Today's blog post is written by Kam Gill, research and policy analyst at Runnymede

David Cameron last week launched an(other) attack on the European Court of Human Rights, this time arguing that it consumes itself with cases that are too trivial. Leaving aside the unexplained category of ‘trivial’ human rights, this latest salvo, and previous Conservative objections, caused me to reflect on the concept of human rights, and their potential role for race equality. It seems that this, now often maligned, concept suffers from a lack of clarity of its own. This lies behind much criticism of the idea, the treaty which embodies it, and the court established to uphold that treaty.

The convention on human rights is often condemned as a “criminal’s charter”. The root of this criticism is the claim that the convention, with its insistence upon processes and mechanisms which ensure fair and equal treatment, in some way prioritises the rights of the accused at the cost of the victims of their crimes. Exactly what rights should be granted to these “victims” is often left ill-defined. Presumably it is not the right to inflict arbitrary punishment upon anyone accused of crime, though this sometimes seems to be the implication.

More often this criticism comes in the form of demanding that rights must be matched by responsibilities. This demand fundamentally misunderstands the basis on which human rights operate. The basis of the Human Rights Act is that people have a set of rights to which they are entitled purely on the basis of their humanity. These rights set a limit upon the treatment that any one person can receive from any other actor – be they a person, an institution or a state. There are clearly some people who benefit more from the Human Rights Act than others. Those are people who are more vulnerable to discrimination or mistreatment. In our society sadly that often means ethnic minorities (among others). In many cases those that gain most protection from the concept and practice of human rights are those that are unpopular within a society – for instance migrants and criminals, and it is telling that these two categories are so often linked in debates on the issue. It is this affinity between minorities, migrants and those who break the law that often makes human rights such a controversial topic. Nonetheless we should resist the temptation to separate them out, as that would undermine the whole concept of human rights, as I will explain. 

The nature of an international treaty is such that it is more readily enforced upon a state than upon an individual though it applies equally to both.

The fact that a given actor fails to act in accordance with the concept of human rights, does not invalidate the concept itself, though it does render such an actor a criminal in the eyes of the convention and liable to punishment on those grounds.  Criminal status does not render any actor as outside the bounds of the convention; they remain human and so retain human rights.

There is no justification for removing the duty on one actor / set of actors simply because another has failed to observe their own. If I consume illegal drugs, that does not justify you in stealing my property. Still less does it allow you to imprison me in your house.

The Human Rights Act is a criminal’s charter only in the sense that it is a human’s charter. Perhaps because they are aware of the consequences of this, critics have been unwilling to attack it on this basis. By denying rights to criminals because they break the law or to migrants because they are not 'citizens' we are undermining that protection for all other others.  If we remove this protection from those we dislike, we undermine our ability to judge them for their behaviour and risk losing its protection ourselves.