Human rights

First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology. But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap. It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On

In his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer  has shown a striking appetite for (self-) publicity and given the job a higher profile than ever. He’s just informed the world, from Andrew Marr’s sofa, that he’s opposed to plans by the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, to tear up the egregious Human Rights Act which is playing havoc with the English justice system. I can see why he’s alarmed: the confusion caused by superimposing European law on English law gives huge power to people, like him, who adjudicate. It has encouraged, in England, the emergence of American-style judicial activism. And the confusion elevates people who should be legal technocrats,

There is a term which ought to be in better use – ‘human rights inflation’. This is the means by which the currency of ‘human rights’ – which used to mean things like ‘the right to life’ – becomes, thanks to the addition of endless spurious additional demands, severely undermined. The latest example of this trend has come to light this morning thanks to a Brazilian far-leftist who claims to be working as a rapporteur for the United Nations. As listeners to the Today programme will know (about 2 hours 37 minutes in here) according to Raquel Rolnik the latest inalienable human right is apparently the ‘right to a spare bedroom.’

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Snatch Land Rover / Challenger II cases, which allowed the families of four soldiers who lost their lives while serving in Iraq to sue for damages, has provoked some strong opinions. Some say that the MoD is in all ways different from other employers and that it should not therefore be held accountable in the courts. Of course soldiering is not ‘just another job’, but surely it does not follow that we should tolerate the deaths of young British citizens if those deaths are caused by the Government’s failure to provide adequate training or equipment. Soldiers should be no less entitled than the

The British Army may never go to war again. Not because it is under-resourced and over-stretched but because, as of today, it may no longer be able to afford casualties. That, at any rate, is one thought prompted by the Supreme Court’s extraordinary – to my mind – ruling that dead soldiers’ families can sue the ministry of Defence for damages. According to the Supreme Court justices, the MoD may have been negligent in its “duty of care” and, consequently, the families may sue the government for failing, apparently, to safeguard the human rights of soldiers killed in Iraq (and, presumably, elsewhere). The court dismissed the MoD’s suggestion there might

How did a blind Chinese dissident scale the walls of his house while under house arrest, evade government surveillance, travel hundreds of miles to Beijing, seek asylum in the American embassy and in the process shine attention on a horror the world has grown used to? The questions for Chen Guangcheng are legion. Last week I met up with him in London. Chen, who is 41, has been blind since childhood and wears smart dark glasses. At our meeting place in central London — the headquarters of a Christian organisation which has helped arrange his visit — he sits upright, suited and tied, occasionally repositioning himself by feeling the corners

I went to the Toynbee Hall, the meeting place for the radical East End, this week to listen to a debate many radicals would rather not hear. British Asian feminists and their supporters had gathered to launch the Centre for Secular Space an organisation whose work I would say is close to essential. It is not fashionable, however, because its focus is the collusion between the Anglo-American left and the Islamist right, which has betrayed so many Muslims and ex-Muslims, most notably Muslim and ex-Muslim women. Gita Sahgal, Nehru’s great niece, became the movement’s figurehead and eloquent spokeswoman when the once respectable and now contemptible Amnesty International fired her for