You don’t expect good news to come out of the scandal of elderly people suffering abuse at the hands of their carers. Where’s the good news in the indignity of an elderly woman left stuck on the toilet because everyone was too busy to assist her? And how can good news ever be associated with a carer telling a patient to shut up because he was reading the newspaper?
These are just some examples of the theft, neglect, rudeness and physical abuse uncovered by the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) review of home care, published earlier this week.
EHRC commissioner Baroness Sally Greengross said that one way to address the problem was to ensure that ‘any care that is commissioned by a local authority or another public body should come under the Human Rights Act (HRA) so people are protected from abuse’.
And that’s the good news because suddenly human rights are something that protects your granny or the old guy who lives next door. Human rights have come home.
They are no longer the exclusive preserve of ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or sex offenders who demand pornography while in prison.
They are not even the sole preserve of immigrant cat owners, as home secretary Theresa May in her ignorance told the Tory party conference. But before we get too excited: this is not the dawning of a new age for how human rights are reported in the right-wing press.
The Telegraph lost no time in rubbishing Greengross’s words. We need basic human decency, Ed West wrote in a blog, not ‘new human rights being created and more lawyers enriched’.
Human rights and ‘basic human decency’ are one and the same thing - the right to life, dignity, freedom from inhumane treatment and the rest of all that good stuff.
And who’s suggesting ‘new human rights’? We can make do very nicely with our current crop, thank you, and won’t be paying any lawyers to pen fresh ones.
The British Institute of Human Rights has long argued that human rights play an unrecognised role in protecting our basic freedoms and that more noise should be made about the positive things they achieve on our behalf.
Its website gives numerous case histories, from the ‘learning disabled couple’ who had to resort to the HRA to have CCTV removed from their bedroom (you couldn’t make it up!) to the elderly couple who used it to stop their local council from separating them from one another.
Unhappily, you don’t read these stories in the popular press. The two words ‘human rights’ are always said with a sneer, as some sort of alien, European encroachment on our hard-won British liberties. We should be reminding people that respect for human rights, as embodied first in the European Convention on Human Rights and then in our own HRA, has not only fostered peace between European nations since the second world war.
It is also doing a good job of protecting granny and granddad, and you and me.
No comments yet