Human Rights Safe Without Acts or Treaties

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of current thinking of what it means to be human, will cease to exist in Britain should the Human Rights Act be repealed or should Britain leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).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.

Squatting Is Nine-Tenths of the Law, Apparently

The famed anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote in 1840 that "property is theft". This slogan has since been carried all over the streets of the world on banners and pamphlets by countless thousands of anarchist activists. On would accordingly expect that today's anarchists would remember these three simple words that inspired some many of their ideological forebears. And I was given to understand that squatters in Western Europe often claim to be anarchists, or at least to be inspired by anarchist theories. But now it seems squatters in the Netherlands have abandoned the simple creed of Proudhon for that capitalist phrase 'possession is nine-tenths of the law'.

In September Parliament finally passed a law making squatting illegal, one of the few good initiatives taken by the former Dutch government under Prime Minister - and Harry Potter look-a-like - Jan Peter Balkenende. No longer would law-abiding property owners have to fear waking up one morning to find their houses or offices seized by balaclava-wearing youngsters. Even the left-wing mayor and aldermen of Amsterdam, usually favourably disposed to squatting, said they would uphold the law and start evicting squatters as soon as possible. So that was that, or at least that's what everybody thought.

Squatters, not content with returning their newly-conquered homesteads to their rightful owners, began claiming protection under the European Human Rights Convention, which prohibits someone from having his home taken from him without judicial fiat. Yes, squatters, having taken a home from its owner by simply occupying it and refusing to leave, in what seems to me clear violation of the Human Rights Convention, now claim protection under the same. What's worse, as the Dutch public broadcaster NOS reports, a bleeding-hearted judge is actually going along with this idiotic - there's no other word for - line of reasoning.

Squatting is robbery, plain and simple and squatters should not expect the law to support them. When news of the impending ban first emerged, squatters took to the streets carrying placards saying "your laws, not ours" meaning that they did not obey the democratically-made laws of society. Yet now, in the face of certain eviction, they choose not to make a stand based on ideals, but surrender quickly and claim the protection of the laws they claimed to despise. I always thought, misguided and abhorrent and criminal though their actions were, squatters at least were led by ideals. But no, they are nothing more than opportunistic hypocrits and they should be treated as the crminals they are.