Helena Kennedy’s two-part radio programme on human rights was very predictable. She did a lot of hand-wringing. She spoke some passionate rhetoric about our common humanity. She quoted Hannah Arendt. She consulted a lot of non-Western thinkers, a lot of fellow human rights lawyers, and a token critic of the concept of human rights.
The first part put much emphasis on the ancient global roots of the concept. Look how it is anticipated in this ancient Iranian or Mesopotamian or Buddhist document. I think this is misleading. Though many ancient cultures had impulses in this direction, they were frail. It was the Christian West that gradually heaved such aspirations into politics. It was in Protestant lands, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the crucial right to freedom of conscience took root – modern citizenship flowed from this. And as one of the contributors said, it’s only within nation states that rights are really secure.
In the second part, an interviewee noted that the universalism of rights derives from religion, but Kennedy failed to pursue this with real curiosity.
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