Casting my roving satirical eye over last week’s events, I’ve noticed that Liberty have called to ban the Mosquito device.
Using technology originally designed to scare away vermin, the ‘Mosquito’ is a device that emits a very high frequency buzzing sound which cannot be heard by people over the age of 25.
This degrading and discriminatory device is now being used to deter young people from particular areas, with a sound that is described as ‘distressing’ and ‘unbearable’. There are estimated to be 3,500 such ultra-sonic dispersal devices in use across the country.
Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty’s Director, said: ‘What type of society uses a low-level sonic weapon on its children? Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids.
‘The Mosquito has no place in a country that values its children and seeks to instill them with dignity and respect.’
Of course the reaction has been predictable. The inventor of this device has said that, ‘People talk about infringing human rights but what about the human rights of the shopkeeper who is seeing his business collapse because groups of unruly teenagers are driving away his customers?’
We’ve been through this millions of times. Liberty make a reasonable argument and say ‘thugs have human rights too,’ and then the public go, ‘well, what about the human rights of the victims, etc, etc, world without end.’
I’m a supporter of Liberty but I think it has shot itself in the foot on this one.
There is already an opinion backlash against the very concept of human rights as it is.
I mean, who cares if some guy running a Spar wants to install a noise-making device to scare drunken kids away from his shop?
When Liberty makes these kind of protests they serve simply to irritate the public and to distract attention from the real crimes against liberty and human rights committed by an increasingly authoritarian government: the ID card and National Register Scheme, CIA rendition flights, the admissability of evidence gained by torture and phonetap in British courts, attempts to abolish habaes corpus and extend the blasphemy laws.
This is the sort of thing Liberty should be making a fuss about:
An Algerian living in Britain who was wrongly accused of being involved in the 9/11 terror attacks tells for the first time today of how his life has been ‘ruined’ by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Lotfi Raissi, 33, a pilot who had trained in the United States before moving to England, was the first person in the world to be arrested in connection with the atrocities. He was suspected of teaching several of the 9/11 terrorists to fly planes.
‘I feared for my life in court and inside prison,’ Raissi said. ‘They moved me from the high-security unit after three or four days and sent me to the normal wing, where I wasn’t safe. I suffered racism and discrimination. I got stabbed twice by other prisoners and no one investigated.’
Raissi says he has had two nervous breakdowns as a result of his incarceration and still suffers from high blood pressure and post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite having been completely exonerated, he is still banned from flying anywhere but Algeria because his US extradition warrant is still outstanding.
