Last Saturday I attended part of the ‘Fairness, Justice and Human Rights’ conference, which was organised by the University of Essex Human Rights Centre, the Law Society and others.
I was struck by a phrase used in passing by one speaker, who referred to the United Nations’ commitment to economic, social and cultural rights in declarations and conventions as ‘bumper stickers devoid of substance’.
It is worth noting that he approached the subject as one committed to human rights in this area, rather than as a cynic having a generic grumble about the pointlessness of all international efforts.
Still, the criticism has substance at one level, when one contrasts the actual conduct with the rhetoric of states signed up to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or later on the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It is true that there are very many countries who are signed up to supporting these rights, but who do little or nothing to make them a reality.
Enter lawyers and other professionals, whose quiet work is helping to turn theoretical rights into real rights. This is not just by testing rights in the courts, but also involves work like that of Essex University law professor Paul Hunt.
Hunt was UN special rapporteur on the right to health, and through reports and research has been one of those engaged in 'considered attempts’ to work out the ‘highest attainable standard of... health’ for low-, middle- and high-income countries.
Judges from various jurisdictions, confirmed that such work has informed the jurisprudence that can make those rights a reality, and outside the courts has affected advice to policy-makers.
I regard this as a ‘good thing’, as of course did the many lawyers in the audience.
But I also want to be sure that we do not downplay the significance of the toothless ‘bumper stickers’ that went before.
It is hard to imagine an international gathering today that would produce economic and social aspirations with the clarity of the Universal Declaration, for example. The recent memory of World War – this was December 1948 – may be to thank for what Geoffrey Robertson QC has called the ‘flash of anger’ that runs through the declaration. (Its general clarity is all the more surprising when one considers that the Berlin Airlift was underway, and many delegates were also concerned with the tricky issue of how to return home if the Cold War turned ‘hot’ in the European theatre.)
Whatever the background, the resulting clarity has made it all the easier to attach more tangible work on to its agreed principles.
Later on, in Hunt’s own policy area of health rights, the theoretical commitment to the enjoyment of ‘the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’ contained in the 1966 Covenant means a green light for the production of 30-plus reports that are now informing the appropriate interpretation of those rights. This is so even if the light was green a long time before work on the appropriate ‘human rights technology’ could begin.
These days, even countries who believe they score highly on upholding the rule of law and the rights of their people can shy away from theoretical commitments urged on them in the form of conventions, covenants and declarations. Witness the 19 years it took the UK to become a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Governments, our own included, push back on such statements because, as has become obvious with the development of human rights principles since 1948, where statements are clear enough, they provide the sort of structure to which more concrete materials can be added.
Many delegates at the 1948 UN General Assembly that adopted the Universal Declaration would applaud the work done since to make some of its aspirations a reality. Our pride in the ‘technology’ we are now able to add to various of those aspirations should not blind us to the fact that establishing those aspirations was important.
Aspirations were the precursors and preconditions to progress made; not a substandard version of something drafted by a crack team of lawyers.
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