Human Rights

The Bishop of Chelmsford, The Rt Revd John Gladwin, spoke on Human Rights on 22 March 2007 in the House of Lords.  The Bishop said:

A bishop of the established church enters a debate on human rights and fundamental freedoms with due humility and caution. The modern liberal state arose from weariness with the European wars of religion. The attempt to protect fundamental freedoms and entrench human rights in law was not always met with sympathy from churches and religious leaders. It is not an edifying spectacle. As we have seen in this House this week, difficult issues arise in this field when liberty of conscience is set in tension with human rights.

It is worth at the outset reminding ourselves that, in Parliament, the law, the elected representatives of the people, the church and those who sit in this place representing a wide diversity of interest have one common duty under God—to defend the liberties of the people and to uphold the role of a just and equitable law.

One of the interesting things about our intellectual history is that here, in some contrast to the revolutionary experience on the Continent and even in the United States of America, the principles of the Enlightenment and the values and visions of Christian faith were not set in opposition to each other—a point made by the noble Lord. In her book The Roads to Modernity, Gertrude Himmelfarb even claims that John Wesley and the early Methodists were part of the Enlightenment in this country. The Wesleys evidenced that in a generosity of spirit that moved in the direction of universal values and moral sentiments. In the United States of America, at an earlier moment, Jonathan Edwards, that great person in the middle of 18th-century America who was both a preacher of the religious awakening and a contributor to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, seemed to hold the two faces of American culture together in his own person—strong religious experience and wide reasoning sympathies.

I was sorry to see in the 50th anniversary celebrations of the European Community that we were not able to celebrate the roots in our Christian tradition of our contemporary inheritance. I hope that we might be able to do so as that debate develops. Deep in the heart of serious Christian thought, over many centuries, has been a concern for the rights of the oppressed and the excluded, and deep in our liturgies and spiritual inheritance is the theme of liberty of conscience. Yes, as with every institution and powerful social agency, there have been nightmare scenarios of the church's collusion with oppression and attacks on freedom. But a golden thread runs through our history that we need to contribute to establishing an unshakable foundation for human rights and liberty of conscience in our own time.

There is some astonishing Christian thinking in our history. Last year, I had the privilege of reviewing Roger Ruston's latest book, Human Rights and the Image of God, on Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas and John Locke. Las Casas spent his whole intellectual life arguing against the conquest of Mexico and Peru. An interesting programme on television last night mentioned him. He opposed the enforced conversion of the people and the illegal appropriation of their lands by the conquerors. He made it clear that, from a moral and religious perspective, all the gold, jewellery and land that had been appropriated by the Spaniards should be restored to the people. In his view, it was a breach of the Gospel to seek conversion by force.

Las Casas even resisted the argument that the Spanish conquest could be justified on the ground of ending the Indian culture of human sacrifice and cannibalism, which is interesting, given some of the debates going on today. He declared that the Indians had not only a right of dominion over their lands and goods, but a natural right, even a duty, to worship according to their own light until such time as they were freely persuaded otherwise. He said that people are free to change by persuasion and the excellence of what is presented—not by force or the abuse of power, but through a fundamental respect for their own integrity and liberty of conscience.

The example is extreme and takes little account of the liberties of those being sacrificed and consumed, one might say, but its point is important on the protection of people from the abuse of power—political, religious and cultural. As a more contemporary thinker, Emmanuel Levinas, whose structure of thought was born in the fire of the Holocaust, said in our own time, we have a binding obligation to give ourselves to the other, always responding to their otherness and difference from us.

Religious belief gives to us an under-girding of our culture and the law on human rights and procedure, with an understanding of the moral and spiritual worth of the person and of human society. Picking up the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, I suggest that our society, given its history, needs a fresh engagement between the traditions of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, freedom, equity, community and moral virtue, and the experience and reasoning of religious faith. If, in these days of so much abuse of human beings and their rights, we do not consciously seek to enliven that conversation and relationship, we may well be in danger of allowing our culture to lapse into one with a growing abuse of power, growing acceptance of violence against the person and an ever widening gap between peoples of different cultures in our society.

It is vital to maintain civil liberties in the face of various challenges in our time, not least the challenge of security. The most dramatic and urgent of these challenges is terrorism, but fear of crime and disorder also generates demands for actions that would erode or abrogate fundamental freedoms. We have already seen this in the provision for control orders against terrorist suspects and we are constantly being told that the criminal justice system must be rebalanced in favour of victims by restricting the rights of the accused. There is a major non sequitur in that argument, for doing justice to victims depends on convicting the guilty, and any moves that substantially increase the possibility of convicting the innocent would not only be unjust but would fail in their intended purpose.

Central to the life of a liberal, democratic society is the administration of justice. We should, therefore, cherish the provisions of the European convention relating to due process: Article 5, which stipulates the conditions for deprivation of liberty; Article 6, which guarantees the right to a fair trial; and Article 7, which prohibits punishment without law. Frequently, good reasons may well be advanced for eroding those provisions, but it is at such moments that proposals to curtail rights and to restrict liberties must be scrutinised in order to ensure that the social order that we are endeavouring to defend by those means will remain worth defending.

We must not set liberty of conscience and the rights of the individual in opposition to each other—a hierarchy of rights, which has been mentioned, in which we argue as to which is more important than the other. Guarding the liberty of the person's conscience and a right for them to live their life according to it is, in the light of some important themes in Christian theology, a fulfilment of our duty; it is not in conflict with it. I am not required to agree with my neighbour; I am required to defend their liberty of conscience and they are required to defend mine.

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