Human rights – a synonym for injustice

Mar 22, 2020 by

By Georgia Leatherdale-Gilholy, The Conservative Woman:

ON November 8, 1998, the Human Rights Act received Royal Assent in the United Kingdom. The Act codified into British law the rights specified by the European Convention on Human Rights. However, far from ushering in a golden age of liberty, the Act has led to rulings that have threatened the safety and prosperity of British society. These include the use of taxpayers’ money for a burglar to sue the man whose house he broke into; a convicted serial killer being given hard-core porn in prison because of his ‘right to information and freedom of expression’;  the prevention of government deportations of terrorists and other violent criminals, and has, directly and indirectly, provoked a general stifling of freedom of speech for fear of legal challenge. 

The progressive consensus is that the revocation of the Human Rights Act, and a withdrawal from the European Convention, would ‘diminish people’s human rights’. This possibility is bemoaned, as if these modern laws had summoned universal rights into existence in the twentieth century, and any scepticism of them implies a wish to revert to barbarism or totalitarianism. This false paradigm dangerously distorts the complex meaning of the term ‘human rights’ as a non-negotiable pillar of any just society, when the term merely refers to the recent phenomenon of secular doctrines of universal entitlements and freedoms codified by international and national institutions, not to historical philosophies of natural and legal rights claims from which it developed, and which have undoubtedly formed a weighty cornerstone of Western exceptionalism.

The list of transgressions against natural freedoms and public safety as a result of human rights law has indeed received criticism, if not any meaningful opposition, in Westminster. In the lead-up to the 2015 election, Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that he was frustrated that people could abuse current rules. However, could Cameron honestly define these incidents as an ‘abuse’ of the rules when it is the ‘human rights’ rules themselves that blatantly facilitated such injustice?

The foundation of universal natural and legal rights far predated the modern ‘human rights’ dogma responsible for the aforementioned scandals and is unquestionably the legacy of the dialogue between philosophy and biblical theology, specific to European Christendom.

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