Equality and Human Rights
The Equality and Human Rights Commission is a Non Departmental Public Body (NDPB), established under the Equality Act 2006. Their sponsor department is the Government Equalities Office. They have a board of commissioners who steer the commission’s work and direction.
Many of those who worked in the previous equality commissions — the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) — joined the new Commission, creating “a body with an enormous wealth of experience and knowledge about race, sex and disability equality and discrimination.” Many more people have since joined the gravy train — sorry, Commission; — experts in sexual orientation, age, religion and belief and human rights and people with skills and experience in all relevant functions.
Much of this data is taken from their website. It doesn’t say that the “experts” who work at the Equality and Human Rights Commission have to be barking mad, and I am sure that some of them might actually be sane, but the members of their Board of Commissioners are clearly deranged.
They have permitted the publication of a document which claims that body scanners at airport security gates might infringe human rights.
The Commission has expressed concerns about the apparent absence of safeguards to ensure the body scanners are operated in a lawful, fair and non-discriminatory manner. It also has serious doubts that the decision to roll this out in all UK airports complies with the law.
An absence of safeguards, such as monitoring who is being scanned and how those scans are carried out, means that authorities are unable to check if in practice people are being unfairly selected on the basis of their race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation or disability.
These last two paragraphs have been lifted verbatim from their web site. Fantastic, isn’t it?
Far better that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s rights remain uncompromised than worry about the possibility of 400 innocent people falling screaming to their deaths.
My taxes pay for this Equality and Human Rights Commission to deliver tosh like this. Instead of reporting it, why doesn’t the media treat it with the derision it deserves? What is the purpose or function of an organisation with such a laughably tenuous grasp on reality?
Why doesn’t it do the decent thing and quietly disband itself, and let its experts in sexual orientation and other highly paid professionals try and make a living in the real world — which has to pay for these bureaucratic follies?
What is an expert in sexual orientation anyway?
