Viewpoint: Human Rights and Rwanda

The radio this morning is full of harrumphing about the fact that, "foreigners should not be making decisions about who we let into our own country." The responses imply that the European Court of Human Rights has a cheek in interfering in the UK's immigration policy. Commentators are seriously missing the point, and - worse still - may weaken the UK's domestic human rights laws.

The morality and practicalities involved in removing migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda merits the extensive public debate underway, but my concern here is about the long-term attack on human rights' protections in this country.

Critics of the European Court, and UK human rights legislation, seem to forget a new era was introduced with the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the wake of World War Two. This declaration was proclaimed by the peoples of the United Nations precisely because of the, "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind," and the recognition that Nazis had decided that they could engage with impunity in genocide against their own Jewish population. Prior to the passage of internationally agreed statements about human rights protection, no "foreigners" could interfere with what Nazis did in their own country. International human rights law came about precisely in the wake of these horrors, because we had learnt we could not trust all states to uphold the human rights of their citizens, and that some kind of fall-back mechanisms were required.

It was states that negotiated the Declaration (and the subsequent laws) so they have rightly built in safeguards to allow for a balancing between the rights that adhere to individuals and the rights of society as a whole. Very, very few individual rights are non-negotiable. But the framework as a whole is established to ensure that realpolitik or sovereign state concerns would not ever again totally disregard the risks to individual human beings who are all, "born free and equal in dignity and rights". Jews, Roma and many others in Germany in the 1930s needed a European Court of Human Rights who would hold sovereign states to account.

We continue to need the Court engaged here in Britain to keep our politicians ever aware that if they do not live up to their responsibilities to uphold our human rights, some other body will help them to do so.

This is the personal viewpoint of Maggie Beirne, a member of the West London J&P Network.