More on Worldcon & Human Rights

By camestrosfelapton on Jul 14, 2024

I'm still thinking about this proposal https://file770.com/wsfs-2024-motion-to-add-human-rights-and-democracy-standards-to-worldcon-site-qualifications/comment-page-1/#comment-1697754 partly because I love a problem that I can throw a spreadsheet at.

Thinking about in terms of the problem we are trying to solve, I think we can consider 4(ish) issues.

We want Worldcon to avoid countries that are, to some degree, reprehensible and which it would be controversial to be associated with. Obviously what is and isn't reprehensible is an open question and for many people the USA would reasonably fit the criteria or indeed the UK.
We want Worldcon to avoid countries that it would be difficult to actually operate in for multiple reasons. I hate the term 'economic freedom' but i has some relevance here. A non-pejorative example would be New Zealand in 2020. For very good reasons there were major restrictions on travel and people gathering that would make an in-person Worldcon impossible. That was an unusual circumstance but more generally, "freedom" in a broad practical sense is more limited in some places than others.
We want Worldcon (and specifically the Hugo Awards) to be able to operate in a way that has minimal censorship and which members are safe from violence and harassment (from government or non-government sources).
- We want all of this point but not just in general or for "most" members but also along specific axes of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability.

The proposal is weak on point 1 and doesn't cover the dot-point of 3 at all.

While the indices suggested do cut out a lot of countries with appalling governments, a basic flaw in the approach of these indices is they tend to look at how a country treats its own citizens. How a country might treat non-citizens, refugees or citizens of neighbouring countries is not well covered.

Point 2, I think does get covered by the proposal and it isn't unreasonable for Worldcon to have a minimum standard on basically how restricted it might be in a given country. However, it is more mixed on the main part of point 3.

The Reporters Without Borders (RSF) score has a methodology that does come closer to addressing the issues in point 3 than either the Freedom House or Economist numbers. Basically, the RSF score is looking at whether a report can operate safely and without government interference in a given country. That's not quite the same question as point 3 but it's close enough that it is hard to imagine a country that couldn't meet a minimum standard on the RSF score but somehow would be safe & fine for a Worldcon.

I'd suggest a two changes to the proposal:

Language should be added to make clear this is a minimum standard and that members should also use their judgement on a broader range of issues that can't be covered by a set of indices.
Rather than "at least one" of the three it should be at least one of the Freedom House or Economist scores PLUS a specific score on the RSF scale.

Point 2 covers a couple of issues. Because RSF works differently than the other two, the current rules give some odd results. Central African Republic has terrible scores on Freedom House (5 out of 100) and Economist (1.35 out of 10). It's not borderline on those measures at all but with a score of 60.12 gets a tick on the RSF criteria.

So that the revised criteria cover as many countries as the original criteria, the pass value on RSF would need to be more generous. The original proposal would lead to 93 countries being approved (more if we include smaller countries that only appear on the Freedom House list and not the others). However, with a cut-off of 50 for RSF, then 73 countries would be eligible — smaller but not much smaller.¹

Having said that these are the countries that would then become disqualified, which includes some that might be plausible locations. A cut-off of 45 for RSF would be more generous.

The Gambia

Peru

Armenia

Colombia

Bolivia

Gabon

Lesotho

Côte d'Ivoire

Sri Lanka

Bhutan

Singapore

Mexico