Even the "Devil" has Rights!

TL;DR

This work discusses that demonizing individuals for discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, creed or reprisal has been a successful tool for exclusion with documented evidence from a single case and argues that human rights are guaranteed for every single individual even the ones that might be labelled as devils in the community for whichever reasons to dismantle such a tool from its roots.

Abstract

There have been works discussing the adoption of a human rights framework for responsible AI, emphasizing various rights such as the right to contribute to scientific advancements. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to take this framework with special focus on computer vision and documenting human rights violations in its community. This work summarizes such incidents accompanied with evidence from the lens of a female African Muslim Hijabi researcher. While previous works resorted to qualitative surveys that gather opinions from various researchers in the field, this work argues that a single documented violation is sufficient to warrant attention regardless of the stature of this researcher. Incidents documented in this work include silence on Genocides that are occurring while promoting the governments contributing to it, a broken reviewing system and corruption in the faculty support systems. This work discusses that demonizing individuals for discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, creed or reprisal has been a successful tool for exclusion with documented evidence from a single case. We argue that human rights are guaranteed for every single individual even the ones that might be labelled as devils in the community for whichever reasons to dismantle such a tool from its roots.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: An overview of the "devil" highlights. The devil, is a female African Muslim Hijabi researcher that is actively publishing in the field. While that could be a shocking or funny label for some, but the devil label has been stamped on many researchers over the years towards expelling them from the field. This work is an effort to defend the right of every individual to contribute to research unless there is compelling evidence of unethical behavior. Even if a researcher is "bad", this researcher has the right to be rejected fairly to help them improve. Even if there is a researcher that is labelled to harm others, they should still be granted transparency; to be fully informed of the allegations and given a chance to defend themselves. Demonizing members of marginalized communities has, in our belief, been a highly effective tool for discrimination in our community. This work seeks to defend the idea that even those labeled as "devils" have rights; challenging and dismantling a tool of exclusion from its roots.
• Figure 2: It provides evidence on how it was normalized to situate ECCV in the place of a long history of human rights violations by the Israeli government which is still ongoing. (a) Oct. 2022, ECCV, Image taken from eccv. (b) Oct. 2024, Image taken from gaza2. An analogy to this would be holding a conference in the backyard of the holocaust while it was happening, and then inviting Jewish participants to that conference!
• Figure 3: A year and a half with grants and two affiliations but still zero students. (a) Being prevented from admitting a sole supervised second student. Except, the graduate program rejected the deferral and rescinded the offer of her first student due to visa delays, and her co-supervised student ended up to work on a completely different topic that does not intersect with computer vision. (b, c) From 22 May a request sent to admit a student, till 26 Sep. when the actual offer letter was sent. (c) 3,000$ admission fees instead of the standard 100$, that were waived after fighting for these international students rights. Resulting in zero students and her inability to start the lab. (d-i) Being denied access to standard information about the students that are supposedly joining the devil's lab in Jan 2025. It can be indicative that they were never registered under her supervision, which could have resulted in another year or two without students. At this point there was nothing to prevent the university from this behaviour, not even Grievances worked.
• Figure 4: GPA of one Black African MASc applicant changing from one year at 3.0 to another year at 2.7 without a change to his transcripts and referred to as a typo.
• Figure 5: Receiving only 3-4K$ from 24K$ yearly installments, resulting in delayed students admission.