Remember the government's proposals for a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities launched in its Green Paper last month? Attacked by both the left - and right-wing press and met with confusion and indifference by most people, it's fair to say it hasn't sparked off the kind of consititional discussion the government was hoping for. Justice minister Michael Wills was doing his best to defend the government proposals at the BIHR's lunchtime lecture yesterday. One of the main criticisms made by those who support human rights is that by touting "responsibilities" alongside rights, the goverment is implying that rights are contingent on responsibilities, thereby undermining the framework of universal non-negotiable human rights. Now I've read the Green Paper and I listened to Wills's lecture and try as I might I can't understand what's behind these "responsibilities". Wills said our rights would be "accompanied by responsibilities and not contingent on them" and that the BoRR would "remind people of responsibilities". As I understand it, this would create a unique situation in which the words contained in an act of Parliament have no legal force but are simply there as reminders to the population on how they "should" be behaving. It's bizarre.
The problem comes from Labour's schizophrenic attitude to the Human Rights Act. Wills wants to say that attacks on the HRA as a "villain's charter" by the Tories and the popular press are pernicious and untrue, but at the same time he thinks we need to address these concerns or we risk undermining the Act. But we can't address these concerns in ways which actually involve changing the law (because of course they're untrue) so rather than try and publicly explain or defend the HRA we'd better write some meaningless words into a new Bill of Rights in the hope people finally "get" the link between rights and responsibilities. At one point Wills started quoting comments in response to Dominic Grieve's recent post on the HRA on ConHome to prove that the Tory grassroots want to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights making the UK a pariah nation. It smacked of desperation. If anything the Tories are even more confused on this subject that Labour, but this was the worst kind of "stick to nurse" argument. The government should focus on making the HRA work, starting by ditching all the authoritarain legislation they've introduced which goes against the principles within the Act they claim to support. If they need a reminder of what this would involve they should check out the Convention on Modern Liberty's What we've lost document. Chris Huhne will be giving the next BIHR lunchtime lecture on May 5th on "Threats to civil liberties".
