Sure, But Who's Counting?

On Worldcons and moral judgments

For context: several draft amendments have been proposed to reinforce the WSFS Constitution against potential repeats of the Chengdu disaster of last year. One of them would add humanitarian criteria to prevent countries under tyrannical regimes from hosting the Worldcon. The intention sounds great in principle: there are currently no rules to automatically exclude locations that are obviously terrible ideas (e.g. Uganda, Israel) but that might win the right to host a Worldcon if they get enough votes. If such rules had been in place in 2021, the People's Republic of China wouldn't have been eligible and we all could have been spared a monumental embarrassment.

The criteria that have been suggested for filtering out candidate locations are three: the World Press Freedom Index, the Freedom in the World survey and The Economist Democracy Index. Helpfully, and impressively quickly, Camestros Felapton has already done the boring work of compiling all three reports in one document. The cutoff score given in the draft amendment is 60% in any of the three rankings. In the World Press Freedom Index, this means that Guyana passes (60.1%) but Guinea does not (59.97%). In the Freedom in the World survey, the cutoff lets Kosovo qualify but not Georgia. In The Economist Democracy Index, Paraguay makes it (60.0%) but Bangladesh does not (58.7%). And I have to ask: what's the significant difference between Guyana and Guinea, between Kosovo and Georgia, between Paraguay and Bangladesh? Any cutoff value would be arbitrary. By the proposed change, Israel would still qualify by two of the three rankings.

To give a clearer idea of how little help these rankings are, let's look at Uganda's competitor for the 2028 Worldcon: Australia. It has spectacular scores in all three measures, so it would seem reasonable to infer that human rights and civil liberties are respected in Australia, right?

Ahem.

Australia has serious failures with regard to Aboriginal rights, immigration policy and criminal justice. Human Rights Watch has pointed out several other problems in the country, and Amnesty International has this to say:

In February, the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture cancelled plans to resume a visit to Australia, suspended in 2022, after failing to secure guarantees of unrestricted access to all detention facilities.

Or for more urgency, let's look at this year's host. Assessing the suitability of the city of Glasgow is tricky because Scotland has been a colony for three centuries; you only need to look at election maps over the course of the latest Tory regime to see that the Scottish people cannot be blamed for TERF Island's alarming retrogression in queer rights, immigration and welfare (see here and here). However, who wants to bite that bullet and ban the UK from hosting Worldcons? Britlandians still have enough freedom of speech for Doctor Who to produce the queerest season in its history, but apparently not enough freedom to question their form of government.

The thing is that numbers on a scale cannot possibly tell the whole story. If you rely on numbers, you could miss the annual reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which are richly detailed but, crucially, don't rate countries on a scale. If you rely on numbers, as the draft amendment proposes, you could end up with a future Worldcon held in such exciting places as New Zealand (ahem), Argentina (ahhhem), India (mmrrmmph), Moldova (owwwuffuffuff), or Hungary (harrrrrrruuuummmmphhhh). And here's the complication: it would be fantastic to have a Worldcon in India or Argentina. One of the arguments in favor of picking Chengdu was that fans shouldn't be punished for the government they happen to have, especially if said government doesn't really represent its people. But that argument has limits. No one wants a Worldcon in North Korea. On a scale from the United Federation of Planets to the Republic of Gilead, we need to decide where to draw the line.

Speaking of which, I'm puzzled by Felapton's counterproposal: a candidate location should qualify on all three scores, but with a cutoff value of 50%. To be fair, this modification to the modification includes more sensible terms:

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.

As much as I'd love a move in that direction, the amendment would need to be a lot more specific if we want to implement it consistently. Do we want to make sure we don't give a free PR boost to countries that mistreat prisoners, fail to protect women from sexual violence and invade indigenous land? Then we'd have to ban Norway, frequent darling of freedom rankings.

I was watching this topic at a distance until I noticed that Felapton's modified rules would remove Colombia from the list of eligible locations. Look, you don't have to explain to me what's objectionable about Colombia. Trust me, I know. What you may not know is that Colombia has years of experience in hosting safe and successful international cultural events. We have three Hay Festival sites and two Comic Con sites. We also have our own geekdom conventions (see here and here) and the second-largest book fair in Latin America. And that's without counting the international festivals for film, visual arts, performing arts and countless musical genres.

So, under Felapton's proposal of a 50% score in all three rankings, Colombia wouldn't make the list, while far more problematic places, like Papua New Guinea, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kenya, Madagascar, Serbia, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Mongolia, Georgia, Senegal and Malaysia, would become eligible.

Numbers alone do not, and cannot, express the relevant differences. I know I may be accused of having a Latin American bias, so I'll be the first to admit that right now is the wrong time to try El Salvador or Venezuela, but seriously, in 2024 there's no way that Serbia or Papua New Guinea are freer societies than Mexico or Bolivia.

This leaves us no closer to solving the problem. Going by numbers + case-by-case will give worse results than just case-by-case, but we'd still be at the mercy of whoever is doing the judging. Imagine we're supremely unlucky and the Seattle Worldcon of 2025 fails to avoid the election of Tel Aviv for the 2027 Worldcon. Then the Tel Aviv organizers would be in charge of running the vote for the 2029 host city. It just so happens that the only current candidate for 2029 is Dublin. And it just so happens that Irish foreign policy hasn't been shy about denouncing the excesses of the occupation of Palestine. We have no guarantee that the Netanyahu regime won't get its nose where it shouldn't and pressure the Worldcon organizers into making up some excuse to veto Dublin from consideration.

This year, Glasgow will be in charge of running the vote for the 2026 host city. The only candidate left for the 2026 Worldcon is Los Angeles, which sounds like a great choice until you pause to wonder how the humanitarian record of the US may change if Hair Furor wins this year's election. Even today, there's no human rights standard that the US isn't breaking somewhere. It would further undermine the credibility of the Hugos if we introduced vetting rules but didn't allow them to apply to the country that created the award.

My countercounterproposal is to do away with numerical rankings and put the onus on the candidate cities to prove that they're safe locations. (That's what the magazine Amazing Stories tried to do this February with the Ugandan team, which responded with a non-response.) The change I'm proposing would be much simpler to implement, as another numeral in Section 4.6.1 of the WSFS Constitution. I'm thinking of something like this:

4.6.1: To be eligible for site selection, a bidding committee must file the following documents with the Committee that will administer the voting: ... (4) adequate evidence of a climate of political freedom, protection of queer rights, accessible infrastructure, and absence of censorship in the candidate city.

This still lets the organizers of the Worldcon where the voting will take place decide what constitutes “adequate” evidence, but that's the thing with us puny humans: there's no social rule without a margin of interpretation.

—Arturo

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