The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) - Firewire News Case Study: Violence at IAAF Tramples International Law

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

(Firewire News) - Members of the International Association of Athletics Federations' (IAAF) recently subjected an internationally competitive athlete from South Africa to the public and personal humiliation of "gender tests". The IAAF appears to have trampled International law and the Internationally recognized human rights of the athlete in regards to her identity, privacy and other significant violent intrusions.

International identity law clearly instructs that an individual is the sole possessor of entitlements to that individual's own identity. Yet, in this case, the IAAF has clearly acted with a false sense of entitlement to their victim's identity - to the grandest extreme. That is, the IAAF is behaving with such an extreme sense of entitlement to the athlete's identity as to feel entitled to redefine that athlete's identity according to the IAAF's own arbitrary and remote preferences.

This flies in the face of International identity law, the Internationally recognized human rights of the athlete, and all forms of rational human decency. Worse, the IAAF's actions are a revival of the long discredited, dogmatic ideologies of biological determinism, also known as eugenics.

Under English Common Law, this was a "violent assault" by the IAAF members, and their actions would be numerous.

Had this case (or any similar) occurred within the U.S. (an English Common Law country), it would constitute many serious Federal felony violent crimes punishable by more than 100 years of imprisonment. [42 U.S.C. § 1320d–6; 18 U.S.C. § 1028; 18 U.S.C. § 1341; 18 U.S.C. § 1343; 18 U.S.C. § 1028A; et al.].

In South Africa, however, English Common Law may or may not apply to the perpetrations of this case due to the complex nature and legal heritage of the South African legal system, and statutory laws within South Africa that may have been violated are unknown to the NCIDP. South African law is beyond the scope of the NCIDP, which studies U.S. law and law applicable within the U.S. This includes English Common Law and International law to the extent of its applicability to the U.S.

Nevertheless, this case from the IAAF does appear, on the surface of it, to trample numerous clauses of the South African Constitution, which appears to hold a status of "supreme law" within South Africa. It is unclear to the NCIDP how violations of these Constitutional clauses may be criminalized or punishable under South African law.

Moreover, it appears that the victim was actually subjected to the "gender tests" in Germany, while the IAAF itself operates out of Malta, which potentially involves two more complete sets of national laws with which the IAAF perpetrators may or may not be punishable. Thus the guidance of International law discussed above and beyond, and apparently trampled by the IAAF management, is critical to understanding the legal context for violations that the victim has endured, and the ramifications that IAAF management might be eligible to face.

Indeed, it is no small, nor less than tragic, irony that Germany was the world's center stage for such eugenicist ideology from approximately 1935 to 1945, and here again now involved with its misanthropic revival.

Conversely, it is encouraging to see the people and nation of South Africa offering their support to their own countrywoman and taking a stand against those eugenicists from Germany and Malta.

Reports indicate that South Africa has declared a willingness to 'go to war' over the issue, but it is not clear from recent reports if they have sought the prosecution or extradition for prosecution of the perpetrating eugenicists at the IAAF. It is disturbing that peoples and nations from elsewhere around the world have not decried the return of eugenics just as vehemently.

The perpetrators at the IAAF in this case appear intent upon trampling the Internationally recognized human rights of the young victim, who reportedly reached the age of 18 only weeks before the IAAF perpetrations began receiving worldwide press coverage. Up to the date of her 18th birthday, she was directly and explicitly protected by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)from such perpetrations, and the underlying rights protected thereby remain her fundamental and Internationally recognized human rights subsequent to her 18th birthday.

The preservations of identity rights exclusively to the individual is specifically enumerated in Article 8 of the UNCRC, while Article 2 of the UNCRC specifically enumerates absolute prohibitions against discrimination on several identity bases, including the bases of sex and birth.

The IAAF, however, appears to believe that it can hold itself above International law and the human rights of its victims.

The actual findings of the "gender tests" are entirely moot to the legal wrongs of this case. Biological determinism, also known as eugenics, is already a badly discredited pseudoscience in whose many names tremendous violence has been done in this world. Moreover, even under that discredited pseudoscience model (constructed primarily in the English Common Law countries of Great Britain and the U.S.), gender was determined to be either "male" or "other than male" (see: Birth Certificates & Identity), wherein "male" required the fully formed and functional capacity to sire children (successfully impregnate anyone "other than male") and everyone else was equally not male.

But again, these models of eugenics have been widely discredited, as no more than an excuse to discriminate and perpetrate violence, since the abrupt end of Germany's eugenics programs in 1945. The world has entered the age of understanding that an individual's identity is preserved exclusively to that individual, as Article 8 of the UNCRC explicitly makes clear.

It does not matter, as an International law matter of the violence done to the victim, if the victim has any medical condition within the diagnostic description of Cogenital Variations of Sexual Developmont (CVSD)*. Neither the IAAF nor anyone else has such entitlements to any degree, and the violence has been done: the violence arising from the IAAF's false sense of entitlement to the victim's identity; violence done in the name of biological determinism (eugenics).

More importantly, regardless of the legal implications in International law, the damage to the victim, the real harm to the victim of this case, has already been done.

* Congenital Variations of Sexual Development (CVSD):

- also sometimes more detrimentally described as a "disorder" (DSD or CDSD) [the conditions tend to be well within a normal range of the human and biological spectrum and the NCIDP considers the use of the term "Variation" significantly more appropriate];

- or by the outdated term "Intersex";

- or even badly described by the egregiously archaic term "pseudohermaphroditism";

- see also, tangentially but with more discussion of CVSD, Case Study: DSM V Zucker-Blanchard Revisions