Human Rights

There was a heady mixture—[Interruption.] Yes, a dolly mixture of cases. It is difficult to unravel them to answer specifically on each. I cannot see the human rights implication in the first scenario—that of someone assaulting another person to stop a burglary—although there would be issues of appropriate defence of self and of property, which is a common law defence that has been around for a very long time. As for not deporting someone because of a danger to them, if there is an acute danger of a person being killed, I should have thought that even prior to the Human Rights Act being passed we would have been as reluctant as we are now to deport that individual. It is to some extent a question of balance, but the right to life is absolute and I do not shrink from saying that it ought to be. Let me give a more difficult example than those that I have given so far: the case surrounding the tragic murder of Naomi Bryant. It is a sobering example of the difficulties in striking a balance between the rights of the individual and the protection of the wider community. Anthony Rice was released from a life sentence and murdered Naomi Bryant nine months later. The Parole Board and the probation service were concerned about human rights legal action against them because he had served more than the 10-year minimum term fixed by the judge; consequently, they prioritised his right to liberty. However, the Human Rights Act rightly provides for a balance to be struck. There is a positive duty on the state to protect the public to safeguard the rights, such as the right to life, of the community who may be put at risk. Appropriate weight was not given to that duty on public authorities, but that is a further example in which although the Act itself was not at fault, its application was. Human rights are not about the protection of one group in society. Classically, they are about providing a practical framework to protect all our freedoms. If our freedoms require protection, and the freedom of others must be suspended to stop crime, resist oppression or prevent terrorism, the Human Rights Act will allow that balance to be struck, and that makes sense to us all. Of course, there are bound to be cases on the edge, grey areas where there is scope for disagreement, and cases that seem to go against the grain of popular opinion. There are difficult situations, and perhaps the most difficult concern terrorism. Recently, Eliza Manningham-Buller talked about the domestic terrorist threat. Police and security services are working at near capacity to disrupt 30 active plots; there are 200 networks, comprising 1,600 individuals known to be engaged in plotting terrorism; and there are more than 20 ongoing terror trials involving over 80 defendants. That is a sombre picture. Against that backdrop, the Government’s primary purpose of protecting the public becomes ever more imperative to attain and ever more difficult to achieve. Terrorism will ultimately be defeated by winning hearts and minds, and any counter-terrorism legislation has to be tested against the impact that it may have on any of the communities that we seek to protect. Human rights are far from being a straitjacket limiting our ability to defend ourselves; in fact, when we need to legislate, we can justify it by reference to human rights. Human rights go beyond racial, religious or community differences and reach to the common humanity that underpins us all. However difficult it is to sustain that idea in the face of terrorism—terrorism wants to emphasise difference and to battle in a barbarian way, extinguishing human life at random to make a partisan point—we must stay with human rights. They, and the Act, are essential in identifying, defining and protecting the values that we put to the forefront of our struggle against terrorism. Liberty and security are not opposites; they are two sides of human rights. My right to life and that of any of my Muslim or Jewish friends must be secured as best it can by the state. Diminution of that right is intolerable, and limiting freedom is undesirable. We must get away from the false dichotomy, in which security and basic freedoms are in opposition. We must remember that we have probably the widest panoply of anti-discrimination law in the world, and that we have a duty to protect life.