The first stage of scrapping the 1998 Human Rights Act is possibly only months away; a Tory-backed repeal would be a disaster, but the left, too, needs be more radical and ambitious on the question

“The meaning of the phrase ‘human rights’ is contested territory in modern Britain,” writes the distinguished academic and occasional government human rights adviser professor Francesca Klug in the opening sentence of this book; it combines her earlier works on human rights with new commentaries, and represents a lifetime’s work.

Although she takes the Great Charter of 1215 as a starting point, from the off Klug is itching to get to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. This was not just a hugely symbolic international agreement hammered out at the end of the second world war, but a turning point in our understanding of human rights. Delving into the background of the drafting of the UDHR, she explains her purpose: to establish how completely different the world of 1945 was to 17th and 18th-century Europe: “The idea that somehow the drafters of the declaration were picking up the pen from where Locke, Paine, Kant and Voltaire left off to have another go and make their ideas stick this time just doesn’t wash.”

Having established her position, Klug, an academic expert at my Doughty Street chambers, turns her fire on the arguments relied on by the current Conservative government to support repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998, which in many ways is the embodiment of the UDHR in our law. One by one, she shoots down the arguments, with confidence and conviction.

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The 1998 act did not just give legal effect to rights until then only recognised in international law, it also incorporated the principles that had been developed since the second world war to give dynamic effect to human rights – to make them practical and effective, not theoretical and illusory. The key to understanding the impact of the Human Rights Act in the UK is to appreciate that civil liberties and human rights are not two sides of the same coin. Civil liberties protect the individual from the state; human rights also protect the individual from the state, but, crucially, through the principle of “positive obligations”, also require the state to protect individuals at risk in certain situations. In practical terms, that means that vulnerable individuals and groups – including, for example, women and girls subjected to domestic or sexual violence – can call on the state to take steps to protect them. In the real world, that makes a huge difference.

Human rights only have meaning if they are universal. The prime minister’s rhetoric about “British values” is just rhetoric – language designed to have a persuasive effect on its audience, but lacking in meaningful content. And repeal of the 1998 act would reverse half-a-century’s worth of cross-party British promotion of human rights around the world.

Thinking Conservatives get this, and that is why the much vaunted British bill of rights has yet to see the light of day. If the 1998 act is repealed it would set the clock back decades and it will be the vulnerable who will lose their voice. Yet, subject to the EU referendum, a long promised consultation paper on the act could be with us within months. When it is published, human rights campaigners, politicians, journalists and others should take heed of Klug; to do otherwise risks fighting on enemy territory.

She not only persuades the reader that the UDHR, though based on earlier human rights thinking traceable back to Magna Carta, is in truth a new beginning, but it exposes the arguments from the political right –who cast the Human Rights Act as inconsistent with core human rights principles and values – as thin and, frankly, misleading. However, comfortable as it might be to leave it there, the reality is that this book is as much a challenge to those on the left in British politics as it is to those on the right.

Many column inches have been devoted to the question of the leadership of the Labour party in the past nine months. Yet the central truth is that unless Labour is able to set out a bold, radical and ambitious project, speaking to the 2020s and 30s rather than harking back to the 1980s or 90s, it may not much matter who leads the party. That project needs to be anchored, and Labour could do a lot worse than anchoring it in the notion of human rights so powerfully articulated in this book.

This entails universal human rights grounded in humanity, equality and dignity which speak to each generation via the basic principles and values set out here: legality and proportionality; rights which are purposive; rights which are “practical and effective”; rights that take account of present-day conditions through the “living instrument” principle of interpretation (the best example of this is the way courts have been able to read protection for gay men and women into international human rights law, although when drafted these rights were not expressly recognised).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Courts have been able to read protection for gay men and women into international human rights law although when drafted these rights were not expressly recognised. Photograph: Shawn Pogatchnik/AP

As Klug observes, the torch of human rights shows no sign of being extinguished. It will continue to offer hope and inspiration to millions of people around the world. Yet the left in Britain has never really embraced human rights in this way.

She argues that during the course of the 19th century, western debates on the “natural” or “inalienable” rights were eclipsed by struggles for extending the franchise and campaigns to improve social and economic conditions and trade union rights. During the 20th century the fault line was increasingly between capitalism and socialism, not Burke-ites versus Paine-ites. Wary of a human rights approach to state responsibility, which puts obligations on the state to protect its citizens from the harmful acts of others, some on the left have found shelter in the civil liberties notion of keeping state responsibility out of it.

And although a Blair-led Labour government turned that on its head by introducing the Human Rights Act, in retrospect it is clear that the same government failed to weigh in the balance the proposition laid out by Klug that any institutional measures to protect human rights must not stifle the enduring idea that those rights derived from people struggling to address abuses of power.

To be clear, human rights cannot substitute for a political project. But human rights can underpin such a project, addressing what Klug has called “values for a Godless age”. Reflecting on the book of that title she wrote in the heady days of 1998, she points out that it was a kind of plea not to turn human rights into a talisman against uncertain times, but instead to recognise the dynamism that catapulted these rights from the margins to the mainstream.

Going back to Klug’s initial point, the meaning of human rights is indeed contested territory in modern Britain and anyone wanting to understand the debate about the future of the Human Rights Act should read this book. It offers not just a piercing analysis of the historical significance of post-second world war human rights and a demolition of the case for repealing the act, but also a profound challenge for the left in general and the Labour party in particular.

Keir Starmer QC MP is a former director of public prosecutions. All royalties for A Magna Carta for Humanity are donated to the human rights NGO Freedom from Torture

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