Labour's Shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan wrote an opinion piece in yesterday's Evening Standard in which he reveals a curious understanding about the state of human rights in Britain today. It seems that Mr. Khan believes that human rights, which are in essence normative constructs and examples of current thinking of what it means to be human, will cease to exist in Britain should the Human Rights Act be repealed or should Britain leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Of course, he knows full well, for he is clearly an intelligent person, that in modern-day Britain human rights are as much protected by the deeply-held convictions of the British people and their elected representatives in Parliament as by acts of Parliament and international treaties.
What's more, Mr. Khan seems to contradict himself in his thoughts on the continued adherence by Britain to the ECHR. First he writes that Britain "As signatories to the ECHR, we cannot just walk away from it. But we can appeal against court rulings and propose reforms to its remit and operation." The latter part is ostensibly the case, except that to reform it would require the unanimous consent of all parties to the treaty, something Mr. Khan knows to be practicably impossible. And there is no appeal possible against the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. But where he contradicts himself is in the first clause of the above quote; he later writes, you see, "The [Human Rights] Act was designed deliberately to preserve the long-held doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty: Parliament alone can decide whether to repeal or amend legislation." If Parliament is sovereign, an opinion I share with Mr. Khan, then Parliament can most certainly decide to walk away from an international treaty. There is no force in the world that has legal right to prevent the actions of a sovereign body.
In fact, human rights would most likely be more strongly protected if they were repatriated. The ECHR and the Strasbourg Court have left the British public with the wretched feeling that human rights are not a product of the shared understanding by a society of what is right and what is wrong, but merely that of 47 men and women ensconced on a bench near the banks of the Rhine. To withdraw from the ECHR and abolishing the Human Rights Act that depends on it would not be the disaster Mr. Khan would like us to believe it would be, but rather gives the British people the chance to re-engage with human rights and to determine anew what they believe human rights to be. The ECHR is almost 60 years old and human rights, far from being eternal, are subject to change and so every once in a while a society needs to reflect on what those rights are.
Mr. Khan's insistence on the dire necessity of an international human rights treaty betrays a lack of faith in the goodness of the British people, who if given the choice, will not seek a return to stoning or witchburning, but will rather uphold those rights they believe every breathing human being possesses by virtue of his existence. They do not need an international treaty telling them what their rights are, they know that full well themselves. International treaties defending human rights are most necessary for people subject to tyranny and oppression - even though they are hardly effective in these cases - but a mature society like Britain has no need for them. On the long journey of human rights, Britain is in the vanguard and we should not let decades-old treaties hold back.
No comments:
Post a Comment