Should people considered obese be protected by human rights laws?
Posted May 1, 2015 8:48 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Laws already protects us from discrimination based on things like sexual orientation and race; should obesity be added to human rights legislation in Canada?
University of Windsor law professor Bill Bogart has told the Canadian Obesity Summit there should be laws protecting overweight people from discrimination.
“I think we have lots and lots of studies, both in terms of individual treatment and treatment as a group of the kind of prejudice and stigma that are visited upon the lives of people who are obese. And when that has happened throughout history, other groups — whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or gender, religion — have sought the protection of human rights laws. To my mind, the parallel here is very strong indeed,” says Bogart.
He adds there is some ability to protect people who are obese by claiming they have a disability, but says that can be a long and complicated process.
“I believe the law’s protection should be clearer and should be more direct. And so, I would make obesity a specific ground of protection in human rights codes.”
He says the other way of protecting people could be banning “appearance bias” — discrimination based on how someone looks.
The number of severely obese Canadians has skyrocketed over the last few decades, and Bogart argues the law needs to keep up with changes in society. He uses changing attitudes toward same-sex marriage and smoking as examples.
“Smoking’s gone from a glamourous, sophistocated activity 50 years ago where almost 50 per cent of the adult population smoked to less than 20 per cent of the adult population smoking now, and smoking widely regarded as a filthy and expensive habit.”
Bogart says during that period of time, we’ve seen different kinds of regulation to discourage smoking, like banning of advertising, and mandatory warnings.
