{"id":13919,"date":"2012-03-05T10:41:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T15:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13919"},"modified":"2012-03-05T10:41:20","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T15:41:20","slug":"the-european-court-of-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/03\/05\/the-european-court-of-human-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"The European Court of Human “Rights”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luke Samuel thinks it’s time for people to declare themselves to be “human rights sceptics<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

\n

You don\u2019t have to be a little Englander, or even right wing, to recognise that it is an affront to democracy that unelected and completely unaccountable judges, who have absolutely no democratic mandate, are able to override the decisions of elected representatives. It is appalling that European judges can make significant political decisions over a body of citizens across Europe to whom they will never have to answer.<\/p>\n

But there is a more fundamental reason that liberals should be sceptical of human-rights law: because it makes us all less free. Human rights are not \u2018rights\u2019 in a liberal sense at all. They bear no resemblance to the \u2018rights\u2019 fought for by the radical liberals of the English Civil War, or the French and American revolutions, which sought to limit the power of the state and protect the autonomy of citizens. Instead, human rights treat people as fundamentally vulnerable and in need of state protection. This view of human vulnerability, in the eyes of the human-rights lobby, justifies the granting of absolute power to the state to set the boundaries of freedom.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, the \u2018right to a private and family life\u2019 protected under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The courts will not consider a claim under Article 8 unless it is convinced in the courtroom that you have a \u2018family life\u2019 worth protecting. How the courts have defined \u2018family life\u2019 for the purposes of Article 8 is laughably antiquated. In 2002, the courts ruled that \u2018family life\u2019 does not exist where a relationship between parents and their grown-up children is \u2018only emotional\u2019, in that the children are no longer economically dependent on their parents. Neither are unmarried parents likely to be considered a family, unless they maintain sufficient levels of contact with their children. How can any \u2018liberal\u2019 support the idea that your family life is only worthwhile if it conforms to what the state decides a family should look like?<\/p>\n

Or take Article 10, which purports to protect our freedom of expression. Of course, the very concept of \u2018freedom of expression\u2019 owes its existence to radical liberals like John Stuart Mill and Voltaire, who argued that there can be no exceptions to free speech, otherwise you do not have free speech at all. But human-rights lawyers will tell you that Article 10, along with most other human rights, is a \u2018qualified right\u2019 because there is a long list of conditions under which the state can interfere with it. This list includes where it is necessary in the \u2018interests of public safety\u2019 or for the \u2018protection of health or morals\u2019. Such broad qualifications mean that as a means of limiting state power, \u2018qualified\u2019 human rights are all but useless.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Luke Samuel thinks it’s time for people to declare themselves to be “human rights sceptics“: You don\u2019t have to be a little Englander, or even right wing, to recognise that it is an affront to democracy that unelected and completely unaccountable judges, who have absolutely no democratic mandate, are able to override the decisions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,10],"tags":[766,46,267,322,217],"class_list":["post-13919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-liberty","tag-democracy","tag-hrcs","tag-justice","tag-nannystate","tag-rights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3Cv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13920,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13919\/revisions\/13920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}