Kashmiri Scholar Winning Mirza Saaib Bég and his team which included Nandita Venkatesan (India), Tafadzwa Matika (Zimbabwe), Andrés Ordoñez-Buitrago (Colombia) have won the Weidenfeld Hoffmann scholarship debate conducted by Oxford Union- a 200-year old debating society.
The Weidenfeld Hoffmann Scholars’ Debate is the key element of the leadership programme offered by the Wiedenfield Scholarship under which Saaib was granted admission.
Last week Facebook’s oversight board upheld the ban on Donald Trump and the debate motion focussed on this issue. The motion for the debate was: This house believes that social media has no right to ban politicians.
During the debate, Mirza Saaib stressed on the need for “preventing an encroachment of our rights by outsourcing the job of dispensing justice to private companies”.
He added that “this proposal will create an opaque system that is making judgments on a public conversation. And these judgments are not guided by a sense of equity or justice but by power and profit. This is how oppression works and authoritarians function- they use an exceptional situation of emergency to justify gaining more power and then normalize the use of that authority in everyday life, even when that emergency does not exist.”
His team member, Tafadzwa Matika who is from Zimbabwe gave historical examples of how outsourcing justice to private companies has resulted in human rights violations, relying on the examples East India Company and others that furthered colonization.
Manuel Francisco Azeuro, a WH Scholar from Columbia stresses on the benefits of debating- “Debating is a critical inquiry of humans’ viewpoints and a powerful rejection of perfection. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Free Speech Debate project of St Antony’s College, “we cannot get at the truth unless we are exposed to the relevant facts, opinion and arguments.” Debating allows us to address the fallibility of the ‘opposing’ views but also, if the spirit of the exercise is fully embraced, the fallibility of our own, because we are forced to reflect on the consistency and coherence of our positions.” Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Manuel was an Acting Mayor in Columbia.
Speaking after the debate Mirza Saaib commented that “human rights cannot be subject to terms and conditions. Freedom of expression includes the freedom to receive information, and this is a basic human right. Social media companies want people to believe that accepting their terms and conditions gives them the right to decide on their human rights. Such terms and conditions are void ab initio.”
Mirza Saaib is a graduate of India’s premier law university, NALSAR University of law. He graduated as President of the students’ union and was a recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s gold medal as the Best Male Graduate with Leadership Qualities. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Oxford- Weidenfeld- Hoffmann scholarship to study public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.