I have never believed in human rights. As a preacher once said: the only human right is to die, as the wages for your sin. To have a right there must be a right-establishing authority (e.g. Parliament), right-arbitrating authorities (e.g. judges) and right-enforcing authorities (e.g. police, courts). There are thus legal rights; for those sharing a religion, there are moral rights. But, since there is no right-establishing authority for all humanity, no right-arbitrating judges for all humanity, and no pan-human police, there can be no human rights.
Human rights are supposed to apply to all of us, regardless of the history of our cultures and constitutions and the legal systems that are their embodiments. According to the human rights theorist it could never be that a culture could develop, say, in which familial relationships are so central that spouses have just one vote between them and that vote is delivered by the woman (and no, it is not silly for me to choose the woman rather than the man here; matrifocal societies are well-known). Likewise, in no culture could the physical be so central that physical punishments are appropriate. No society could be so collectivist that private property cannot be tolerated. And many other such universal judgements.
Why should I share these views? On what authority does the human rights theorist declare that her preferred set are indeed the pan-human rights?
Similarly, why should I believe that enforcing human rights leads to an attractive society at all (let alone the only attractive society)? Until recently, we had a perfectly civilised tradition for dealing with political refugees that had committed horrible crimes in their home countries but that might be tortured if we returned them and who were at the same time considered potentially dangerous to British citizens or British interests if allowed to move around freely within the UK. What we did was to grant them asylum in the form of a prison cell in the UK. If they didn't like that, they were free to leave to go back to their home countries or somewhere else if some other country wanted them.
But under the human rights doctrine this was unacceptable, as it represented discrimination. The result was that, now, anyone in the UK (not just foreigners - anyone) can be detained without trial under a "control order". So there is no point in human rights advocates pretending that their is anything liberal about their concept. Demonstrably, as practical matter of fact, the result of human rights doctrines is (fairly often, in fact) a more authoritarian society.
This is nakedly so in the case of control orders. But the equalities aspects of human rights doctrines are probably even more illiberal. We are not allowed to express our moral views about others if our morality does not happen to coincide with human rights concepts. If our views of Islam, or Christianity, or homosexual behaviour, or abortion, or the role of women, or any number of other things happens not to be perfectly aligned with the doctrines of human rights advocates, then giving anything more than the most factual, culture-appealing, subjectivist expression of them makes us human rights violators. Employment tribunals and other court cases follow, along with ruin for the dissenters.
We think of this as pettiness. But really it is not. The judges ruling that foreign terrorists could not be detained without trial unless British citizens could also be so detained were correctly interpreting the relevant human rights. Similarly with the equalities rules. Those really are human rights that are being violated. The problem isn't the application. The problem is the concept. Human rights are fundamentally illiberal, precisely because of their demand for universal application and their rejection of the notion that there could be context- or history-specific exceptions, and because they allow of no toleration for the non-accepting dissenter.
So when the Conservatives withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, let's not do so just so we can produce our own British Bill of human Rights. We can have British rights, if we must. But the point is not that, being British, we somehow have a superior insight into what applies to all humanity. If we are to have British rights, that must be because we created them (e.g. through the Crown in Parliament), because our judges arbitrate upon them, and because our police and courts enforce them.
