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The many wrongs committed in the name of human rights
Since we are, astonishingly, about to have a law that will curb our freedom to talk about religion, what I am about to say will soon be unsayable, without at the very least a police caution. So I must get it said quickly.
I believe that the idea of universal human rights is a bad and dangerous idea; for all its nobility, it tends to lead to terrible confusion and cross-purposes, and to the most bitter disappointment. It is clearly a religious idea: it is something in which people have faith, as a revealed truth, which neither has nor needs a rational basis; it is self-evident to good people. (Self-evident was, after all, the word used by the writers of the US Constitution.)
Believers believe in it passionately, and despise unbelievers. And it will soon become almost impossible to declare that you do not truly believe in the idea of universal human rights, whatever the Home Secretary may decree; it is the only form of passionate, unself-consciously proselytising religious faith left to the faithless West.
I found myself last week at a Human Rights Watch fundraising dinner at the Natural History Museum, talking to the celebrated QC Geoffrey Robertson, who has had a distinguished career specialising in human rights. I asked him what was the origin of universal human rights, meaning (rather rhetorically) to challenge the assumption that there is any objective basis for the idea.
But the cavernous room in the museum was very noisy, and I failed to make myself either audible or clear, because he said - or at least I think he said - that the modern idea of universal human rights was conceived in 1939 at a meeting of British socialists, including H G Wells, Barbara Wootton and A A Milne.
The memory of this fragment was rather faint in the cold light of the next day, but it was all too plausible. There is indeed something altogether utopian and fantastical (Wells), as well as child-like (Milne) about the concept of universal human rights.
I don't mean human rights as part of a social contract in a particular society; in such a case, human, or rather civil, rights are based on tradition, consent and law, and breaches can be punished. But universal human rights, applying to everyone in every society, have always seemed to me perfectly absurd. It is all very fine for the UN to declare that every child has a universal human right to a home and a square meal, but it is meaningless verbiage in the real world.
Who conferred those rights? Who is to fulfil them? And who can be prosecuted for the failure to fulfil them? Besides, societies and cultures do truly disagree on human rights. And by what universal human right may the universalists inflict human rights on countries and cultures that think differently? Besides, even when people do agree on human rights, one tends to conflict with another. Such conflict cannot be resolved universally, but only locally and pragmatically.
This has been a confusing week for anyone interested in human rights. The Government seems to be both absurdly over-mighty and absurdly weak. On the one hand, it has suddenly decided to remove our right to talk freely about religion, let alone joke about it - how innocent things were when Pamela Stephenson was able to sing "Ayatollah, don't Khomeini closer" on Not the Nine O'Clock News.
On the other hand, the Government is quite unable to support our universal human right to life, limb and unjudgmental religious chat by deporting or extraditing suspected terrorists from our shores, since the European Convention on Human Rights makes it pretty much impossible. Instead David Blunkett proposes new legislation to lock up suspected terrorists indefinitely. Brilliant. What I want to know is whether the suspected terrorists have been consulted on all this. Surely that is no less than their right. What would they prefer? I shall be writing to my MP about this.
It is all very confusing. On Thursday, I went to a lunch at the think-tank Politeia, for the launch of a lucid pamphlet by Martin Howe, QC, depressingly called Tackling Terrorism: The European Human Rights Convention and the Enemy Within and I found myself huffing and puffing against the human rights orthodoxy. Yet later the same day, I found myself supporting Human Rights Watch. Inconsistent though this sounds, I cannot think of any charity more worthy of support.
Human Rights Watch sends quite astonishingly brave researchers all over the world to record the terrible things that are done to people in war and in peace - in Chechnya and Sierra Leone, for example - and then to make the rest of the world pay attention.
It also supports heroic men and women who try to fight these evils in their own countries, often at great risk to themselves. I was particularly touched by an Indian lawyer, himself a Dalit (once called untouchable), describing the deliberate degradation of many millions of Dalits in peaceful, prospering India. Three of his colleagues have been shot.
I am not really being inconsistent about universal human rights. What this charity does is right and immensely important. It's just that its name isn't right. I think it should be called Human Wrongs Watch. It is so much easier to agree on what is wrong. It's almost always intuitively obvious. It is often local. And it is so much easier to deal with specific negatives, than with vague, all-embracing, codified all-purpose positives. As in medicine, the more universal a panacaea, the less it tends to work.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 20, 2001
