On Liberty (18 page)

In the summer of 2012, the Olympics finally came to London. I had the awesome privilege, on Liberty’s behalf, of carrying one corner of the Olympic flag into the stadium. I walked alongside Doreen Lawrence and Sally Becker – ‘the Angel of Mostar’, who risked her life to save hundreds of others during the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo – among other heroic figures from around the world. Looking around, I was acutely aware that they were infinitely more worthy of the honour than me. The ceremony that preceded this moment was a beautiful reminder of how strongly our vibrant multiculture had featured in London’s bid to host the Games. It was even more poignant when one remembers the attack on our great open and diverse city that came the day after the bid was won.

Danny Boyle’s extravaganza was a sight to behold. There was no hint of the pomp and military-style uniformity of the Beijing Games that – some had feared – the ‘Big Smoke’ would be unable to follow. And yet, what a display of a different kind of power in the modern world. Shakespeare was celebrated, but so were the suffragettes. The Industrial Revolution was remembered in a particularly theatrically ingenious spectacle, but so was the
Windrush
. There was Elgar and punk, while the NHS and the internet were rightly highlighted as great free treasures of British design. This was the soft power of diversity and ingenuity and values, confidently displayed to the world. This ceremony set the tone for a wonderful summer of internationalism and sport, culminating in perhaps an even more inspiring and prejudice-busting Paralympic Games. This was our country rubbing along together, a country that aspired to be the equal of any, but no one’s superior – except perhaps on the field of sporting battle.

Amy Winehouse didn’t live to sing at the Olympics in her
beloved London (it’s hardly fanciful to suggest that she would have been asked). However, the equally beautiful and talented young Emeli Sandé sang like an angel, aged just twenty-five. My mother never lived to see those Olympics in the adopted city where she lived for most of her life. But I wore some Indian pearls she had given me to the opening ceremony that summer. And, somehow, I think, she might have been proud.

They are largely a shoal species and therefore can out-compete the more individual trout
.

– Wikipedia’s description of
thymallus thymallus
(the fish otherwise known as ‘grayling’)

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got

Till it’s gone

– ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell

Some say we human beings have come to dominate the Earth because we were chosen by God. Others would say it’s down to a particularly primeval, competitive and ruthless streak which allows us to impose our will on others and to drag the more vulnerable among us to the outskirts of the encampment to wither. I have no doubt about the beauty, creativity and ingenuity that come with our rugged individuality. But how could we have achieved so much, over thousands of years and against such difficult odds, without learning to bring our individual strengths together? How could we have built communities and even empires on a global scale, without imagining both the pain and potential of total strangers? Without solidarity as well as self?

I have a friend from my teenage years who is one of the
all-round best people I know. While it is sadly not always the case, isn’t it lovely when the person you knew and loved in their youth grows up to be the person they were somehow always meant to be; someone that both you and their younger self would recognize, and of which both can be proud? I am lucky enough to have a number of friends like this, and I believe that is the potential for each of us. That is the promise of each new-born baby and newly arrived asylum seeker, and everyone else besides. Not because someone else, some member of a powerful elite, has judged us worthy. Just because we are human and alive. This is the potential that human rights values protect.

Human rights laws can protect us from premature death and wholly avoidable degradation, from modern-day slavery and unlawful detention. They guarantee fairness in the courtroom, where no one wants or expects to be but any one of us could find ourselves one day. Human rights laws safeguard privacy, intimacy and family life. They protect a free conscience and the creativity that can flow from it. They defend free association and expression and the vital democratic action and participation in a good society that are otherwise impossible. Any modern bill of human rights worth the ink must protect other people’s children from all corners of the planet. Otherwise, how can our own children really be protected? Dignity, equality and fairness, and the greatest of all qualities which is empathy.

Some years ago my old friend’s parents asked me to give one of a series of guest talks at their synagogue. I had admired them and their daughter all my adult life and accepted the invitation in a heartbeat. My friend’s mother had survived a Nazi death camp and her father a Siberian work camp. Both eventually came to Britain, where they made enormous contributions to research, teaching and civil society, not least via the legacy of their three children, by now all middle-aged like me. As usual there was tight security at the entrance to the hall in which
I made my opening remarks. I always enjoy the debate more than the lecture, and was comfortable with some pretty robust comments from the audience about how to deal with terrorism in the Q and A that followed. The rather polite rough and tumble was nothing compared to questioning on mainstream radio and TV current affairs programmes. ‘Why should we respect the rights of people who hate us?’ ‘Surely those who attack other people should lose their own protection.’ That sort of thing. But I could see my friend’s dear old dad gradually becoming indignant on my behalf. When he could contain himself no more, he rose to his feet in a moment that I will never forget. ‘My wife was in a death camp and I was in Siberia,’ he said. ‘No one is going to tell me we don’t need human rights laws.’

So here I sit in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I live in a country and a world of common values, humanity and great and righteous freedom struggles, many of them making real progress. But I also sense an atmosphere where, quite bizarrely, terror or complacency or both might tempt us to relinquish some of our most precious treasures. It is remarkable how often fear and ignorance come together. We can be so obsessed with threats to our lives from outside our community or society that we forget how easily we undermine them from within.

Unthinkingly, and at the instigation of those with obvious vested interests in keeping their power unchecked, we might lose hard-won fundamental rights that earlier generations paid for in courage and blood. I do not trust the powerful. Not because they are inevitably malevolent or venal, but because they are human, with all the frailty, fear and vanity that comes with humanity and all its many virtues. Do you write blank cheques often? Can you afford to?

We’ve watched, it seems, the near death of privacy. This has come from two directions, in a powerful pincer movement to which we are only just waking up. First, there is the predictable and insatiable appetite of those in power, in business or
government. It is a hunger for more and more intimate information about the details and patterns of our lives. I understand why those who snoop for a living must get used to life in the shadows and working by stealth. Sadly, this has extended to massive spy programmes directed at entire populations on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. This would seem to have been sanctioned and operated with contempt for and no recourse to the democratic niceties of public knowledge, political discussion and debate – let alone legal authority. We are told just to trust them, told ‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear’. But we all have something to protect, if not hide. Information is power and, as we have seen, unchecked power will inevitably be abused by accident or design.

Secondly, there is the rise of what some of my younger friends and colleagues think of as ‘cool technology’, whether it’s social media or the apps dependent on knowing our location. They bring fun and convenience, but are also capable of real abuse. The toy that tells us where our nearest pizza can be bought will also tell others where we are. Of course it’s ultimately incumbent on us not to let the state become our ‘Big Brother’. But corporations and even individuals inspired by profit, or just prurience, are capable of being less than sweet siblings as well. Brand-new parents come home from hospital to find unordered complimentary samples of infant formula on their doorstep. Insecure or jealous spouses hack their loved ones’ email accounts for tell-tale signs.

We’ve seen how bad and sloppy laws drafted for one – at least publicly stated – purpose can be used in unlikely or ingenious ways that were never imagined at the time they were passed, often during an apparent crisis and often almost on the cross-party nod. Naïve adventurers on the internet and other unlikely characters have been parcelled off around the globe and peace protesters dealt with like terrorists.

Fair trials, whether in the criminal or civil courts, have been treated like once beautiful but now battered antiques, worthy
of little more than scrap. And this by many of the people who will no doubt queue up to wrap themselves in the Magna Carta as its 800th anniversary approaches. If the late Baroness Thatcher was once accused by a predecessor of ‘selling the family silver’, think of how some of her successors have trashed even the constitutional foundations of our home. Surely the right to a fair trial is no less glorious when, in the post-war era, it is translated from its original Latin into English and, via the European Convention, into many other languages besides? More importantly, even if available in modern English rather than an ancient tongue, the law becomes a dead letter in a sealed book in a land where only the rich and the powerful can afford access to fearless and independent legal advice and representation.

We have seen all kinds of ‘otherness’ defined and then predictably denigrated. ‘Divide and rule’ was once an imperial tool but it works still, and all too well, for the powerful all over the world to this day. You don’t have to have been literally born to rule, it would seem, to act that way. It is too easy to acquire the knack of distracting those you serve from your practical difficulties and possible inadequacies, by turning them on each other at community, national or global level. No unity for us, no scrutiny for them. It’s quite a combination. Other people’s children should have ASBOs. Ours should have extra Maths tutoring instead. Our citizens should be protected by our laws, but when other governments want to persecute us under their laws – after all we are not their citizens – our friendly government will happily make the trade. Whether this comes at the price of our privacy or even protection from torture, it just gets waved through.

As if only to help further with my case for human rights rather than citizen’s privileges, the same night that I write this the coalition government has added powers to its latest Immigration Act to strip British national ‘suspects’ of their citizenship, even if this would render them stateless. What did I warn of at the start
of my story? Whether it’s blanket surveillance, or internment and even torture, first it starts with the foreign nationals – and we are all foreigners in someone else’s eyes. Now it seems our government wants to remind us that citizenship is a privilege bestowed by the political community. What politics gives, it can take away. Our common humanity is all we have left and we should protect it with our imagination and empathy, with our values and ultimately with law at home and internationally.

That’s the ultimate essence of the Human Rights Act. It does what it says on the tin. But what do its enemies claim the problems to be?

First they say that the European Convention from which it derives is just somehow too, well, European. Like Berlusconi or Bratwurst or driving on the wrong side of the road. But the Convention itself was Winston Churchill’s post-war legacy and Conservative lawyers played a major part in its drafting, thinking they were sharing thoroughly British values with younger and frailer democracies in post-war Europe.

Then they say that either the European Convention or the Human Rights Act, or both, have given away our national sovereignty. They are deliberately vague about which they have the bigger problem with. So let’s take each instrument in turn. Yes, the European Convention is a treaty that binds our government under international law. But what is the problem with international law protecting everyone from torture, arbitrary detention, snooping, censorship and discrimination? If these values are good enough to form the charge sheet against governments elsewhere ‘over there’, why not our own dear government that we want held to account for our own protection? Haven’t we seen how even continental judges of mixed quality in a Strasbourg Court are capable of protecting rights and freedoms – privacy in particular – that we were in danger of letting go by default? The Court of Human Rights gives a great deal of latitude to domestic politicians and judges to implement these values according to our own norms and traditions. Understandably,
however, a brash reverse and altogether non-Churchillian two-finger salute just won’t do, even when we don’t like or understand every decision. It can’t work in any club of like-minded people.

How can we and our judges help shape international law by pulling out of it? There is value in states, like people, putting up with irritation for the bigger picture and longer view. By staying in the Convention, we get to help guide its development with our own thinking. And, in turn, that is how we can influence the human rights thinking of the wider world. To put it another way, what kind of signal would a once mighty empire send to the rest of the world by pulling out of its most enforceable document of international human rights standards?

The Human Rights Act is the law that gives our judiciary the power to referee on Convention rights here at home. It means people in Britain need not wait up to a decade for access to a busy European Court that has been the victim of its own success in challenging so much state abuse. So the Act does the very opposite of ceding power to Europe.

Alternatively, they say that our human rights laws give away parliamentary sovereignty to unelected judges. But haven’t we seen case after case of independent judges doing vital work in holding our politicians to account? As already illustrated, Parliament is too often dominated by government. In any event, if a Parliament is clear and committed enough, even in a desire to trample our rights and freedoms, declarations from the courts under the HRA have only a shaming and not an enforceable effect. Pretty tame stuff, you might think. If our political masters – supposedly our servants – find this too rich and testing for their blood, what kind of bill of rights could they possibly find acceptable and what could it possibly do to protect us?

Finally, they promise new mythical and magical bills of rights that would protect only the worthy and never the wicked. Haven’t we seen these distinctions in the eyes of various beholders? Wicked prisoners shouldn’t have the vote. Really? Not any
one of them, no matter how short the sentence or questionable the crime? What if you chose to go to prison rather than take the identity card forced on you by a future authoritarian government? You paid the price for your protest with your liberty and some would say that’s a democratic contract. But how democratic is it that you shouldn’t even be able to vote from your cell for a party that opposes identity cards? And even if your crime were more conventional and your incarceration justified by your alleged dangerousness, how does depriving you of the vote provide public protection, your rehabilitation or punishment, or act as a real deterrent to others?

When so many people are tired of politics and fail to bother to vote, it hardly seems like true punishment or deterrence. Sadly, perhaps, can you really imagine a putative opportunistic thief put off from stealing either a loaf of bread or priceless diamonds for fear of missing out on the next general election? If prison is to be anything other than a dustbin or ‘too-difficult pile’ for forgotten humanity, how can the signal that people inside just do not count help in any nobler aim? Even if you don’t agree with me and think that ‘law breakers cannot be law makers’, except when our leaders are breaching our rights and international law, is this the issue over which you would throw the baby out with the bath water and give up your own rights with those of the prisoners?