Human rights

Imagine you bought a ticket for the opera and then a copper told you how you may travel to the opera house. You absolutely may not drive there, he says, nor take public transport, nor walk. You must go on a licensed coach, crammed in with all the other opera-lovers, under the watchful eye of the boys in blue. Yes, that’s right, the police will escort you to the opera, monitor you through the performance, and then escort you home. You got a problem with that? I imagine you would. You might feel that your right to get from A to B however you please had been curtailed. Now you

‘The award of Queen’s Counsel is for excellence in advocacy in the higher courts,’ says the QC appointments page. ‘It is made to advocates who have rights of audience in the higher courts of England and Wales and have demonstrated the competencies in the Competency Framework to a standard of excellence.’ Given that, earlier today, the relatively unknown MP Jeremy Wright, who was recently appointed Attorney General, was sworn in as QC, Mr S suggests adding a few more lines to that description. Perhaps: ‘The award of Queen’s Counsel is also for those who have shown willingness to express whatever opinion their masters decree; even if that opinion is wholly at odds with those of every other

While he was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Tony Judt found the breath to educate those who believe they could ameliorate pain with soft words and bans on ‘inappropriate’ language. “You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.” Worry about whether you, or more pertinently anyone you wish to boss about, should say ‘person with special needs’ instead of ‘disabled’ or ‘challenged’ instead of ‘mentally handicapped’ and you will enjoy a righteous glow. You will not do anything, however, to provide health care and support

In Rwanda I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant — this time 20 years ago I had no idea of the scale of what I could see on the ground. Trekking with a column of rebels from the Ugandan frontier south towards Kigali, we came upon the early massacres of Tutsis, hysterical survivors, flames leaping above huts, mortars roaring down misty valleys. But we had seen a lot of this across Africa in the 1990s. We visited a Catholic pastor in his rectory and I suppose at that point I and my Tutsi guides still respected the priesthood and could not imagine their complicity in

It’s curious that the story about the National Council for Civil Liberties and its links with the Paedophile Information Exchange is big news now, since it’s been common knowledge for many years, and written about in the Catholic press on a number of occasions. I researched the story back in 2006 or 2007, along with another journalist, and this was already then well-trampled territory, but the papers weren’t interested, despite my friend’s huge amount of work. He even went to Hull, I seem to remember. And back. I only got as far as Cockfosters, which was then the improbable home of the Gay and Lesbian Newspaper Archives, which was where

Further to yesterday’s post on Britain’s apathy about Christian persecution, the main question people asked in response was: what can Britain do, without military means? Taking aside that our military power helped to bring about persecution in Iraq and almost certainly would have done in Syria had this government got its way, there are lots of ways you can peacefully influence a country’s politics, including financial and moral pressure. That is what Saudi Arabia does, after all. The Organisation Islamic Co-operation (OIC), for example, a bloc of 57 Muslim countries dominated by the Saudis, has just released the latest edition of its annual ‘Islamophobia report’. It states that in the

Mixed emotions stirred here in Pakistan when Malala Yousafzai came within kissing distance of the Nobel Prize. The reaction was reminiscent of how we felt when Sharmeen Chinoy’s Saving Face was up for an Oscar: great to be noticed by the world, but how tragic that the path to such recognition was paved with acid burnt faces. The deplorable act of attacking Malala increased the aversion felt for the Taliban among ordinary Pakistanis. But terrorists do not feed on public support; their demented ideology is sustenance enough. Pakistanis wept when Malala was battling for her life, and heaved a sigh of relief when she survived. We are proud that she has thrived.

Barely a week goes by when a female Lib Dem minister doesn’t pledge some new coalition initiative on ‘female body confidence’. The junior equalities minister Jo Swinson was at it again when she congratulated Debenhams for becoming the first high-street retailer to introduce size 16 mannequins. Ms Swinson said: ‘The images we see in the world of fashion are all pretty much the same. It’s as if there’s only one way of being beautiful. Yet nine in ten people say they would like to see a broader range of body shapes shown in advertising and the media.’ For broader range of body shapes, read fat, by the way. For nine

Walking a lap of the North Pacific island of Nauru would take you three and a half hours. One kilometre inland, you would glimpse the republic’s phosphate mines. Living hundreds of kilometres from anywhere must sometimes feel like incarceration for the 10,000 or so Nauruans. What makes the republic seem even more prison-like is the way it is used by Australia as a detention and processing facility holding over 800 mostly Iranian asylum seekers. As fellow Commonwealth members, we should be concerned about this dot in the Pacific, and the way that Australia is off-shoring facilities there. Nauru is used by Australia to distance itself from the human face of