Human Rights

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick]

My Lords, it is a huge privilege and honour to be able to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and to congratulate her on her very powerful maiden speech. She began her great life of compassion and commitment before she went as a VSO volunteer to Nigeria in the mid-1960s to work as head of science in a girls’ secondary school. Her litany of responsibilities, duties, commitments, committees and professional obligations make absolutely the embodiment of the big society and allow us in this House to receive her wisdom, which she will give to us over many years. She has continued in those roles while being a school governor of many London schools and, in her professional expertise, while sitting on committees that have brought her to the place of being a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and now a professor of psychiatry and disability at St George’s, University of London.

We should also note that she is a prolific author, as I discovered from her CV. She has had published 200 books, chapters and articles on learning disabilities. This is an issue on which she cares deeply, emotionally, practically and professionally. For that we are deeply grateful. That is why, if I may say so, we need quality people such as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, on the Cross Benches and in this House.

I move on to the subject of this debate. I want to respond to the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Sacks, who rightly pointed out that we need to go beyond declarations into education. Perhaps I may add another “E” and move beyond education into enforcement.

For a poor person in the developing world, the struggle for human rights is not an abstract fight over political freedom or over the prosecution of large-scale war crimes, but a matter of daily survival. It is the struggle to avoid extortion or abuse by local police, the struggle against being forced into slavery or having land stolen, or the struggle to avoid being thrown arbitrarily into an overcrowded, disease-ridden jail with little or no prospect of a fair trial. For women and children, it is the struggle not to be assaulted, raped, molested, or forced into the commercial sex trade.

Efforts by the modern human rights movement over the past 60 years have contributed to the criminalisation of these abuses in nearly every country in the world. However, the problem for the poor, however, is that those laws are rarely, if ever, significantly enforced. At the same time, this state of functional lawlessness allows corrupt officials and local criminals to block or steal many of the crucial goods and services provided by the international development community. These abuses are both a moral tragedy and wholly counterproductive to the foreign aid programmes of countries in the developed world. Helping construct effective public justice systems in the developing world, therefore, must become the new mandate of the human rights movement in the 21st century.

In June 2008, a report was published by the United Nations that estimated that 4 billion people live outside the protection of the rule of law. As the report concluded,

“most poor people do not live under the shelter of the law”.

Instead, they inhabit a world in which the perpetrators of abuse and violence are unrestrained by the fear of punishment. In this world, virtually every component of the public justice system—police, defence lawyers, prosecutors and courts—works against, not with, the poor in providing the protections of the law. Take, for example, the police. For most of the world's poor, the local police force is their primary contact with the public justice system. The average poor person in the developing world has probably never met a police officer who is not at best corrupt, or at worst gratuitously brutal. In fact, the most pervasive criminal presence for the global poor is frequently their own police force. A 2006 study in Kenya, for example, revealed that 65 per cent of those citizens polled reported difficulty obtaining help from the police, and 29 per cent said they had had to make “extraordinary efforts” to avoid problems with the police in the past year. According to a 1999 World Bank study, poor people in the developing world view the police as a group of “vigilantes and criminals” who actively harass, oppress and brutalise them. Many countries in the developing world do not recognise a right to indigent legal representation, leaving those who cannot afford a lawyer to navigate the legal process without an advocate.

If the first stage of the modern human rights movement was largely intellectual, the second has become political. During the past 25 to 30 years, the movement for human rights has embedded the growing body of international norms into national law, and for that we should be profoundly grateful, but two generations of global human rights efforts have been predicated, consciously or unconsciously, on assumptions about the effectiveness of the public justice systems in the developing world. Those systems clearly lack effective enforcement tools. As a result, the great legal reforms of the human rights movement often deliver only empty parchment promises to the poorest people on our planet. In large part, the human rights community, which includes various UN bodies and agencies, government offices, non-governmental organisations and individual jurists and scholars, exists to defend the victimised, particularly where more powerful actors have little incentive to act on their behalf. Yet throughout the history of the modern human rights movement, this community has largely neglected the task of helping to build public justice systems in the developing world that work for the poor.

In conclusion, I advocate that if we add to education, let us also add the right of enforcement.