Ken Macdonald
Wrong turn on rights
When, in 2009, the Conservative MP Jesse Norman and commentator Peter Oborne wrote a pamphlet about the European Convention on Human Rights, they came up with an unexpected title: “Churchill’s Legacy.” Yet their thesis—that the end of the Second World War brought an opportunity to bestow certain blessings of the English common law upon a battered Europe—would hardly have been controversial in the 1940s.
Setting aside a measure of sentimentalism, it is perfectly true that David Maxwell Fyfe and those other Tory lawyers who worked on the text of this postwar bill of rights believed their efforts necessary, even a precondition, to turning the continent away from brutality and rendering relations between citizen and state more benign. The English law, these men believed, with some imperial insouciance, had centuries of kindly experience from which millions of victims of tyranny might now benefit.