Democracy is more than mere majoritarianism, this much we are told. Though the majority of citizens must have the lead say in who governs, the minority must have a minimum level of protection from the wishes of that majority. That is why in a true democracy the wishes of the majority must be qualified by the presence of human rights and the rule of law.
Following this sort of reasoning, the Shadow Attorney General and former Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti, argued on the BBC’s Today programme this week that the right to an abortion should be imposed by law upon Northern Ireland – even if the majority of its citizens do not want it. The right to an abortion is a fundamental human right and thus it even supersedes the wishes of the majority – that was basically her line, I believe, though she was careful not to spell it out quite so baldly.
This is not a discussion on abortion, my interest is simply in the way the appeal to human rights can be used to trump the wishes of the majority. And I worry that what was originally intended as a protection against the tyranny of the majority can be used as a means of imposing or maintaining the dominance of a certain worldview, even against the wishes of the population concerned. That is, it becomes a way of imposing a particular slate of (typically liberal) values without the need to persuade people to vote for them.
Writing in the Human Rights Law Journal in 2016, Hurst Hammun, Professor of International Law at Tuft University, offered the following warning:
“Unless there is a conscious attempt to return to the principles of consensus and universality, the increasingly strident calls from European and other ‘Western’ human rights activists for adherence to the contemporary liberal European construct of society is likely to create a backlash in the rest of the world. This tendency is concurrently exacerbated by activists who see an expansive concept of ‘rights’ as the primary means to effect domestic social and political change.”
Imagine, for instance, that the language of human rights has been extended to the unborn child, as some argue it should be, and used as a means of nullifying the wishes of the majority of voters in the recent Ireland referendum. There would rightly have been a massive outcry. So why does the Shadow Attorney General think it acceptable in the case of Northern Ireland? Because, of course, she believes that human rights, when properly understood, map onto her own political values, and are a means of achieving them.
Perhaps I should come clean about my wider nervousness about the very notion of human rights. Much that has been achieved by an appeal to human rights has been laudable. But I remain cautious about the inherent individualism of human rights, that a right is regarded as the property of individual human beings and as the foundational basis for this whole moral philosophy. Cautious because, for most of human history, ethical consciousness has been structured around a sense of corporate responsibility – of the ‘we’ coming before the ‘I’.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe