Matthew Henty

• Warming up for the Lions by watching France and Italy lose. So it goes. #
• listening to a brass band in greenwich park. The child is fascinated. #

I went to Liberty’s 75th Anniversary Conference on Saturday 6 June, held at Central Hall, Westminster. The two morning sessions were of the very highest quality, unfortunately the afternoon didn’t reach the same uniform excellence – although Shami Chakrabarti made a good final keynote – and Louis Christian was a little uneven as the Chair.

The unquestioned highlight was the keynote speech by Lord Bingham, a fantastic explanation and rousing defense of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act (HRA). He addressed many of the spurious arguments made against the Human Rights Act in a simple list of ten points. For example, that it is undemocratic, that it elevates the rights of the individual above the community, that it is foreign, gives judges all the power, that it does not mention our responsibilities only our rights, and so on. And he did so in a overwhelmingly convincing manner.

Is the Human Rights Act a foreign import? Well, no it is an incorporation into British law of the ECHR. And much of the ECHR is based on existing British legal tradition. The drafting of the Convention was overseen by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. The United Kingdom was the first country to ratify the Convention. And so on.

Does it elevate the rights of the individual over the community? This is often raised when asylum seekers or prisoners, or an “other” uses the HRA to achieve some improvement in their life. Well yes, the ECHR and the HRA do elevate the rights of the individual over the community in some very specific ways: the right not to be enslaved or to be punished retrospectively. Can any person who gives this a moments thought seriously argue the right not to be enslaved should be conditional on the interests of the community? Really?

The most overwhelming case for both the ECHR and the retention of the HRA comes in his tenth and final point:

In the manner of a bad advocate, I save my strongest point for my tenth and last. The rights protected by the Convention and the Act deserve to be protected because they are, as I would suggest, the basic and fundamental rights which everyone in this country ought to enjoy simply by virtue of their existence as a human being. Let me briefly remind you of the protected rights, some of which I have already mentioned. The right to life. The right not to be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The right not to be enslaved. The right to liberty and security of the person. The right to a fair trial. The right not to be retrospectively penalised. The right to respect for private and family life. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Freedom of expression. Freedom of assembly and association. The right to marry. The right not to be discriminated against in the enjoyment of those rights. The right not to have our property taken away except in the public interest and with compensation. The right of fair access to the country’s educational system. The right to free elections.

Which of these rights, I ask, would we wish to discard? Are any of them trivial, superfluous, unnecessary? Are any them un-British? There may be those who would like to live in a country where these rights are not protected, but I am not of their number. Human rights are not, however, protected for the likes of people like me – or most of you.  They are protected for the benefit above all of society’s outcasts, those who need legal protection because they have no other voice – the prisoners, the mentally ill, the gipsies, the homosexuals, the immigrants, the asylum-seekers, those who are at any time the subject of public obloquy.

• heading into london town to the liberty conference. #