In the modern world, the domestic and the international become entwined. News of David Cameron’s assault on the Human Rights Act in the aftermath of the riots was noted around the globe. The Tehran Times quoted the prime minister as saying that ‘human rights and health and safety can interfere with morality’. The Voice of Russia agreed with what it thought he had meant on human rights: the Brits need tougher policing.
Cameron shares with Tony Blair ‘people’s princess’ syndrome - the capacity to express, and thereby accentuate, a public mood. But, like his mentor, he can also get it spectacularly wrong. Remember how Blair declared that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ after the London bombings of 7 July 2005? We now begin to see the full extent to which they did.
Actually, the game may change but the rules are constant - we play as a democracy committed to human rights and civil liberties or we lose. We do this both because it is morally right and, in the long term, practically best. UK interests are not, for example, assisted by successful Libyan resistance leaders claiming that MI6 conspired in their rendition for torture.
Cameron would appear to have pulled some old prejudices out of the drawer rather than advancing an analysis to meet a set of events that, frankly, took everyone - from police to rioters - by surprise. Typical of the prime minister’s response was an article in the Daily Express entitled ‘Human rights in my sights’.
Back in Iran, the Tehran Times summarised Cameron’s arguments as twofold. First, the very notion of universal human rights ‘undermines personal morality and responsibility’. Second, ‘the interpretation of human rights legislation has exerted a chilling effect on public sector organisations, leading them to act in ways that fly in the face of common sense, offend our sense of right and wrong, and undermine responsibility’. This approach probably meets with a good deal of local support: the Iranian regime shares a concern that notions of human rights undermine its ideas of personal morality and responsibility.
Did the Human Rights Act or its interpretation play any part in inciting or encouraging the rioters? It would seem inherently unlikely. The rioters appear to have been a mixture of outright criminals, some in gangs, and others caught up in the excitement of the affair. The appeal for many would very likely have been that what they were doing was: quite precisely wrong; without justification in law and morality; and that they were, for a day, lords of misrule.
In her first Reith lecture, Eliza Manningham-Buller had interesting things to say about terrorists that would apply equally to rioters. She was clear that terrorists were not all swivel-eyed psychopaths or crazed fundamentalists, but that their numbers included others who joined up for a variety of reasons that include a search for a shared identity as much as anything else. It is for rioters as it is for terrorists: complicated.
The rioters seemed to have remarkably little that was political behind their actions. One recalls the extraordinary outburst of the ‘Hackney heroine’ Pauline Pearce: ‘We are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running down Footlocker and thieving shoes. Get real.’ As a number of commentators pointed out, rioters left libraries and public buildings largely untouched. Their targets of choice were shops selling trainers and mobile phones. It would seem more likely that looters were driven by a distorted form of consumerism rather than any false interpretation of human rights.
Nor does it seem that the slow police reaction was caused by interpretations of the Human Rights Act. The truth is the police were unprepared for riots of this kind. There were just not enough officers on the streets to maintain public order.
There is a world of difference between the use of gratuitous force of the kind that killed Ian Tomlinson and the necessary action required to quell looting and violence. To argue that the Human Rights Act creates confusion between the two is just mischievous. And there were undoubtedly operational failures. For example, at the critical moment in Tottenham, there was no senior officer to talk to demonstrators because of holidays and a football match.
That allowed matters to escalate out of hand. Blaming the Human Rights Act in these circumstances is just sloppy. The only direct relevance of human rights to the events is the requirement for an independent investigation of a death at the hands of the police. This is a longstanding interpretation of article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights by the European Court of Human Rights. It reflects good practice; desirable accountability; and was exactly what the original protesters were demanding.
At the core of the concept of human rights is: a respect for human dignity; a concern that the state, through parliament or elsewhere, should have powers limited by basic values; and a specified set of those values, very few of which are absolute and most of which are balanced and nuanced. The great advantage of the language of human rights is that it is international.
You can use it in Moscow, Tehran or Tripoli. And we do. Rather a lot - expending not inconsiderable money, diplomatic effort and, occasionally, military action in its support. It is surely not helpful to repudiate the concept of universal rights at home while saying we are advancing them abroad. Moreover, domestically, the riots were either a one-off or a warning of more to come. If they were the latter, then we will need a bit more precision in our analysis than Cameron - and, to be fair, most other politicians - are currently displaying.
Join our LinkedIn Human Rights sub-group
Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice
No comments yet