Even the "Devil" has Rights!

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a human rights approach in computer vision research, highlighting documented violations and emphasizing that even individual incidents warrant attention regardless of the researcher's stature.

Contribution

It is the first work to document human rights violations in the computer vision community from a personal perspective, emphasizing individual incidents over surveys.

Findings

Documented silence on genocides promoted by contributing governments

Broken review and support systems in academia

Discrimination and exclusion based on individual cases

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.