Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too welcome the aspiration of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, to use the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to rejuvenate and promote its principles. However, this task faces some contemporary challenges.

One of the main legacies of the declaration is that human rights discourse is now so ubiquitous that it is possibly losing any meaning. In one recent school debate I was involved in on whether mobile phones should be banned in classrooms, the outraged pupils claimed that it breached their human rights to be denied access to social media. More seriously, we have an expansive transnational human rights industry with an endless array of lawyers, NGOs, commissions, consultants et cetera who certainly talk the talk. But my first concern is the danger that this ever-growing body of experts is discrediting human rights ideals among many voters by their disdain for democratic decision-making.

Because human rights claim to embody universal human dignity per se, they are often treated as sacrosanct and unchallengeable. Their adherents assume a high-handed, self-righteous, imperious manner, disdainful of the views, wishes and demands of national populations. In the UK we have seen legitimate attempts at changing how the country manages its asylum system run into the unyielding moral high ground of human rights walls, used to constrain elected legislators and limit the scope of the country’s political policy. But when human rights are used to undermine voters and national sovereignty, does that not betray the UDHR’s original 48 aims, conceived at a time in which self-governance of all sovereign nation states was itself embodied in principles of non-intervention and universal equality?

My second concern is the pick-and-mix approach to which human rights principles matter. I will give a couple of examples. When I first read the Online Safety Bill and realised that so much of it threatened free speech, I assumed the Chamber would be full of the usual human rights experts queueing up to cite Article 19, which states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of … expression; this right includes freedom to … seek, receive and impart information and ideas”

of all kinds, either orally, in writing or print, or “through any media” of his choice. In the event, there was a resounding silence and empty Benches, even though the legislation tears up Article 19 as a principle. Similarly, the year before, when a mere handful of noble Lords raised problems with the assault on civil liberties associated with many lockdown regulations, with citizens confined to their homes and the elderly, disabled, sick and dying denied access to families et cetera, I assumed that the human rights industry would be up in arms. No. Zilch. More silence.

Such silence speaks volumes, none more shocking than in response to the 7 October anti-Jewish pogrom in Israel. This was particularly tragic and ironic as the UN declaration was precisely conceived in the shadow of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were annihilated because they were Jews—a fact worth stating as polling reveals that a fifth of the young think the Holocaust a myth. Now that “never again” is now, you would expect the human rights community to leap into leading denunciations of the worst display of anti-Jewish bloodlust since the Nazi regime. But despite filmed evidence of Jews raped, beheaded, burned alive and worse, the UN human rights organisations stayed silent for almost two whole months before condemning Hamas’s gruesome butchery, and they remain tight-lipped about the remaining 130 hostages.

A few weeks ago there was a cartoon in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper depicting an Israeli woman in bloody and torn clothes, saying “Me too”, while a panel of three UN women were shown—one covering her ears, one her eyes, another her mouth. Shameful. Conversely, we must ask why the UN human rights organisations have been anything but silent about Israel’s alleged human rights violations in relation to Gaza, labelling the undoubted brutality and suffering caused by war—arguably a just war—as genocide of Palestinians, which is a misnomer. In doing so, human rights advocates relativise the specific meaning of genocide, reducing it to a meme, a placard, a slogan—too often deployed by western activists as an anti-Semitic slur against our Jewish fellow citizens.

How can we defend the UN human rights leadership, which only this year appointed the UN ambassador for the Islamic Republic of Iran to chair a UN conference on human rights, representing a country whose morality police violently assault and lock up brave Iranian women who dare show their hair in public? It is a country where you can be hanged for insulting the Prophet Muhammad and belittling the Koran. It is a brutal regime that, in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, celebrated the Hamas terrorist atrocities.

I am afraid that such selective double standards in terms of whose human rights deserve attention and whose we ignore undermine the principles of the UDHR. Some of the problem lies at the heart of the human rights industry. I suggest to the Minister that for the principles of the declaration to be promoted genuinely we must stop looking the other way when human rights are reduced to partisan weapons for politicised ends, and human rights advocates are sometimes the problem.