Informed Critique of the Right to Education Act

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Here's an informed critique of the Right to Education Act. Anyone who wants to comment on it must read this. The author has obviously read all the fine print before writing this piece.

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How brave American women on the battlefront are treated

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I had blogged in October, 2009 that it was shocking that American women who allege rape or harassment while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan have been denied recourse to courts. Studies that I had not been aware of when I blogged in October show the extent of this offence.  For example, this story from May, 2009 shows another form of wink-wink-nod-nod behaviour of the Government when it comes to dealing with this issue. This story on BBC's website datelined 17 April, 2009  reviews a book on the subject. Importantly, it alleges that the US Department of Defense knew about this state of affairs and chose to do nothing.
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When Technology Runs Ahead of Laws and Ethics

Ever since safe abortions were made possible and test-tube babies happened, our laws and ethics are being left hopelessly behind by technology.

• What can one say of the paternity/ visitation rights of a non-anonymous sperm donor who is not married to the mother?
• Or to the pregnant lady who is not allowed to abort in the third trimester, after she has come to know that her unborn child is condemned to lead an poor quality existence?
• Or to the lady who got the wrong fertilised egg implanted in her womb? Does she have an obligation to carry it to term? If she does, what right does she have in relation to the child born?
  
• Or to the Passport Officer who did not want to issue Indian passports to the children born in India showing a German lady as the mother, when the twins born of an Indian surrogate mother with sperm of the father but an anonymously donated egg?
• Or to the parents of a child whose grandfather will also be its father because of the sperm donated by the father-in-law? 

I wonder why all these people are seduced by technology into uncharted moral and legal waters when a perfectly acceptable solution called adoption exists?

 

Shocking -- Rape Victims Denied Recourse to Court in the USA

Republicans are opposing an amendment to deny government contracts to companies that force their employees to accept binding, mandatory arbitration; i.e., forgo their right to go to court, including, inter alia, women who are alleging that they have been raped, assaulted, etc.. Why is such a salutary provision being opposed? Because the companies that would be hurt the most would be Halliburton and KBR, the contractors who have got uncounted billions worth of US taxpayers' moneys to support the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has come out that several women have alleged gang rape by male employees of these contractors, and all these cases have been hushed up by the mandatory binding arbitration. See this devastating cross-questioning of a KBR attorney by a Sen Frank Allen.


It is difficult to believe that in a country that prides itself on upholding human rights that this can be allowed to happen.


It has taken 10 years of war for this state of affairs to emerge into the public domain in any meaningful way other than armchair discussions.

Secularism

Mr M C Chagla wrote, in his autobiography, Roses in December, as below:
"As a legal concept, secularism means equality before the law, and no distinction between one citizen and another as far as the application of laws is concerned. It also means equality of opportunity and a refusal to classify citizens into first class citizens and second class citizens. But in my opinion, secularism is much more than that. Secularism is an attitude of mind and a quality of the heart. It is a matter of temperament, of outlook, even of feeling. A man with a secular outlook looks upon all persons as human beings pure and simple, equally estimable or precious, not only in the eye of the law, but in the eye of God. You refuse to classify people according to the religious labels which you attah to them. You do not think of a man as a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian, but merely as a human being. You make friends with him as a human being and you deal with him as a human being. You are not conscious of the religion he professes.

I remember when I went to the United States as Ambassador, when I was asked at my first Press Conference whether I was a Muslim, I answered, 'How is it any business of yours what my religion is? That is purely my personal affair. All that you have a right to know ndian and proud to be an Indian. When I meet an American I do not ask him 'Are you a Protestant or a Catholic or a Jew?' To me he is a citizen of the United States and I treat him as an American. I do not understand why you take this attitude when you are dealing with the people of India.'"

Not only are we now seeing such a viewpoint genuinely and fervently held by a person in India dismissed and rubbished as "pseudo-secularism".

Even in the US, the so-called "melting pot", they now have a USA PATRIOT Act (full text Wikipedia Entry) under which the vast majority of persons on the receiving end of its draconian provisions in the 5 years that it has been on the statute books so far, have belonged to a particular community, as BBC found out. Mr Chagla was indeed, deeply prescient, and clearly foresaw this happening. He wrote:

"Today, one great problem of democracy is to reconcile the rights of the individual citizen with the rights of the State. The citizen has to be protected against an all-powerful State. The citizens' rights have to be safeguarded by the judiciary, which has been constituted as a custodian of those rights."

Legal Profession -- Then and Now

In a Gallup Poll in the US last year, only 16% of the respondents thought that lawyers were honest and ethical, above only car salesmen and stockbrokers. This compares with nurses (83%) and medical doctors (68%).

Michael Asimov, wrote in a paper published in 2000:
"Polling data demonstrates clearly that the popular perception of the character and the ethics of American lawyers, and the prestige of the profession, have plunged precipitously since the 1970s."

He then goes on to justify the low light in which lawyers are perceived in these words:

• Lawyers will always be distrusted, in part because their assigned task is to play whatever role and manipulate whatever law a client’s interest demands.
• Lawyers tend to represent the rich and powerful; naturally everyone else who can’t afford lawyers resent that.
• Even more significant, lawyers are doomed to be unloved because criminal practice is their most public function.
• As lawyers see it, justice requires that an accused person have the benefit of appropriate process, such as the reasonable doubt rule or the privilege against self incrimination. This perspective is not shared by most members of the public, especially when it comes to criminal law. Most people think that justice means finding the truth regardless of the adversarial system, procedural technicalities, statutory loopholes, police or prosecutorial misconduct, or lawyers’ tricks.

Asimow later quotes the findings in a Harris Poll. In its introduction to polling data, Harris Poll (#37, Aug. 11, 1997) wrote:
"Recent Harris Polls have found that public attitudes to lawyers and law firms, which were already low, continue to get worse. Lawyers have seen a dramatic decline in their “prestige” which has fallen faster than that of any other occupation, over the last twenty years. Fewer people have confidence in law firms than in any of the major institutions measured by Harris including the Congress, organized labor, or the federal government. It is not a pretty picture.
In 1977 over a third of the public (36%) believed that lawyers had “very great prestige.” Today, twenty years later, that has fallen to 19%. In other words, almost half of the people who accorded lawyers great prestige then do not do so today. No other occupation has fallen so sharply....
For the last thirty years Harris has been tracking the confidence people have in the leaders of various institutions. In the most recent survey, only 7% of the public said they had a great deal of confidence in the people running law firms. This places law firms at the bottom of the institutions on the list. The 7% figure is not only the lowest number recorded for law firms over thirty years, it is actually the lowest number recorded for any institution over thirty years."

This stands in stark contrast to Mr M C Chagla's words, written after a lifetime on the Bench and at the Bar, quoted below from his autobiography (Roses in December), penned in 1973:

"The Bar is one of the most important of all professions. He who joins it belongs to a great fraternity. The most valuable asset he enjoys is complete independence and integrity. He is no man's servant. He is not compelled to do any work which he does not want to do. He cannot be compelled to argue in a manner which, though it might please his client, would, in his opinion, be detrimental or prejudicial to his cause. He has to be courteous to the judge, but at the same time he can maintain his integrity and the right to express his own views, even though they may not be acceptable or palatable to the presiding dignitary."

How things change with time!