There are two levels here. First, being 'champions' of the ECHR these days means pretty much defending the basic idea that fundamental human rights are necessarily universal in nature - IE they must apply to everyone, even those we find repulsive. The 'why' should be clear but it bears repeating: /1 - ThreadSky

paolosandro.bsky.social • 9 days ago

There are two levels here. First, being 'champions' of the ECHR these days means pretty much defending the basic idea that fundamental human rights are necessarily universal in nature - IE they must apply to everyone, even those we find repulsive. The 'why' should be clear but it bears repeating: /1

Reposted from George Peretz KC

The point is that champions of the ECHR need to be able to respond to cases where it appears that people accused (presumably with some cause) or convicted of crimes such as child abuse are using not obviously solid Art 3 (or 8) arguments to delay or avoid deportation or extradition.

Comments

paolosandro.bsky.social•9 days ago

Because once governments become able to decide who is entitled to fundamental protection and who isn't, we're automatically all at risk (see the US and the attempt to remove habeas corpus from migrants). It's very much the fundamental premise, without which fundamental rights stop being 'human'. /2

paolosandro.bsky.social•9 days ago

The second level is the one about these specific cases that ITV has brought to public attention, to the dismay of GB News who, and rightly so, feel undercut. First, let's read the actual judgments, and see what's the evidence on which their human rights claims have succeeded. Second, /3

paolosandro.bsky.social•9 days ago

do only foreign criminals lie to courts (if that's what happened in one of these cases, as the piece by ITV suggests)? Should foreign criminals be treated differently because they are, well, foreigners? You can see where this goes.. Third: how does a convicted criminal of a country with which we /4

paolosandro.bsky.social•9 days ago

Extradition and other treaties arrive into the UK in the first place? And finally: as @echrhawk.bsky.social suggests, shouldn't these cases be dealt with extradition memoranda of understanding between the UK and other countries? Especially if Brazil really wants them back to face justice there? /5

paolosandro.bsky.social•9 days ago

So yeah, I find this attempt by the 'respectable' ITV to overtake GB News to the right pretty appalling. And I don't believe for a second this is the basis on which legitimate demands to reform specific aspects of the ECHR system should be grounded in. This is pandering to the worst in people. /End

georgeperetzkc.bsky.social•8 days ago

Those are all good responses to the question raised by the cases - and ones that take the question seriously. My point was simply that a “stay” campaign would need to hone such responses: resorting to “you’re illiberal/moronic to even raise the question” is (obviously) not going to work.

spinninghugo.bsky.social•9 days ago

The ECHR concerns duties on the state that it secures certain interests for people in its jurisdiction. As Raz explains, they're not universal. Cavemen didn't have rights to education against anyone

paolosandro.bsky.social•8 days ago

Raz is wrong, and I genuinely don't understand what cavemen have to do with anything. The fact that you keep repeating the same, idiosyncratic, stuff, SH, doesn't make it correct

spinninghugo.bsky.social•8 days ago

You think Joseph Raz "idiosyncratic".

Gosh.

spinninghugo.bsky.social•8 days ago

The claim to universalism is just obviously wrong. See from ten years ago.

https://spinninghugo.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/four-bad-arguments-and-a-good-one-for-the-human-rights-act/

If we're going to defend the human rights settlement, best not to do so with arguments bad on their face.

amritlohia.bsky.social•8 days ago

"Universal" precisely means universal among modern democratic societies - nobody's arguing for rights of humans that existed 5000 years ago, or other such irrelevant distractions. The concept of "duties" doesn't quite work in the ECHR context ... 1/

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

Even with that large qualification, it isn't plausible that the ECHR is universal in that sense. Why does it not contain rights to housing or healthcare? How much protection against crime is a state expected to provide?

/1

https://spinninghugo.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/four-bad-arguments-and-a-good-one-for-the-human-rights-act/

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

It is perfectly possible to postulate just democratic moderns states without any human rights regime at all. And we even have names for them eg Australia.

The ECHR is a product of its nature: an international agreement between states about how each of them should behave.

/2

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

If you were drafting a wholly domestic human rights regime, it would look very different (see Canada).

/3

robertmullins.bsky.social•7 days ago

I don't disagree with your larger point (I'm a constitutional rights 'skeptic' myself), but the eastern Australian states (Qld, NSW and Victoria) now all have weak human rights legislation

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

The claims to universalism are, imo, an attempt to avoid making the difficult arguments that are necessary to support the current settlement. They're usually an attempt to argue that those opposed to such regimes in a domestic law context (eg Jeremy Waldron!) favour torture.

/ends

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

... It's not different at all - the fundamental features, including the proportionality method, the living instrument and positive obligations doctrines, and the principle of effectiveness, are all just as much part of the Canadian Charter as the ECHR and CFREU. ... 1/

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

Many of the individual Australian states do have a fundamental rights regime, but because the federation as a whole indeed doesn't have such an instrument, I don't consider it democratic in any meaningful sense ... 1/

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

Ok. I think you're now making a different mistake of running together completely different values (eg democracy and human rights). That is usefully discussed by Tasioulas here

https://aeon.co/essays/conceptual-overreach-threatens-the-quality-of-public-reason

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

... The narrow definition of 'democracy' that you seem to be using hasn't been widely accepted in European political thought since at least 1848, and was indeed famously rejected by Strasbourg all the way back in 1981 (Young, James, and Webster v. the United Kingdom) ... 2/

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

What I said is that all the ECHR rights are universal among modern democratic societies, not that all the rights that are universal among modern democratic societies are contained in the ECHR (in other words, you seem to be conflating the statement I made with its converse). ... 1/

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

... The ECHR, as currently construed by Strasbourg, does therefore contain housing and healthcare rights to a certain extent, but many of us indeed think that that extent is far too limited. By contrast, the rights of protection against crime that it provides are fairly extensive. 2/2

amritlohia.bsky.social•8 days ago

... either, since a "duty" (unless you want to depart from the basic Hohfeldian model) can only really be well-defined if it's "owed" to some particular individual/group, whereas the ECHR deliberately avoids such definition - the question of who's entitled to enforce the rights it confers is ... 2/

amritlohia.bsky.social•8 days ago

... treated separately from the substantive question of what content those rights possess. 3/3

mwhoyle96.bsky.social•8 days ago

The claim to universalism doesn’t really go very far, because it doesn’t tell you which rights everyone should have, only that we should all have the rights we do. And the quarrel is about the rights recognised by Strasbourg, not their universal application.

paolosandro.bsky.social•7 days ago

I don't follow. Given that the claim is that 'bad' people should not avail themselves of the protections under the ECHR (or at least some of them), universalism is very much engaged and at stake.

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

Ah, I see the misunderstanding on our side. You're not foolishly claiming that "human rights" are universal, but rather that the rights that the law recognises that persons generally have should not be lost because you're bad. If that is the claim, we can all agree. Good

paolosandro.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'll allow myself, for once, to reply to your characteristically insufferable condescension: I'm most definitely claiming that fundamental human rights are universal, and maybe if you had read a bit more Ferrajoli (and less Raz) you would understand immediately what I mean

mwhoyle96.bsky.social•7 days ago

If that is what universalism means here, then we all agree.

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

Yes. It must have been an argument against outlawry

mwhoyle96.bsky.social•8 days ago

So for example, if it was proposed to adopt a protocol reversing Sigurjonson back to the understanding on freedom of association in the trevaux, would that pose an issue for universalism?

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

Yes - the relevance of 'universalism' is that the rights contained in the Convention are all universal features of democratic societies. There are indeed *other* universal features of democratic societies that don't currently feature in the Convention, hence why it's possible to argue for ... 1/

amritlohia.bsky.social•7 days ago

rights to be *added* to the Convention and its Protocols (e.g. the current proposals at Council of Europe level for environmental rights). But *subtraction* of rights (as in your example of the right not to join a trade union) is, by definition, a departure from universal democratic standards. 2/2

spinninghugo.bsky.social•7 days ago

A one way ratchet. How unappealing.

mwhoyle96.bsky.social•7 days ago

But by definition, rights which have not been added to the convention are not “universal” in any sense other than “some people believe it should be there in an advanced democracy”.

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