fuddmain

terryblakey:

Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat MP for Eastliegh and Shadow Home Secretary made the following excellent speech on Human Rights recently.

It is also essential in my view that we don’t abolish the Human Rights Act. Both Labour and Conservative politicians are now talking about how we need a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and the Conservatives actually said they want to repeal the Human Rights Act.

Now we must remember why the Human Rights Act is so important as opposed to British rights. Because Eleanor Roosevelt was not foolish when she championed human rights in the 1948 universal declaration and the British lawyers involved in the drafting of the process were making a fundamental point. Any society at some point in the future can decide who its citizens are and who they are not. That is what happened in Nazi Germany - they defined the Jews as non-citizens outside the pale, no longer at the serving of human rights no longer deserving of German citizens rights. If we define [rights] as British that is the risk that we run again and we must not allow that to happen.
And let me make one final point, which is that if we want to achieve that consensus that I very much want to see, we have certainly to build a popular campaign that is absolutely crucial, but the end of that popular campaign to my mind should be an entrenchment of our civil liberties in a way that cannot be challenged in the way that it has been challenged in the last ten years in particular. I am thinking here of a written constitution. … That is the sort of entrenchment of civil liberties which we’ll never have in this country unless we too have a written constitution to guarantee that judges can oversee laws and can make sure that they do not contravene fundamental civil liberties.

Perhaps there is hope after all?