Plants ought to have the right to vote

To deny plants the right to vote is to disolve the concept of human rightsUnweighted arguments:Marder, journalist at Al-Jazeera, 2013["The time is ripe for plant rights"] "[t]he codification of human rights ... meant to provide ... protections that would compensate for the vulnerabilities engrained in the ... condition. In fact, the more vulnerable ... the more ... rights need to be protected ... There is no doubt that plants are some of the most vulnerable living beings on the planet: even according to fairly conservative estimates, one in every five plant species is currently on the brink of extinction.". Baxi, Professor at University of Warwick, 1998 [Upendra, “Introduction to the Symposium: Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights”] " ... Nor may we succumb to an anthropomorphic illusion that the range of human rights is limited to human beings; the new rights to a clean and healthy environment ... take us far beyond such a narrow notion ... The expression "human rights" shelters an incredibly diverse range of desire-in-dominance politics and desire-in-insurrection politics. These forms of politics resist encapsulation in any formula. The best one may hope for is to let the contexts of domination and resistance articulate themselves as separate but equal perspectives on the meaning of "human rights."" United Nations, 2015 [Democracy and Human Rights] "The values of freedom, respect for human rights and the principle of holding periodic and genuine elections by universal suffrage are essential elements of democracy. In turn, democracy provides the natural environment for the protection and effective realization of human rights. These values are embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and further developed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which enshrines a host of political rights and civil liberties underpinning meaningful democracies." From these three quotes, we can see that in order to uphold human rights, we need to provide a forum for the vulnerable and the suffering to be able to speak; this is through the process of democracy, of which a major component is the right to vote.IMPACTS: Linarelli, Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown University, 1996 [DENVER JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLICY], p. 253 finds: "Development and respect for human rights are also closely interconnected ... the essence of development encompasses not only higher incomes but also better education, higher standards of health and nutrition, less poverty, a cleaner environment ... Human rights protections in the development process thus refer to economic and social rights as well as civil and political rights." Therefore, we must affirm human rights in order to help protect the development in the US, in terms of: better education, higher standards of health and nutrtition, less poverty, and a cleaner environment (cleaner housing for plants, in this case). These protections help increase the scope of economic, social, civil and political rights. Hoffman, Chair of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International, 2004 ["Human Rights Quarterly"], p. 932-955 "History shows that when societies trade human rights for security, most often they get neither. Instead, minorities and other marginalized groups pay the price through violation of their human rights. Sometimes this trade-off comes in the form of mass murder or genocide ... Indeed, millions of lives have been destroyed in the last sixty years when human rights norms have not been observed.' Undermining the strength of international human rights law and institutions will only facilitate such human rights violations in the future and confound efforts to bring violators to justice." Here, Hoffman is claiming that if we trade the security of anthrocentrism in order to not allow plants to have human rights, we get neither security nor the protections of these human rights. Marginaized groups pay the price through the constant violations of their human rights; sometimes this goes as genoicde. Millions of lives are destroyed or ended whenever we do not recognise human rights, therefore giving plants the right to vote will save countless lives. Carothers, director of Democracy and Rule of Law Project, 1994 ["WASHINGTON QUARTERLY"], p. 106. "In most of the countries that have undergone democratic transitions in recent years, during the generative period of the transitions ... the emphasis of external actors was on human rights advocacy rather than democracy promotion per se. Therefore, just as human rights advocates should not overlook the fact that democratization has advanced the cause of human rights in many countries, democracy promotion proponents should not ignore the contribution of human rights advocacy to democratization" In order to promote a more perfect democracy within the US, we need to focus more on human rights advocacy than on democratisation. If we affirm botanical suffrage, we affirm the notion of trying to make democracy more important and weighing in the US.SUMMARYIn order to protect human rights (and further, to make sure that we increase the scope of economic, social, civil and political rights; protect the lives of millions; to promote a more democratic US), we affirm the resolution and can only see a PRO ballot today. Thank you!