Harry Giles: thoughts on Human Rights

This is the second part of Harry Giles' response to my questions about Human Rights and the Arts... 

But all this is me talking in very abstract theoretical terms. In actuality, the UDHR is a set of ideas that I can mostly (if not entirely) get behind, and the European Court of Human Rights is something that mostly (if not entirely) seems to be a tool we can use in struggles against oppression. So while I might have some intellectual qualms with it all, and while I might want to explore those, I'm also more worried about other things!

One of the things I'm worried about, like you, is the Tory attack on the discourse of human rights. It's partly the dystopian vision of the future, in which British rejection of the ECHR enables greater and greater restriction on civil liberties and greater and greater oppression of marginalised groups. 

But it's also how much the attack on the ECHR is used as a stalking horse for a bunch of other issues. When rightist parties attack "Europe", more often than not what they're acting on is really a fear of immigrants: xenophobia. In Dave's Declaration, the two targets (prisoners, terrorists) are stalking horses for immigrants. All three groups are people we can conveniently blame society's ills on and use as fear figures to increase neoliberal power.

(And as an aside, Dave's three examples are all also horrible in and of themselves. YES, I want it to be impossible to deport "suspected" terrorists. (Because who defines "suspected"? On what grounds? What about innocent til proven &c?) YES, I want the Geneva convention to apply to the battlefields of Helmand, just as it applied to even the fucking Nazis. And YES, I want prisoners to have the vote. Why the fuck should they not have the vote? Why should we take that right away, if we believe in it as a right? But then I also believe in abolishing prison, so.)

So yes, you're certainly right, I think, in your understanding. A "British bill of rights" is a horrible idea, because it defines "British" as some meaningful category of people who deserve more and better than other people. It restricts political organisation to a stupid border, rather than opening up actually meaningful classes of oppression like gender, or economic class, or dis/ability. "Nation" is a horrible way to organise a people, and one that truly relies on meaningless divisions between humans, rather than the actual power dynamics of how we relate to each other. There is no liberation for anyone in "nation", only small-mindedness, xenophobia and oppression.


You'll note something that feels like a contradiction in what I'm saying. On the one hand, I'm calling for attention to localities while on the other hand I'm calling for organisation beyond national borders. That's the sort of contradiction that bringing up "human rights" causes for me, and I think it's a productive contradiction. For me, universality is more about paying attention to everyone's specificities than it is about creating set codes and institutions for everyone. How to go about doing that, in practice and against power, is another question.

Hope this "helps".

 I would add a reply, but I think Harry articulates my position exactly on the difference between 'British' and 'Human' rights. And I have exactly the same qualms about the nation as an appropriate unit for political measures.

Cool: I got a reply from Harry Giles...

About a week or so ago, I posted a plea for help to Harry Giles. I was a bit confused about human rights. He replied...

Hi Gareth,

Thanks for writing to me! I think we can have some fun conversations. It made me laugh that this is what we began with, but maybe it's a nice way for me to say hi to your blog readership. Hi, blog readership.

First off, I'm totally happy to chew over ideas with you (or just about anyone), but I'm going to resolutely resist the rubric of "help" or anything that might cast me as experty. I blether about politics in the abstract and the specific a lot, but that doesn't make me an expert in any way. (I tend to be a lot better at theory than history, for a start). I tend to think everyone is the expert of the politics of their own lives. Also, because on Twitter I tend to be strident and angry and declamatory, people assume that I have loads of determined and considered views. The internet for me is mostly a space of thinking-things-through (like the theatre!), and in person I tend to be a lot more awkward and uncertain about things.

So, human rights? Hmm. My immediate reaction, with my anarchist hat on, is to be as sceptical of supra-national (neo)liberal institutions like the UN as I am of national institutions. They're an embodiment of the idea that if we create a state apparatus big enough, with enough hierarchical layers of representative democracy, then eventually we'll be able to sort everything out. Like in Star Trek, where there's a pan-Earth government that makes everything absolutely lovely for everyone, and all the conflict goes up to the interplanetary layer. Deep Space 9 is absolutely brill, because we finally properly see what happens when a massive liberal interstellar government (the Federation) comes into conflict with a local anti-Imperial resistance movement (the Bejorans) who are critical of Federation politics as erasing of their locality. 

Anyway. So. I really like all the *ideas* in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but I want to examine to what use they're put: in practice, what structures of power do they help maintain? How are they used as a tool to maintain that power? And who do they leave out?

On that last question: I also tend to be sceptical of human universals. Whenever there's a universal declaration of something, I assume that some specificity, some locality somewhere is being ignored, erased and oppressed. In this case, for example, it's notable that the UDHR has since been supplemented with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Hey Harry Help!

Hey Harry,

I did want to start this conversation slowly: a few general questions about anarchism as a ideology within theatre, the role of performance within activism. You know, abstract stuff that opens up a chat, finds common ground, gives us a framework. Terms of reference, shared assumptions, that kind of thing.

Only, as always, events have caught up with me. I am not the biggest fan of the Conservative party, but I nearly soiled myself when I read David Cameron's thoughts on human rights today. Let's recap his words...

Of course, it’s not just the European Union that needs sorting out – it’s the European Court of Human Rights.
When that charter was written, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it set out the basic rights we should respect.
But since then, interpretations of that charter have led to a whole lot of things that are frankly wrong.
Rulings to stop us deporting suspected terrorists.
The suggestion that you've got to apply the human rights convention even on the battle-fields of Helmand.
And now – they want to give prisoners the vote.
I’m sorry, I just don't agree.

Let's pause there for a moment. Apart from the rather odd tricolon here - he starts with the most frightening thing (terrorists!), and ends on a bathetic note (prisoners getting the vote), I can't quite get my head around Cameron's process here. He seems to be saying the charter of the European Court of Human Rights 'we should respect.' then goes on to say the interpretation are 'frankly wrong.'

I'm sorry, Dave, I just don't agree. If we accept the basic foundation, don't we have to accept its working out through its application? 

I am actually pretty frightened by the thought that Britain might drop our human rights. It's not just the company we'd be keeping (Belarus, Greece during its junta period): it's the idea that a 'British bill of rights' would somehow replace the universal quality of 'human rights.'

So - I am wondering where you'd stand on human rights? I think that they are a fiction, something we made up, but that they represent an ideal - a Platonic Form of social justice that defines us as individual beings of worth - that governments can work towards. They can never be reached, but each attempt makes the world a little better. And a British bill of rights suggests that rights are not universal, but belong to a nation and its citizens. 

And so, other nations, other citizens, can't share those rights. 

I rather hope I am over-reacting. How do you understand this?