darfur, and Congo faces its own forced starvation and an unprecedented rates of rape as a war tactic.
Across the border in the US, people’s rights to healthcare, shelter, education, and safety are being ripped away from them, all for the terrible crime of existing. These are just a few of the many instances across the world where people are being persecuted for their identity and existence.
In 2025, we find whole communities being persecuted for their religion, the colour of their skin, their sexuality, their gender, their bodies and abilities, and for simply living on land that might be “profitable”.
Meanwhile our governments do nothing but sit around and encourage complicity. Our academic institutions tell us to look at both sides in the name of objectivity and tolerance, and our media panders to those in power instead of criticizing them.
We are people. We have the right to exist. We have the right to food and water, to shelter, to education, and safety irrespective of disability, race, gender, sexuality, and religion. We have the right to protect ourselves from occupation, from colonization, and from persecution.
The question posed for this article was if human rights should be debatable ideas. The answer is no. I’m not going to play devil’s advocate, I’m not going to look at both sides, I’m not going to consider nuance. No: human rights are not debatable.
In fact, I will go as far as to say that even allowing human rights to be debated moves you from being passively complicit in their violation to actively aiding and abetting it. Human rights are not just simple concepts someone dreamed up; they are the fundamental bricks that make up the foundation of, not just democracy, but any functional society.
Whether it is in our classes, on our news, or on the latest Jubilee video, when you allow the debate of these rights, you do three things.
First, you give people a platform, informing society that not only are disregarding human rights tolerable, but their violation can be capitalized on. Jubilee has platformed individuals including Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson—both sporting incredibly harmful rhetorics targeted against Muslims, people of colour, the LGBTQIA+ community, people with disabilities, and immigrants. Both made money from their platformed debates and their huge social presence. Jubilee has also, notoriously, platformed a Nazi. We have reached a point where we, as a society, find it acceptable to platform bigotry.
The second thing that occurs, when debating human rights, is the increased sympathy for and softening towards the violation of human rights. Suddenly, we are told to “tolerate others’ opinions”, that we need to be respectful, that these are people, too, and we need to take the moral high ground. I, personally, don’t consider that genocidal ideations and eugenics were something worth tolerating.
Lastly: there is this concept in politics known as the “controlled opposition.” You see it in governments, the news, and you see it in these so-called debates. The idea of the controlled opposition is to provide “safe” criticism to the systems in power—focusing on surface level issues without touching the deeper, systemic, root causes.
When we have these debates over human rights, we inherently dehumanize the people actually facing these issues, diminishing and disregarding them as pure theory, separate and distant from us. We argue for and against them. And yet, it is our government, our taxes, our indifference that allows these violations to continue. But because we’ve expended the energy to debate the matter, we’ve experienced the catharsis of “doing the right thing”, of criticising the system, and no longer are we motivated to change it. Words do look pretty without actions to back them up.
If the full extent of your activism is to debate people’s entitlement to human rights, then your activism is performative. If you have the time and energy to participate in these debates, then you have the time and energy to educate yourself and others about issues in the world and how our inherent systems feed into them. You have the time to donate to a charity; to volunteer at an NGO; to attend a protest; and to call your government officials and hold them accountable.
The entire point of these debates is to disarm us of our outrage so we don’t use it constructively. So why are we wasting our time debating a brick when we could be pulling down the wall?
