Human Rights: The Case for the Defence

 

Shami Chakrabarti

 

£20, Penguin Books

 

★★★✩✩

To believe in human rights is, as the author puts it, to believe in humanity. With the world facing conflict and climate change and challenges to the post-second world war consensus, these rights need defending. Baroness Chakrabarti has spent her legal life as a human rights activist. She was the director of Liberty from 2003 to 2016, before becoming a politician and member of the House of Lords.

This book is not intended to be an in-depth or academic study of the subject. It is a heartfelt cry from a lifelong advocate of rights.

Although this is an interesting subject, the book does not address some issues in-depth. Chakrabarti looks at the legal and political background, documentary sources of rights, and the legal framework.

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There is a great attachment to national statements of rights, such as Magna Carta, the US Bill of Rights and the French rights document. These documents are highly regarded because they are linked to key events in national histories. Some of the phrases used in Magna Carta still have an emotive impact, such as ‘to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice’. But as Chakrabarti observes, much of that document is about feudal society and benefited a small class of people.

The US Bill of Rights is often cited as the gold standard. But society then was very unjust – some, if not most, of the framers of the document had enslaved people. Chakrabarti refers to fans of such documents – particularly the Magna Carta – to the exclusion of international statements, as

‘rights nationalists’. She also comments on the absurdity of the fact that British lawyers and politicians were leading proponents of the European Convention when there are now calls within the UK to withdraw. I am not sure what ‘withdraw’ means. Does it mean repealing the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the convention into British law?

Chakrabarti argues that human rights are vital in solving, or at least attempting to tackle, most of the world’s problems, such as inequality, war and climate change. A compelling read.

 

David Pickup is a partner at Pickup & Scott Solicitors, Aylesbury

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