Some time ago I was at a lunch with Nigel Farage. He was exhibiting his habitual beer-swilling geniality. I decided, casting aside British don't-talk-about-politics-sex-or-religion etiquette, to challenge him on a key plank in UKIP's political edifice: that Britain should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) at the earliest possible opportunity. Apparently the ECHR is an infringement on our sovereignty. The dedication of Britain's right wing to this goal is beyond my comprehension - should we opt out of the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) to stop irritating foreigners from telling us not to abuse people, too?
I asked Mr. Farage whether he could identify how the ECHR ever did him any harm. He went through his hail-fellow-well-met obfuscation but, when pressed, he could not come up with a single example. That is understandable: there are none. Furthermore, we are a long way from a world where there are too many protections for the most powerless people among us.
To suggest there are "too many human rights" is fatuous. Of course, our rights are occasionally in conflict - the right to free speech versus the right to privacy, for example - but most of these tensions don't actually exist. Take yesterday: the U.S. Senate published a heavily redacted report on how the CIA got itself mixed up in torture. The CIA had insisted on its right to keep certain matters secret, and for the most part the Senate acquiesced, despite the citizen's right to freedom of information. In fact, the government has no "rights" at all, and certainly not the right to cover up evidence of its own criminality. This was merely an example of "might makes right" (which it invariably does not).
Ironically, I find myself in Guantanamo Bay as I write this, meeting with the last remaining British resident, Shaker Aamer. If ever we needed a reminder of the importance of the ECHR and CAT, it is Shaker's predicament: he was horribly tortured when first sold to the US for a bounty in 2001, and he is now being held under terrible conditions in an isolation cell, notwithstanding the fact that he was "cleared" for release more than seven years ago.
While his rights not to be tortured, or arbitrarily detained, clearly need to be enforced, so does his human right to be reunited with his family - including his youngest son Faris, who he has never met. The lad was born on Valentine's Day 2002, the same day Shaker arrived in the world's most notorious prison. Yet the American courts have held that, while they have the power to declare Shaker's detention illegal, they have no authority to order his release in the face of the Pentagon's insistence that he may be held indefinitely. In other words, there is a legal right, but no remedy, which means there is not really any legal right at all.
The antipathy of the Americans towards human rights is, at the very least, conflicted. These rights are at the heart of the US Constitution: since 1789, the U.S. has had a Bill of Rights, and nobody seriously contends that we should abolish that. Americans just do not like to be told that they must provide the same rights to the rest of the world. Hence Guantanamo, where there are no Americans (they would have rights), only foreigners. Since animals have privileges under the U.S. environmental laws, the bizarre conclusion is that the iguanas that freely roam the base should have more protection than the Muslims who are locked up there.
The hostility shown by some British people - including, sadly, David Cameron - to human rights is even harder to understand. It is not as if the average Briton has a superfluity of protections. Police can infiltrate a peaceful NGO and father the children of members without redress. The security services can snoop on us with impunity, with or without parliament's permission. In any case, the "Average Briton" is not the person who is most at risk: liberty is eroded at the margins, and today's hate figures, who are vilified in politics and the media, are the people whose rights require most protection.
The malaise that afflicts the British right is that they seem to think that misfortune can only ever visit the homes of others. They feel that they do not need to stand up to government for themselves, let alone for those less fortunate. They hear a term like "Parliamentary Supremacy" and they believe that Cameron (or even Theresa May) can be trusted to respect liberty even in an election year.
Rather than accepting a wholesale retreat from the front lines of civilization, we would do better to contemplate how our society might move forwards. This is worth a book rather than a couple of paragraphs but, to give an example, the human right to a roof over your head could force the government to reconsider its tax breaks for the wealthy, and require that some funds be spent on low income housing instead. Or what of the right to procreation, first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court (for Americans) more than fifty years ago? My wife and I benefited from a gruelling struggle with IVF, culminating in our wonderful little boy. It makes me wonder how long it will be before the world recognizes the right to IVF for those otherwise unable to have children? And yet the miserable critics of the NHS complain that IVF is a luxury, as if somehow we should have the right to treatment for spraining an ankle, but not for infertility.
Today, as we contemplate our achievements, we still have a long way to go before we attain nirvana.
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Guest post: Clive Stafford Smith - 'to suggest that there are too many human rights is fatuous'
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 10/12/2014 11:02
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