Extract – Cursed charters! | Power relations

From the Mike Ward affair to the health emergency, including bills aimed at regulating religious accommodation and secularism, Louis-Philippe Lampron dissects the controversies that have marked Quebec news from a rights and freedoms perspective. over the past 10 years.

Essentially, looking at human rights and freedoms means revealing/examining the many power relations that exist within society and, above all, the limits of what dominant institutions can impose within a democratic law society. As I explain in my text entitled “Guardrails of democratic societies”: “… the rights and freedoms of the person, wrested with great struggle by the generations that preceded us, still represent one of the more powerful checks and balances to prevent the numerous “institutions of power” from abusing their prerogatives. »

Like any effective counter-power, human rights and freedoms have been the object of incessant attacks for several decades, in Quebec as elsewhere in the world. Most often, these attacks take the form of a rhetoric of illegitimization or attempts to instrumentalize some of the guarantees that make up the body of rights and freedoms. For example, when they are not accused of serving exclusively to prevent criminals from going to prison or of preventing the pursuit of collective interests within contemporary societies, they are characterized as useless or downright of anti-democrats. Conversely, several groups and institutions attempt to advance authoritarian agendas or ones contrary to the spirit of these texts inspired by the Universal Declaration of 1948 by resorting to a disembodied interpretation of certain fundamental rights as the basis of their positions, such as if the latter could not suffer any limit or were not part of a broader set of guarantees.

This uninterrupted “noise” surrounding the texts protecting human rights and freedoms, amplified by the steroid boombox of social networks, can obviously make it very difficult to decide between the “true” and the “false” about them. .

Fueled (or maintained) for too long, this confusion can become quite dangerous in that it is likely to weaken the support of the population for these texts which, in the long run, serve their collective interests by setting guidelines likely to ensure peaceful coexistence within the plural societies that structure most states in the world, including Quebec. It is globally the objective of contributing to the dissipation of this “ambient noise” which has motivated me to intervene periodically, through short texts, in public debates concerning fundamental rights and freedoms since 2007.

These different interventions make up this collection.

Of course, it is not possible to speak validly of checks and balances, and certainly not of their effectiveness, without first questioning the nature of power within a democratic society which, like the Quebec, has accepted the principle of representative democracy. The usual definition of the concept of “counter-power”, i.e. “a power that organizes itself to defeat an established authority^⁠1 is very interesting in that it introduces a fundamental distinction between “power” and “authority”. This distinction, moreover, coincides perfectly with that which Hannah Arendt made between legitimate “power” within a democratic society and the ability of certain public or private institutions (or persons) to impose their will (or coercive power) to a group:

Power corresponds to the ability of man to act, and to act in concert. Power is never an individual property; he belongs to a group and continues to belong to it as long as this group is not divided. When we say someone is ‘in power’, we mean that they have been given authority by a number of people to act on their behalf.

[…]

To use conceptual language for a moment, we will say that power, but not violence, is the essential element of any form of government. Violence, on the other hand, is by nature instrumental; like all instruments, it must always be directed and justified by the ends it intends to serve. What thus requires external justification cannot represent the essential constitutive principle.^⁠2.

Thus, if the source of public power (or state power) in a democratic society derives from the fact that a majority of the population (or at the very least, a majority of those who had the right to vote and have exercised it) has mandated the elected officials who carry out the executive and legislative functions to conduct the affairs of this same State, the counter-power represented by the rights and freedoms of the person aims precisely to guarantee that these representatives of the population do not abuse the incidental power of constraint that comes with their temporary status as leaders.

1. The Illustrated Petit Larousse (1991), Paris, Librairie Larousse, p. 256

2.Arendt, Hannah (2002), From lies to violence: essays in contemporary politics [1972], Paris, Pocket, p. 144-151

Cursed charters! 10 years of assaults on the democracy of rights and freedoms

Louis-Philippe Lampron

All in all (to be released February 8)

240 pages