Change in Canadian Policy To quickly summarize, all three countries condemn torture, but all three countries commit torture to some degree by finding loopholes in their own policies to justify their actions. With the US, it is by narrowing the definition of torture, Israel circumvents its policies by using the necessary clause, and Russia simply ignores its own policies as there is no system in place to hold the government accountable for its actions. The question then becomes whether or not Canada should either modify its policy or adopt a torture policy more similar to the three countries, or continue to preserve its own policies. To start if Canada adopted any practices similar to any of the three countries it would cause international
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To elaborate, under the current absolute ban on torture, there are no situations where torture will ever be legal, even if doing so can save multiples lives. To clarify, this is not a utilitarian argument where saving a group of people at the expense of a suspect would bring the greatest happiness to the public, the argument is that by completely prohibiting torture with no exception, it limits the capabilities of the law enforcement agencies. The reason why the Russian policies are a good comparable is that Canadian policy makers can make sure that there is an oversight in place to ensure accountability and so that the system does not become similar to that of Russia, whether it is by using a warrant system for torture (Dershowitz, 2004, p. 277-278) or through some other means. Furthermore, unlike Israel and Russia, Canada is very pro- human rights and this is a positive, as I believe that this will limit the potential for the judicial system to overly issue warrants for torture and will generally only issue it under extreme circumstances. In addition, with a free press, it ensures that the public will have a chance to discuss the decision, which further ensures accountability by the government and provides …show more content…
This may be because of the Obama administration though as under his watch, there was an increase of 22% refugees from 2015 to 2016 (Zong & Batalova, 2017). Moreover, despite the US being referred to as a melting point, the US has been relatively liberal in the sense that they welcome and accept people of a wide diverse background (Abrego, 2015, p.260) and while current sentiments towards immigration seem to be negative, it is not surprising given US historic records. This is because, in US's immigration policies history, there have been periods of harsh and discriminatory immigration policies followed with a reverting back to a liberal and open immigration policies (Abrego, 2015, p.265). It seems that the US is currently experiencing one of those periods where immigration has become stricter and this is partly because a good portion of the population is blaming the immigrants stealing native people's jobs (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015, p.531). Furthermore, it seems as if the native population is not blaming all of the immigrants, but rather a specific subset of them, as according to Hainmueller & Hopkins (2015), people are open to certain immigrants and more denial to other race. For example, study shows that people are more likely to reject immigration application
To elaborate, under the current absolute ban on torture, there are no situations where torture will ever be legal, even if doing so can save multiples lives. To clarify, this is not a utilitarian argument where saving a group of people at the expense of a suspect would bring the greatest happiness to the public, the argument is that by completely prohibiting torture with no exception, it limits the capabilities of the law enforcement agencies. The reason why the Russian policies are a good comparable is that Canadian policy makers can make sure that there is an oversight in place to ensure accountability and so that the system does not become similar to that of Russia, whether it is by using a warrant system for torture (Dershowitz, 2004, p. 277-278) or through some other means. Furthermore, unlike Israel and Russia, Canada is very pro- human rights and this is a positive, as I believe that this will limit the potential for the judicial system to overly issue warrants for torture and will generally only issue it under extreme circumstances. In addition, with a free press, it ensures that the public will have a chance to discuss the decision, which further ensures accountability by the government and provides …show more content…
This may be because of the Obama administration though as under his watch, there was an increase of 22% refugees from 2015 to 2016 (Zong & Batalova, 2017). Moreover, despite the US being referred to as a melting point, the US has been relatively liberal in the sense that they welcome and accept people of a wide diverse background (Abrego, 2015, p.260) and while current sentiments towards immigration seem to be negative, it is not surprising given US historic records. This is because, in US's immigration policies history, there have been periods of harsh and discriminatory immigration policies followed with a reverting back to a liberal and open immigration policies (Abrego, 2015, p.265). It seems that the US is currently experiencing one of those periods where immigration has become stricter and this is partly because a good portion of the population is blaming the immigrants stealing native people's jobs (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015, p.531). Furthermore, it seems as if the native population is not blaming all of the immigrants, but rather a specific subset of them, as according to Hainmueller & Hopkins (2015), people are open to certain immigrants and more denial to other race. For example, study shows that people are more likely to reject immigration application