scaramouche

...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

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User: scaramouche
Irreverent, contrarian, delighted to be out of synch with the zeitgeist, I depend on my sense of humour (such as it is) to keep me sane in this wacky world.

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Tuesday, 09 December 2008

Three strikes yer out: Melanie Phillips does an excellent job of demolishing the “human rights” culture:

‘Human rights’ culture has done serious and fundamental damage to traditional English liberties. This is for a number of reasons.
1) The ‘rights’ that that it claims are universal are nothing of the kind. Because they are balanced by competing rights they are highly contingent on the whims and prejudices of individual judges to decide which of them comes out on top. This gives enormous power to unelected judges to wade into issues where public opinion is divided, and which therefore should properly be the province of politicians. One such is the issue of privacy, where judges are hell-bent on creating a law precisely because politicians have chosen not to do so. But who gave unelected judges the right to say they know better than Parliament what laws should be created in the public interest? Human rights law is thus fundamentally undemocratic and leads to the politicisation of the judiciary.
2)  ‘Human rights’ has changed over the decades following World War Two from a doctrine protecting the individual from the state to a doctrine requiring the state to accede to the proclaimed ‘rights’ of groups. As a result, enforcing group demands has become a judicial weapon in the hands of every minority group under the sun to beat up on the majority culture, turning rights and wrong and common sense itself on their heads and producing a culture of creeping illiberality and coercion. Thus evangelical Christians, for example, find themselves arrested or sacked for upholding their Christian beliefs about homosexuality. Their right to practise their religion is struck down. As the former lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham candidly declared in 2005, since the European Human Rights Convention existed to protect vulnerable minorities who were sometimes disliked, resented or despised, it followed that it was an ‘intrinsically counter-majoritarian’ instrument. It should come as no surprise, he added, that decisions vindicating their rights ‘should provoke howls of criticism by politicians and the mass media, because they generally reflected majority opinion.
3) Most fundamental of all, the very idea of setting down in statute what rights we have runs absolutely counter to the foundational principle of English common law and the unique principle of liberty it enshrines – that everything is permitted unless it is expressly forbidden. Human rights law turns that into ‘only what is codified is to be permitted’ – which is deeply illiberal.

Deeply illiberal—the reason it meshes so well with sharia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:27 | link | comments

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