Justine is attending the fifth annual Oslo Freedom Forum where hundreds of the world’s most influential dissidents, innovators, journalists, philanthropists, and policymakers summit are exploring how

Oslo, Tuesday 14th May 2013
Let’s just think, for a moment, what human rights have come to mean, now.

A man is standing on a stage in front of an audience. It is the start of the first day at a human rights forum. It is 10am and already there has been live music. The elegantly dressed audience is settling in, comfortably, waiting for more polished, massaged presenting, more music, lights, slides, and for more sweeping statistics riding up steep graphs and charts.

This man in front of us cannot move around the stage, performing. He just stands, very still, behind the podium and speaks without a script. He does not gesticulate.  His face seems expressionless to many in the audience. But he cannot see their response.

Chen Guangcheng is blind, a self-taught, barefoot lawyer who was imprisoned in China for more than four years for his anti-corruption activism. He escaped house arrest in April 2012, and reached the US Embassy in Beijing. He now lives in America, from where he continues his work.
He tells of the attacks on himself and his family before he left, because of his activism. He tells us that China has the second highest defence budget in the world, behind America, and yet allocates a bigger budget than this on internal security. China spends more money on the persecution and policing of its own people than it does on showing the world that the People’s Liberation Army marches with just under 1.5 million soldiers.

This, the very still, blind man, makes clear, is a modern definition of industrialised human rights abuse.

His message is perhaps also that we have become too used to being entertained by a certain kind of human rights reporting, and that perhaps we need to relearn how to listen and understand what freedom really does mean.