Report of the Council
HUMAN RIGHTS
During the year, "human rights" has suddenly become a pair of household words-thanks largely to the accession of President Carter and his overt campaign for better protection for individual rights both within and outside the USA.
It is of course gratifying that more and more people, both in the free world and in those many countries whose practice makes a mockery of the ringing declarations in their constitutions, should subscribe to "human rights" as an ideal, should demand them for others, and should protest when they are denied. But that is by no means the position of all those who have suddenly discovered that human rights can be prayed in aid to support their own self-interest. Many of them do not yet under- stand that the concept of "rights" only comes into play because there is not enough of some good to go round, and different people make conflicting claims to what there is. It is precisely because the unfettered exercise by one man of the freedoms comprised in the human rights catalogue can, and only too often will, restrict the exercise of those (or some other) freedoms by other men that we have had to devise a code of Human Rights Law which seeks to adjust conflicting claims, define appropriate limits to freedoms, and impose correlative duties to reflect the rights which it supports.
But what is important in our time--and still far too little understood in the free countries of the world, though those who are oppressed and persecuted in other places are becoming aware of it more quickly-is that there is now in existence an international code of Human Rights Law which regulates many of the contested issues, at least in outline. Of the international instruments which comprise that code, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was the first. Expert opinion among international lawyers differs on whether it constitutes binding international law. But there is no such dispute about the European Convention on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of 1950, which the United Kingdom ratified in the following year. That is now binding on 19 of the European nations, and is unique in having effective organs of enforcement: the Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg.
In March 1976, there occurred an event whose full significance has been surprisingly slow to sink in: the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights came into force through the deposit of the 35th instrument of ratification by, ironically, Czechoslovakia. Since then, several more countries have ratified, and among those who are now bound by these instruments figure some whose recent record in the protection of human rights in their territories has been distinctly less than creditable as for example Argentina, Bulgaria, Chile, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Rumania, Uruguay and the USSR.
Until March 1976, countries such as these were apt to brush aside foreign protests about infringements of human rights with the time- dishonoured phrase "illegitimate interference in the internal affairs of a
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