How the European Convention on Human Rights became a battleground between the center and the right | Daniel Trilling
IIn the latest series of Blue Lights, a BBC drama about police officers in Belfast, there is a scene in which a policeman insists on staying with a mentally ill man until the nurse arrives. “This is a second article issue,” the officer says to his colleague – and he means it This is in accordance with Article Two Under the European Convention on Human Rights, which was incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998, the state has a duty to protect life. It is an uncontroversial example of how the European Court of Human Rights works, which He turns 75 this weekhas found its way into everyday life across the UK.
At Westminster, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights has become a new rallying cry for the right, which claims to be the solution to unauthorized immigration. In early October, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives said they wanted it Extracting the United Kingdom from the agreement If they win the next elections. Last week, MPs voted down a largely symbolic motion put forward by Nigel Farage of the Reform Party to do the same. The right hopes that this issue will turn into a wedge issue similar to the issue of Britain’s exit from the European Union. “We are not sovereign all the time while we are part of the European Convention on Human Rights.” Farage claimed.
Public attitudes towards the European Convention on Human Rights are more nuanced than you might think. A Latest poll The YouGov study found that 46% of people oppose withdrawal, while 24% are unsure. The fact that the right has succeeded in convincing the remaining 29% of people that their lives would be better if we abandoned a treaty restricting the British state from killing, torturing or ill-treating them is, of course, worrying. But to formulate an effective response, there is no point in mocking. Instead, it is important to understand how and why far-right populists have been able to create the belief that human rights exist only for the benefit of other people who do not deserve them.
The European Court of Human Rights partly fulfills the human rights principles agreed by governments at the end of World War II. These principles, enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, state that people have the right to freedom and dignity wherever they live. This means economic and social rights – for example, the right to a life free of poverty – as well as civil and political rights. But the European Court of Human Rights focused mainly on the latter, defining the rights to life, liberty and a fair trial, among other things.
Indeed, that is why, for the first few decades at least, this was a favorite issue of the British centre-right. Guarantees of individual liberty were supposed to protect Europe from communist dictatorship, and perhaps prevent any Labor government from redistributing wealth on a large scale. actually, Proposal for a “Bill of Rights” This would fully incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law (initially the Convention was only applied by a court in Strasbourg) and appeared in Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election manifesto.
But by the 1990s, the left had taken up the cause more enthusiastically – partly because it saw how the UK’s relatively weak constitutional protections had enabled Thatcher’s government to crush organized labour. In 1998, Tony Blair’s government passed the Human Rights Act. This requires public bodies such as courts, police forces, hospitals and local councils to respect the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, and allows British citizens to seek redress in a British court if they believe their rights have been violated. Legislation drafted by the government must also comply with these rights.
According to human rights expert Francesca Kluge (in a 2016 book for The Guardian, by an ambitious new MP called Keir Starmer), Blair’s government has failed to realize the potential of the European Court of Human Rights. Under attack from the right, it dropped plans for a public awareness campaign that could have fostered a real popular sense of ownership. (A recent poll of people in Great Britain found that just under half knew little about the European Convention on Human Rights; contrast this with Northern Ireland, where it was included in the Good Friday Agreement.)
What is more, New Labor missed an opportunity to expand human rights to include economic and social protection measures. For example, the United Kingdom has not fully ratified the European Social Charter, a companion agreement to the European Convention on Human Rights first drawn up in the early 1960s, which covers issues such as housing, labor and employment rights. If that were the case, Britain might not have worse income inequality and weaker union rights than many of its neighbours.
After promoting the newsletter
This is important because all of these things, from individual freedom to mutual solidarity, are at their core about what we owe each other as a community. If people in general are supported to thrive, it is easier to make the case that particularly vulnerable groups among us – a refugee seeking safety, for example – may need additional forms of protection. But if people are pitted against each other in a winner-take-all economy, it becomes easier for the vicious politics of resentment to fester.
This is exactly what happened in the United Kingdom. Over the past 20 years, the populist right has blamed the European Court of Human Rights, with increasing fervor, for endangering Britain with the basic protections it provides to migrants the country might otherwise want to deport. To be sure, this relies heavily on racist stereotypes of “criminal” foreigners and involves a great deal of myth-making about how human rights protections actually work. But underneath that, it does something else.
He also got a lot of people in Britain Poorer and sickeror he had to work harder for less, and Spaces and services Because the maintenance of communal life had been allowed to deteriorate, the right was saying, “Look, here are some people who should be worse off than you. Don’t you hate the fact that we’re not allowed to do what we want to them?”
After the past two summers, the dark place this leads to needs no explanation. But it will not be possible to avoid it, as Labor currently believes, by meeting the demands of the centre-right. Either the European Convention on Human Rights and the protections it offers us become part of a broader politics of equality – or we lose them.