I hear a lot about human rights and things like freedom of speech, but I feel that we’ve lost our way with what rights fundamentally mean at a personal level which is where they count and have meaning. A right is something that we each inalienably have, it is something that is, or should be, self evident to us, like breathing. Human rights can be protected in law but they cannot be conferred, they must be something I own, the removal of which would cause me harm or distress.
Right now, in writing this, I am exercising my freedom of speech, which is a sovereign right, I own it. I can be silenced, either through being censored or physically silenced, but that silencing always requires an exercise of power, it cannot be removed in any other way or can it? What if I have learned to fear to speak out? Therein lies what I think is the problem of our times. We now live in a world where we have been coerced into fearing consequences such that we have learnt to silence ourselves. We haven’t lost the ability to speak out, but our will and determination has been eroded to such an extent that we have given up the right of our own volition, albeit through insidious coercion.
With the widespread use of CCTV cameras, something that I find an affront to my human dignity, we’ve been fed the line, ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about’. Actually I think we have a great deal to worry about in which the good they might be considered to do does not outweigh the greater harm they give rise to. Being a watched society is an insidious evil in which we are not party to those who make the rules nor those who watch and by whom we are observed and who watch us with suspicion. I feel it daily, in a very personal way which I can in no way put down to an overblown sense of paranoia.
I have become very aware that the daily sense of ill ease with which I move about the world, endlessly portrayed and stoked by the media, is an assault on my being. It is a human rights issue because I feel less free; there is less pleasure in roaming and in simply being me in the world.
I am old enough to have enjoyed the freedom and optimism that marked what being a hippy was all about. They were good years of liberation and hope in the post war era. I am, therefore, fortunate to have an internal point of reference with what I feel today. David Cameron wants to do away with Human Rights laws for the spurious reason that they stopBritainprotecting against terrorism. You simply cannot do away with the protection of an entire nations human rights in order to make it easier to catch a few criminals. Such an act of terrorism is likely to succeed precisely because we have learned to live with fear and in fear, but it is completely insane and must be prevented at all costs.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
