The oppressive individualism of human rights
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Democracy is more than mere majoritarianism, this much we are told. Though the majority of citizens must have the lead say in who governs, the minority must have a minimum level of protection from the wishes of that majority. That is why in a true democracy the wishes of the majority must be qualified by the presence of human rights and the rule of law.
Following this sort of reasoning, the Shadow Attorney General and former Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti, argued on the BBC’s Today programme this week that the right to an abortion should be imposed by law upon Northern Ireland – even if the majority of its citizens do not want it. The right to an abortion is a fundamental human right and thus it even supersedes the wishes of the majority – that was basically her line, I believe, though she was careful not to spell it out quite so baldly.
This is not a discussion on abortion, my interest is simply in the way the appeal to human rights can be used to trump the wishes of the majority. And I worry that what was originally intended as a protection against the tyranny of the majority can be used as a means of imposing or maintaining the dominance of a certain worldview, even against the wishes of the population concerned. That is, it becomes a way of imposing a particular slate of (typically liberal) values without the need to persuade people to vote for them.
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