Human Rights

Finally after days of torturous patience, I was able to attend the talk by Josef Roy, Executive Director of Amnesty International Malaysia. I had waited eagerly for this talk to occur as I have read so much about the organization's efforts through the newspaper. The speaker touched upon many local and international issues on human rights and gave a brief introduction about the human rights movement.

The topic that I found to be most interesting was about the role multinational companies play in safeguarding human rights. Because of globalization, so many of these companies have had a direct influence towards the country they operate in. In many cases, mega companies have been found to be very negligent in dealing with the rights of the locals. Josef highlighted that Shell Petroleum had been found to evict locals from their own land in order to build refinery plants or lay pipelines in poor countries like Nigeria and Chad without giving proper compensation. The fact that these companies, with annual revenue that equal the GDP of small countries like the Ivory Coast, could put aside the welfare of the locals they displace clearly shows the extreme lengths companies go for a quick profit and to outdo their competition. Thus, I really believe that organizations like Amnesty International play a great role in exposing all these cases of negligence to the world. Companies need to be held accountable for their actions and hopefully through this pressure more efforts will be taken by multinationals themselves to ensure ethical conduct is present at all times and the basic rights of locals are kept.

It is also safe to assume that the topic on abuse of power by our police force is the 'hottest' topic of discussion in the media recently. It is saddening to find out that the very people we trust to protect us are also 'criminals' themselves. Although acts of prison abuse and torture might only be conducted by a small percentage of the police force, the continuation of these acts is a small reminder of how much our country has progressed socially in recent years. Furthermore, Malaysia's refusal/delay in signing the Convention Against Torture in the United Nations sends a clear message about efforts