Omar Khadr, Hannah Arendt, and the Racialization of Rights’ Discourse

In this paper, I focus on the story of Omar Khadr, a Canadian minor who was held captive in Guantanamo Bay for a decade, to demonstrate that, at times, neither citizenship nor human rights offer any protection to those who, like Khadr, are citizens of a country and are certainly human beings, yet have been deprived of the rights associated with those statuses. By drawing on Hannah Arendt’s argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism, as well as some of her subsequent work, I critically assess the debate regarding whether the rights conferred upon citizens are the only true barriers against abuse, or whether human rights have become a more effective protection. I suggest that this debate is sterile as it fails to recognize that the issue is not which set of rights offers a better guarantee of protection, but how the discourse around citizenship and human rights remains racialized, to the point where certain individuals are considered neither citizens nor humans, and therefore are potentially subject to abuse. Focusing on Canada’s treatment of Khadr, I argue that racialization is the root cause of his denial of rights. My analysis aims to contribute to existing literature by refocusing the “rights debate” to demonstrate that any discussion around abstract rights fails to address the experiences of those racialized subjects whose rights have been denied