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- The American Declaration
of Independence eloquently sets out the rights with which we
are born:
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"We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness." |
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- But a close encounter
with an alligator in the Everglades will soon show that our Creator
forgot to tell it about man's inalienable right to life. To say
to a woman living in Darfur that she was born equal, with a right
to liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be met with a look
of despair rather than hope. The reality is that we have ‘rights'
only if we as voters decide that the law of our country should
give them to us and then only to the extent that they can be
enforced against those (including governments and alligators)
who would try to take them away. Rights are not somehow intrinsic
to our lives. There is no gene for human rights. In the absence
of an enforceable law, ‘rights' are, at best, aspirations
- a rallying cry. And sometimes they are an imperfect formulation
of what we want to be the case. I cannot see for instance the
justification for the recent decision that a life prisoner, in
the name of a right to family life, should have access to artificial
insemination facilities so that his wife can become pregnant.
Prison should bring with it the natural results of physical separation.
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- There is a considerable
difference between the view of the majority of people and liberals
as to how others should be treated. Amongst readers of the Guardian
and the Independent, human rights legislation is seen as obviously
‘a good thing', whilst readers of the Express, the Telegraph
and the Daily Mail are far from sure. Liberals would consider
it completely unacceptable to deport an illegal immigrant back
to a country where he would probably be tortured or killed. Most
others, by contrast, would look at what the person had done and,
if he had committed a serious crime, would be likely to say ‘tough'
and send him back anyway. Their view would be that receiving
humanitarian treatment is dependent on compliance with your obligations
as a ‘guest' here. Both views are, of course, merely assertions
incapable of justification on purely logical grounds. All cows
eat grass, this is a cow and so therefore it eats grass is not
a formulation which can be used to settle this particular issue.
There are no premises which would be universally accepted as
true from which a deduction could be made.
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- If logic cannot be used,
then we have to look at the claims of morality. But the rights
set out in the 1950 European convention on human rights or in
the 1948 United Nations Declaration do not come from a generally
accepted source of moral authority, such as the Church or the
Mosque or even from the founding fathers of a new country or
as a consequence of a revolution against an oppressive regime,
such as in France. And so for most people in this country they
have no religious or emotional force. Indeed, the fact that we
have adopted the ‘European Convention on Human Rights'
makes it even more suspicious, even though eminent British lawyers
had a leading role in writing it after and because of the atrocities
committed in the second world war. It is now seen simply as an
unconvincing attempt to create a secular morality out of nothing
- and by Europeans as well! It is interference by do-gooders.
The fact that, according to the newspapers, rights seem mainly
to benefit undeserving people underlines this.
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- And yet as individuals
we each want most, if not all, of the protections on which these
‘rights' are based. The history of communism amply demonstrates
that without them my life would be intolerable, if I actually
still had a life. It is then a simple exercise of pragmatism
to realise that if I want that protection then, unless I happen
already to be the supreme ruler, it will have to be part of a
package giving everyone-else in the same position as me the same
rights as me.
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- But it is an emotional
thing as well. I and my fellow liberals could never be instrumental
in sending anyone living here back to suffer what goes on in
a repressive regime. My mirror neurons wouldn't let me. This
is perhaps where the great divide exists in society. We liberals
are obviously too soft - or the others are too hard. But then
I shed a tear when I watch ‘the Railway Children'.
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