Wrote an article for a paper today about the Human Rights Act 1998. It is bloody amazing how people cling to its name and allows for the argument ' well it is called HUMAN rights act so it must be good' - Mandela was responsible for killing several people using high explosive yet he is held up as a beacon for all that is good in this world. The problem with lefties is that they cannot get past their own bull shit but believe to the extent that they become dogmatic in its favour. They refuse to acknowledge that they are wrong, that they were wrong all along and cannot take advice from anyone not even fellow socialists. That is why Brown and his government are in such deep trouble (well, that and that their entire government is a heap of lying bastards).
1951 Britain signed the European Convention on Human Rights
1960 British citizens could for the first time bring their cases to the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights)
1998 The Convention is signed into British law
2000 the Human Rights Act is fully implemented
2010 the Human Rights Act is scrapped for being utterly useless in protecting normal people but being spectacularly good at ring fencing criminals.
2 comments:
The Human Rights act draws from the Code Napoleon of continental law. English common law tradition recognizes that people can do whatever the law does not specifically forbid, but in the continental Napoleonic Code tradition, people can only do what the law specifically allows. This leads people falsely to suppose that the state is giving them these rights, when it would be more accurate to say that the state is recognizing those rights. Our responsibility to behave fairly and decently is something we owe to other people, not to government or the human rights act.
Back in the 1960s, my mother warned me as to the real meaning of the term "human rights."
Of course, now the term is the buzz word for both left and right. Drives me mad!
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