European Convention on Human Rights: 75th Anniversary

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I too add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this debate and for his speech. I am not going to explore the legal implications, but want to make a few theological points, if I may. I want to comment on the origins of the spring from which these ideas first came, how it developed into a stream and then a river, and how still today our understanding of rights and responsibilities is developing.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is right. It goes back to those early chapters of Genesis. In fact, you could go back to the Code of Hammurabi, 1,700 years before Christ, but let us go back to the Ten Commandments, where we find the creation narratives where humankind is created in God’s image. It is about the inherent dignity that belongs to each and every person, not dependent on sex, wealth, education or any other differentiation. This is implied in the Ten Commandments and is developed further in passages such as Deuteronomy 10, where God defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger in the land. It is why the prophet Isaiah urges the people of God to seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless and plead for the widow.

However, as Jonathan Sacks, a former Member of your Lordships’ House, was keen to point out, rights are things we claim and duties are things we perform. In other words, duties, he said, are rights translated from the passive to the active mode. The biblical teaching in the New Testament reaches its fullest expression in this reciprocity in human relating, expressed by Jesus in this way: love the lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.

Nowhere in the scriptures do we find the phrase human rights—and certainly no reference to the ECHR. Indeed, some theologians, such as the eminent Alasdair MacIntyre, have argued that human rights are actually a fiction; he simply did not agree with them as a concept. Others, including a former Member of this House, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, disagreed, saying that the fundamental theological point

“is not so much that every person has a specific set of positive claims to be enforced, but that persons and minority groups of persons need to be recognized as belonging to the same moral and civic world as the majority, whatever differences or disagreements there may be”.

He went on to argue that

“a proper consideration of human rights has a better chance of sustaining its case if it begins from the recognition of a common dignity or worthiness of respect among members of a community than if it assumes some comprehensive catalogue of claims that might be enforceable”.

All laws and all conventions are ultimately human constructs. There are some who dislike the ECHR and have problems with the wider issue of human rights. There are people who are not happy with the way that the court has interpreted the underlying legal principles which are enshrined in the convention. But the huge benefits that it has brought to so many people, particularly people who have traditionally been marginalised and not given the ability to participate and to engage, surely outweighs the frustrations that people sometimes feel. I, for one, am thankful that we have the ECHR.