Placing political conditions on humanitarian aid to foreign countries is unjust.

! I will start by attacking my opponent’s case; then I will move on to rebuild my own. Opponent’s Value: Governmental Legitimacy- virtue of political institutions and of the decisions over laws, policies, and candidates for political office made within them. With this value, we must look to the fact that most of the governments within countries that need humanitarian aid are not legitimate. The negative side is doing absolutely nothing to solve or even lessen this problem. Most attempts will be seen, like my Smith card stated, as an invasion of sovereignty, and they will be rejected by either the government or the people. Governmental Legitimacy is not something that can be achieved with political conditions, and since we are debating weather political conditions are just or unjust, we must look to justice as the highest value. Opponent’s Criterion: Upholding State Autonomy- the right of a state to govern itself. Political conditions are a direct invasion of a state’s autonomy. Only with unconditional aid can autonomy actually be achieved. Forcing states to do something in order to obtain something their citizens desperately need is highly unjust. Opponent’s DefinitionsMy opponent provided no reason as to why their definitions should be held higher than mine, so my definitions must flow through. However, I will go ahead and provide a reason why my definition of political conditions must be looked to. Opponent’s Definition: Political conditions: The criteria which are applied to a specific situation regarding the behavior of the government (Summarized from the SDC). With my definition, we are actually talking about administrative and political reform in respects to humanitarian aid in recipient countries. My opponent’s definition does not specify that we are looking to changes in the recipient country which is important because when political conditions are placed on aid we have to look to the reaction of the recipient country and how that reaction affects the donor country. Opponent’s Contentions 1. The resolution itself cannot be upheld. A. Political conditions can be justified it at least one circumstance. The situation in Macedoniawas not just. The USKP observes that Turkey provides successful unconditional aid to Macedonia since 1991. To be exact, 15.8 billion dollars of aid has been provided and used successfully. It is unjust to put political conditions on aid when the aid could be successful without such political conditions. This situation even goes against my opponent’s criterion of upholding state autonomy in this situation because it goes against Macedonia’s right to govern itself. B. Effectiveness can justify political conditions. I would like to turn this argument on my opponent because since political conditions are not effective, they cannot be justified. I have proved through my examples of Western Africa,Haiti, and Afghanistanthat political conditions are not effective. With the high amounts of corruption in countries, we must look to the fact that the conditions cannot be followed, thus they must be considered unjust due to the risk of suspensions and reductions in aid. C. It is impossible for the resolution to be upheld. Here in this sub point, my opponent basically claims that they win the debate if they can prove that political conditions are just in at least one circumstance. This argument is highly abusive and allows the affirmative almost no ground. Thus, this argument cannot be taken into account. 2. No injustice in conditional aid to be claimed by the affirmative. My opponent claimed that injustice implies some invasion of human rights. I would like to again refer to my Smith card which states that human rights are defined as “the articulation of the need for justice, tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity in all of our activity” In order to attack this contention, I am going to explain how political conditions result in the violation of several of these things. justice- the quality of being fair and reasonable It is unfair and unreasonable to place political conditions on humanitarian aid because both the donor and the recipient are negatively impacted because the aid (if any is provided at all) is low quality and the donor suffers from invading the recipient country’s sovereignty and losing credibility. human dignity- recognizing that humans are worthy of fundamental respect and have inherent worth Political conditions result in denying aid at some time or another. This results in loss of lives, thus human dignity cannot be preserved. Even when the political conditions are accepted, humans within the recipient country are being treated like bargaining chips; thus, human dignity is not preserved. Through the loss of human dignity and justice, human rights are violated with political conditions. My opponent talked about how it is not to the benefit to the donor country to give away handouts. For this argument we can look to my second contention which proves that the donor country is actually harmed with political conditions. Loss of credibility and conflict are two things the donor country will run into with political conditions. I now move on to rebuild my own case. My value and criterion (which my opponent attacked at the same time) My opponent agreed that justice and preserving human dignity are important values within the resolution. My opponent stated: “Now my opponent must either refute the examples I give where conditional aid was just or show why the resolution is not universal. Until then, I have adequately negated her position and even upheld her value and value criterion in some cases, while she upholds it in other cases. ” I did this with my opponent’s example ofMongolia, showing that is it unjust to place political conditions on humanitarian aid when the aid could have been successful without political conditions. As I mentioned before, it is abusive to claim that the resolution is impossible to uphold. If you, as a reader, do not buy this argument, look to the fact that in rare instances that political conditions are actually followed, the humans within the country are still being treated like bargaining chips; human dignity is not preserved, thus justice is not achieved. My Contentions 1. Political conditions on humanitarian aid are ineffective. (countries not accepting political conditions and countries not following political conditions) To attack this contention, my opponent claimed that I agreed with their sub point B of their first contention. Basically what their sub point said was that effectiveness justifies political conditions. I do not completely agree with this statement because we have to look to much more than effectiveness to justify political conditions. In addition to this, because political conditions are highly ineffective, they cannot even be partially justified. This is because the governments of many foreign countries are highly corrupt, resulting in little or no aid. 2. Political conditions cause more harm than good for the donor country. To attack this contention, my opponent attacks my example of North Korea in two ways. I will cover them both. 1) My opponent said we cannot apply this to all cases. This is partially true, but the point I am trying to convey is that when political conditions are rejected, it can cause conflict. This is a fairly logical conclusion. My Smith evidence also supports this point.2) My opponent says that because North Korea is highly corrupt, conditions would be beneficial. For this I would like to provide the example from my Kwon card of China giving unconditional aid to North Korea. This aid is going to the people. Due to corruption, some of the aid may be misused, but in situations with highly corrupt governments, we must look to my first contention where I have shown that either no aid or aid suspensions and reductions are going to be major problems with political conditions. My opponent also never addressed my argument talking about loss of credibility of the donor. It is vital to take this into account because it becomes a major problem when political conditions are placed on humanitarian aid. 3. Quality of the aid is improved when conditions are removed. My opponent said that there is no justice based impact to this because the aid is not obligatory. We can cross apply my attack on their second contention to this where I talked about how loss of lives results in an invasion of human dignity because humans have inherent worth. Basically, denying aid does not preserve human dignity; thus, it is a human rights violation. This makes it unjust for the donor country to provide low quality aid to the citizens of a recipient country due to political conditions. We have to look to the fact that in some cases, literally 40% of the aid is spent on fulfilling the political conditions. This is completely unreasonable. For these reasons, I affirm the resolution.