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Sadly, Prime Minister David Cameron isn’t on a mission to protect those rights. Instead, he’s gone with the unimaginative and predictable let’s-chuck-the-Human-Rights-Act-in-the-bin-“so that foreign criminals can be more easily deported from Britain” route.

This route may be filled with legal and logical gaps, but it’s smoothed out by the fact that universal rights aren’t universally beloved. Some observers suggest that the distrust of universal rights is rooted in the racist belief that some kinds of people don’t deserve them. But I think there’s a much broader belief in play: the belief that human rights aren’t nearly as universal as their name suggests — that, rather than protect everyone, they’re designed to help a small coterie of bad guys, whoever the bad guys may be.

Right now, the bad guy may be presumed Muslim. But where populism prospers, “elites” are targeted too. In what was at least a refreshing near-departure from scapegoating visible or religious minorities, last week one Daily Telegraph columnist also railed against the whole lot of civil rights defenders — or, as she calls it, the “human rights industry” — which has “grown fat and contented on the suffering of others.” That’s Big Human Rights, all right: notorious for preying on society’s most vulnerable, like Big Tobacco and Big Oil before it.

But apart from helping courts stand up for the terrorists and entrench NGO privilege, might universal human rights benefit any other humans? Might universal rights even be — dare we say it — universal?