The recent symposium organised by the Law Society’s International Human Rights Committee in conjunction with the Essex University Human Rights Centre marked a huge advance in the Society’s engagement with the legal profession’s greatest moral challenge: upholding human rights.

The efforts of UK lawyers to promote human rights throughout the world were impressively displayed. It is heartening that the current president, Robert Heslett, has made the rule of law the theme of his year of office. In recent years, human rights have steadily moved up the agenda of the profession.

There was a time – not long ago – when the Law Society took a very different view. In 1974, soon after the seizure of power by General Pinochet from the democratically elected government of Chile, I went to Chile to observe the anticipated trial of former ministers. I found that several lawyers representing opponents of the new regime were languishing in prison without charge or trial. Their own bar association was unable to help them. On my return to Britain I asked the Law Society to issue a protest. The president, Sir David Napley, informed me that this was not possible: the Society could not intervene in politics. That was how human rights were then regarded.

Some of us then formed a solicitors’ human rights group, recently revived, without any official endorsement. Even by 1985, when the American Bar Association, holding its annual meeting in London, featured a seminar on human rights, neither the Law Society nor the bar had any formal body committed to human rights within their organisation. Soon afterwards, however, the penny dropped – human rights are not a party political manoeuvre from the left. They are above and beyond politics. They are universal and they give ethical meaning to our vocation as lawyers. Hence the establishment of the International Human Rights Committee and the Bar Human Rights Committee, and the commitment of both branches of the profession at the highest level.

Yet there remains a degree of ambivalence in some quarters, and the public is largely sceptical when we claim to aspire to more than the crudest commercialism. While it has become acceptable to promote human rights abroad, the professional bodies are still wary of pursuing human rights issues within the United Kingdom. A year or two ago the Law Society addressed this gap by setting up a ‘Domestic Human Rights Monitoring Group’. This was meant to provide advice and assistance to other Law Society committees, which in turn were expected to consult the group when human rights issues arose in their spheres of interest. It appears that this group has been disbanded – at any rate, as a member of it I have not been contacted for a very long time. Committees are presumably now expected to include human rights among their other concerns, and it may be that they are quite capable of doing this, but there is no indication that they are giving them the attention they deserve.

The way forward may be a dedicated Law Society domestic human rights committee. There is much for it to do. The Human Rights Act is currently under threat from the Conservative Party, which is committed to its repeal should they form the next government. Legal aid is a human right increasingly under attack and it needs to be defended from a human rights perspective. The duty of public authorities to comply with human rights standards is inadequately understood and implemented, as the work of the British Institute of Human Rights has demonstrated. The voice of the profession is muted on these matters.

The work of the International Human Rights Committee and the commitment of the Society’s president and the officers of the Society show that the will is there to fulfil our human rights responsibilities. The profession must speak out loudly in the defence of human rights within the United Kingdom. It could do wonders for our popularity.

Sir Geoffrey Bindman is a consultant with Bindmans and chair of the British Institute of Human Rights