Human rights bollocks

[mistermack]

If you deliberately put yourself and your family to sea in a rickety boat, is it your human right to be rescued and taken to where you want to go?

[laklak]

Only if you're Oppressed(tm).

[mistermack]

Only if you're Oppressed(tm).

What if you're not oppressed, but you were recently?

[piscator]

You'll have a human right to asylum just as soon as a nation decides to honor the UNCHR and spend $$ to go out and find you, then provide for your security and safety in their country, for however long.

[mistermack]

For the purposes of this thread, human rights are not the same thing as legal "human rights".

That would rather defeat the object of discussing it.
I suppose, to be more precise, I should have said "should" it be a human right?
(since rights don't actually exist, except by some sort of agreed behaviour.)

[piscator]

Neither does money...

[laklak]

Only if you're Oppressed(tm).

What if you're not oppressed, but you were recently?

Like, just before you got on the boat?

[Tyrannical]

If you deliberately put yourself and your family to sea in a rickety boat, is it your human right to be rescued and taken to where you want to go?

Well, if the parents were jailed for child abuse and their children put up for adoption to good Christian families that would work too lol

[mistermack]

Only if you're Oppressed(tm).

What if you're not oppressed, but you were recently?

Like, just before you got on the boat?

Nobody's sailing from Syria to Greece. Not when they can just take the bus through Turkey to a spot five miles from a Greek Island, and then claim that they are "fleeing oppression" by risking a five mile paddle in a poxy inflatable, which they got from the friendly local people smugglers.

And funnily enough, hardly anybody is "oppressed" enough to claim asylum in Greece, a perfectly safe country. Or Turkey, the safe country they just left.
Funny that. Maybe it's not safety they want, after all. It's a ticket to Germany? Or Sweden?

[Strontium Dog]

If you deliberately put yourself and your family to sea in a rickety boat, is it your human right to be rescued and taken to where you want to go?

It's your human right not to have to put yourself to sea in a rickety boat, which is the point you are wilfully missing.

That some folk are forced into such desperate measures is our fault, not theirs.

[pErvinalia]

If you deliberately put yourself and your family to sea in a rickety boat, is it your human right to be rescued and taken to where you want to go?

Via international convention (and possibly local laws too), you have the right to be rescued and provided safety and dignity if you are a genuine refugee and/or asylum seeker.

If you don't like that, then you should back out of the UN convention on refugees.

[JimC]

Fewer would need to take to the seas if a more systematic and rational attempt was made by countries everywhere to take a fair share of refugees directly from the camps, plus a major political effort to fix the chaos in places like Syria which is filling them.

[Sean Hayden]

It's a weird question. I think we're obligated to rescue people.

[L'Emmerdeur]

. . . (since rights don't actually exist, except by some sort of agreed behaviour.)

The agreed behaviour in this instance is to try to do what can be done to prevent people from drowning. It seems clear that you would rather that the agreed behaviour would be to let them drown. Am I wrong? Is there some subtlety that you haven't as yet explicated?

[Tyrannical]

If you want to prevent drowning deaths, you just have to remove any incentive for them to travel across the sea. If the rest of Europe adapted Hungary's stance of zero tolerance for Muslim refugees, the problem would go away over night. I'm sure there are plenty of nice Muslim countries they could settle in anyways.